Terry Jones

Author Archive

Secure per-site passwords with no encrypted blob

Sunday, February 3rd, 2013 Posted under python, tech. | 16 Comments »

Last night I read a Guardian article, Online passwords: keep it complicated. It's a surprisingly good summary, given that it's aimed at the general public. The author concludes by telling ... Read more..

CEL, a Chrome Event Logger

Sunday, January 27th, 2013 Posted under browser extensions, tech. | Comments Off on CEL, a Chrome Event Logger

Last night I wrote CEL, a Chrome Event Logger, a Google Chrome extension that logs all known chrome.* API events to the Javascript console. Example use cases are: You wonder ... Read more..

A chrome extension for examining tab events and ids

Wednesday, December 19th, 2012 Posted under browser extensions, programming. | Comments Off on A chrome extension for examining tab events and ids

Yesterday I was on a call with a friend who told me that when he enters a URL into an existing Chrome tab, the tab id changes. He asked if ... Read more..

Omit needless parens

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 Posted under programming, python. | 9 Comments »

The famous 17th commandment in The Elements of Style is "Omit needless words". There should be an equivalent in programming, but for parentheses. Every time I see needless parens in ... Read more..

Destructive, invasive, and dangerous behavior by UK ISP TalkTalk (aka StalkStalk)

Wednesday, December 5th, 2012 Posted under companies, tech. | 6 Comments »

Today I spent several hours trying to figure out what was going wrong with a web service I've been building. The service uses websockets to let browsers and the server ... Read more..

Max Tabs

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012 Posted under browser extensions, tech. | 1 Comment »

Here's the second of several Chrome and Chromium browser extensions I've recently written. Earlier, I posted some of the background motivation in Alternate browsing realities. After installing Max Tabs, your ... Read more..

Open It Later

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012 Posted under browser extensions, tech. | Comments Off on Open It Later

Here's the first of several Chrome and Chromium browser extensions I've recently written. Earlier, I posted some of the background motivation in Alternate browsing realities. After installing Open It Later, ... Read more..

Alternate browsing realities

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012 Posted under browser extensions, tech. | 2 Comments »

I find it interesting to look for things we take for granted, and to ask what the world would look like if the basic assumptions were outlandishly violated. Recently I've been ... Read more..

A simple way to calculate the day of the week for any day of a given year

Sunday, November 11th, 2012 Posted under me, other, python. | 2 Comments »

[caption id="attachment_1023" align="alignright" width="300"] Image: Jeremy Church[/caption]The other day I read a tweet about how someone was impressed that a friend had been able to tell them the day of ... Read more..

Simpler Twisted deferred code via decorated callbacks

Sunday, October 14th, 2012 Posted under deferreds, python, tech, twisted. | 10 Comments »

This morning I was thinking about Twisted deferreds and how people find them difficult to grasp, but how they're conceptually simple once you get it. I guess most of ... Read more..

SOBGTR OCCC AILD FUNEX?

Friday, August 10th, 2012 Posted under me, other. | Comments Off on SOBGTR OCCC AILD FUNEX?

Suppose you had to pick a very small set of character strings that you, and only you, could identify without hesitation in a particular way. What would you choose? How ... Read more..

describejson – a Python script for summarizing JSON structure

Thursday, August 9th, 2012 Posted under python, tech. | 3 Comments »

Yesterday I was sent a 24M JSON file and needed to look through it to give someone an opinion on its contents. I did what I normally do to ... Read more..

Autovivification in Python: nested defaultdicts with a specific final type

Saturday, May 26th, 2012 Posted under python, tech. | 11 Comments »

I quite often miss the flexibility of autovivification in Python. That Wikipedia link shows a cute way to get what Perl has: from collections import defaultdict def tree(): return ... Read more..

The love of pleasure and the love of action

Saturday, April 28th, 2012 Posted under books, Gibbon. | Comments Off on The love of pleasure and the love of action

There are two very natural propensities which we may distinguish in the most virtuous and liberal dispositions, the love of pleasure and the love of action. If the former is ... Read more..

A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian

Sunday, April 8th, 2012 Posted under books, Gibbon. | Comments Off on A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He ... Read more..

The ruling passion of his soul

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 Posted under books, Gibbon. | Comments Off on The ruling passion of his soul

Yet Commodus was not, as he has been represented, a tiger born with an insatiate thirst of human blood, and capable, from his infancy, of the most inhuman actions. Nature ... Read more..

It is almost superfluous to enumerate the unworthy successors of Augustus

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 Posted under books, Gibbon. | Comments Off on It is almost superfluous to enumerate the unworthy successors of Augustus

It is almost superfluous to enumerate the unworthy successors of Augustus. Their unparalleled vices, and the splendid theatre on which they were acted, have saved them from oblivion. The dark, ... Read more..

Women’s guide to HTTP status codes for dealing with unwanted geek advances

Saturday, January 21st, 2012 Posted under tech. | 1 Comment »

Here's a women's guide to the most useful HTTP status codes for dealing with unwanted geek advances. Someone should make and sell a deck of these. 301 MOVED ... Read more..

Emacs buffer mode histogram

Thursday, November 10th, 2011 Posted under me, other, python, tech. | 6 Comments »

Tonight I noticed that I had over 200 buffers open in emacs. I've been programming a lot in Python recently, so many of them are in Python mode. I wondered ... Read more..

The Grapes of Wrath & Occupy Wall Street

Monday, October 31st, 2011 Posted under books, me, politics. | 28 Comments »

I'm reading The Grapes of Wrath for the first time. I can't believe it took me so long to finally read it. It's great. Below is a section I just ran ... Read more..