Terry Jones

Author Archive

Nova Spivak really gets it

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 Posted under tech. | Comments Off on Nova Spivak really gets it

Usually when I hear about the thinking behind new web technology I dismiss it pretty quickly. That's not because I don't like what people are doing or find it interesting, ... Read more..

Orwell on intellectuals

Monday, October 22nd, 2007 Posted under books. | Comments Off on Orwell on intellectuals

One of several things I admire about Orwell is that he doesn't pull any punches and he turns his guns on all comers. Here's a nice passage from a 1943 ... Read more..

Resurrection

Monday, October 22nd, 2007 Posted under me. | 1 Comment »

Today I resurrected as many of my old postings as I could find. I think I have about half. I’m still saddened by the loss of all those words. I ... Read more..

I’m back

Sunday, October 21st, 2007 Posted under me. | Comments Off on I’m back

Well, I'm back. The previous instantiation of this blog was washed away in a storm in early August. A server got hacked and in my hurry to have it decommissioned I ... Read more..

smell the fear

Saturday, June 30th, 2007 Posted under companies, tech. | Comments Off on smell the fear

Entertainment retailers are not happy that Prince is giving away his upcoming album, via a deal with the Mail on Sunday newspaper. Their reaction is one of abject fear with ... Read more..

forgetting how to dial international

Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 Posted under me, tech. | 1 Comment »

A weird thing happened to me this morning. I needed to call someone in Portugal. I reached for the trusty land line, checked for a dial tone (so old fashioned), grabbed ... Read more..

my O’Reilly number

Monday, June 25th, 2007 Posted under books, companies, tech. | Comments Off on my O’Reilly number

I like O’Reilly technical books. Back in 1987 I put together some notes to write a book on the vi editor, and later considered submitting the idea to O’Reilly. I ... Read more..

literary arbitrage

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 Posted under books, companies. | Comments Off on literary arbitrage

The two books I just bought on Amazon.com cost me $37.74, plus shipping to Spain of $13.47, for a total of $51.21. The same books are available on Amazon.co.uk for a ... Read more..

better together

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 Posted under books, companies, tech. | Comments Off on better together

Amazon, intentionally or not, have done a great job with their special offer feature that suggests a second book to you and offers you both at the same time for ... Read more..

Pondering the T&C of Amazon’s S3 and EC2

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 Posted under companies, tech. | Comments Off on Pondering the T&C of Amazon’s S3 and EC2

I’ve spent many hours reading about Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services since they were announced. They’re certainly very attractive, and they are being put to heavy use by many companies. ... Read more..

Sort uniq sort revisited, in modern Python

Sunday, June 17th, 2007 Posted under python, tech. | Comments Off on Sort uniq sort revisited, in modern Python

Just after I started messing around with Python, my friend Nelson posted about writing some simple Python to speed up the UNIX sort | uniq -c | sort -nr idiom. I ... Read more..

reflective bandwagon

Thursday, June 14th, 2007 Posted under me, tech. | Comments Off on reflective bandwagon

Here’s another thing I’ve had enough of: The graphic design bandwagon of which this image is a perfect example: This technique is like a rash all over the web. It’s one ... Read more..

it’s long

Thursday, June 14th, 2007 Posted under books, me. | 2 Comments »

There are a few things that bug me on the internet. One is that people often warn each other that articles are long, or apologize for writing long blog entries. There’s ... Read more..

resorting to regular expressions

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 Posted under python, tech. | 1 Comment »

I was going to write a much longer set of thoughts on moving to Python, but I don’t have time. Instead I’ll summarize by saying that I programmed for 28 ... Read more..

Comments on Productivity and being Always-On

Monday, June 11th, 2007 Posted under companies, tech. | Comments Off on Comments on Productivity and being Always-On

Antonio over at the Onda has a post up about Productivity and being Always-On. He’s got comments turned off, so I’m going to make a few here. First of all, ... Read more..

Orwell on T. S. Eliot and the path from existential angst to serial entrepreneur

Thursday, June 7th, 2007 Posted under books, companies, me. | 10 Comments »

I like George Orwell. A tired fool got me started on the four-volume collection of Orwell’s essays, journalism, and letters. It’s great. Among many things I could say, one is ... Read more..

Why I HATE my 17″ MacBook Pro (Intel)

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 Posted under companies, tech. | Comments Off on Why I HATE my 17″ MacBook Pro (Intel)

I’m trying to work. But right now I’m not working, I’m writing this. Q: Why am I writing this instead of working? A: Because my MacBook Pro has decided to spend 2 ... Read more..

iteranything

Monday, May 7th, 2007 Posted under python, tech. | Comments Off on iteranything

Here’s a Python function to iterate over pretty much anything. In the extremely unlikely event that anyone uses this code, note that if you pass keyword arguments the order of ... Read more..

the blind leading the blind?

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 Posted under companies, me. | 2 Comments »

At some point I read a description of why entrepreneurs pitching VCs is a bad mix: because you have people who can’t explain anything meeting people who can’t understand anything. ... Read more..

why data (information representation) is the key to the coming semantic web

Monday, March 19th, 2007 Posted under me, representation, tech. | 5 Comments »

In my last posting I argued that we should drop all talk about Artificial Intelligence when discussing the semantic web, web 3.0, etc., and acknowledge that in fact it’s all ... Read more..