Terry Jones

Author Archive

Leaving Barcelona

Friday, October 7th, 2011 Posted under me. | 2 Comments »

I'm leaving Barcelona on October 19th and have a bunch of stuff I need to get rid of before then. If you're interested anything below, please let me know ASAP. ... Read more..

fishus

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 Posted under other. | Comments Off on fishus

Date: Tue, 26 Sep 95 15:55 MDT From: mosterin@hydra.unm.edu (Ana Mosterin) To: dsmith@cs.unm.edu well, you should love wild cooking too you have to find the right attitude: you ... Read more..

La Storia di San Michele

Monday, August 8th, 2011 Posted under books, me. | 3 Comments »

[caption id="attachment_857" align="alignright" width="270" caption="Image: Villa San Michele"][/caption][Written in 2003, as the first of a two-part story of a remarkable connection. Here's part two.] Axel Munthe In 1928, Axel Munthe, a Swedish ... Read more..

Bob Arno

Monday, August 8th, 2011 Posted under barcelona, books, me. | 3 Comments »

[caption id="attachment_867" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Image: ABC Tasmania"][/caption][Written in 2003, this is the 2nd part of the story of a remarkable connection. You'll need to read part one for the set ... Read more..

txdpce: a Twisted class for deferred parallel command execution

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011 Posted under deferreds, python, twisted. | Comments Off on txdpce: a Twisted class for deferred parallel command execution

I just uploaded a simple Twisted Python class, txdpce, to Launchpad. It's designed for situations where you have multiple ways of obtaining a function result and you want to try ... Read more..

A resizable dispatch queue for Twisted

Monday, June 27th, 2011 Posted under deferreds, python, tech, twisted. | Comments Off on A resizable dispatch queue for Twisted

In December 2009 I posted to the Twisted mailing list about what I called a Resizable Dispatch Queue. I've just spent some time making a new version that's much ... Read more..

Back of the envelope calculations with The Rule of 72

Monday, June 20th, 2011 Posted under other, tech. | 6 Comments »

[caption id="attachment_815" align="alignright" width="225" caption="Image: internetworldstats.com"][/caption]The Rule of 72 deserves to be better known among technical people. It's a widely-known financial rule of thumb used for understanding and calculating interest ... Read more..

How to asynchronously exchange a dictionary using Twisted deferreds

Friday, June 10th, 2011 Posted under deferreds, python, twisted. | Comments Off on How to asynchronously exchange a dictionary using Twisted deferreds

Here's a fun class that I can't think of a good use for :-) But I like its simplicity and it's another illustration of what I like to call ... Read more..

Graceful shutdown of a Twisted service with outstanding deferreds

Friday, June 10th, 2011 Posted under deferreds, python, twisted. | 4 Comments »

I've been spending a bit of time thinking again about queues and services. I wrote a Twisted class in 2009 to maintain a resizable dispatch queue (code in Launchpad, description ... Read more..

The eighty six non-trivial powers ≤ 2^20

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 Posted under other, python. | 3 Comments »

Tonight Jamu Kakar mentioned in IRC that a program of his had unexpectedly crashed after processing 1,048,376 items. I think it's a useful debugging skill to have to be able ... Read more..

GMZD: Google Maps Zoom-out Distance

Sunday, February 6th, 2011 Posted under other, travel. | 1 Comment »

Here's a fun and simple measure of distance between any two locations, A and B. First, find A using Google maps and zoom in (centered) as far as you can ... Read more..

Apple channeling Microsoft?

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 Posted under companies, tech. | 10 Comments »

[caption id="attachment_756" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image by Lara64"][/caption]Apple's behavior, as described today in the New York Times and in Ars Technica reminds me of Microsoft building MSIE into Windows. When that ... Read more..

py-narrow-to-class

Friday, January 28th, 2011 Posted under python, tech. | 9 Comments »

I can never understand when I meet programmers who don't use emacs. As a programmer, you spend inordinate amounts of time in your editor. You call yourself a programmer. You ... Read more..

jsongrep.py – Python for extracting pieces of JSON objects

Thursday, November 25th, 2010 Posted under FluidDB, python. | 18 Comments »

Lots of APIs these days return JSON objects. I love JSON, but reading a raw JSON dump can be awkward. You can print the whole thing using pprint in Python ... Read more..

Faulkner on splendid failure

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 Posted under books, companies, Faulkner. | 4 Comments »

I always enjoy running across writing that is not about entrepreneurialism but which seems directly relevant. A couple of snippets that I've blogged before are The entrepreneurial spirit in literature ... Read more..

The first empirical evidence that confusion might be recursive

Monday, September 13th, 2010 Posted under me. | Comments Off on The first empirical evidence that confusion might be recursive

I spent 4 wonderful years (92-96) at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. During that time there was a very funny underground SFI newsletter "The New Can" (a play ... Read more..

Vigilante

Friday, September 3rd, 2010 Posted under me. | Comments Off on Vigilante

From terry Thu Jun 7 01:26:35 +0200 2001 To: dsmith@cs.unm.edu, high@hci.ucsd.edu today i saw a bag snatching happened about 20/30 yards in front of me 2 guys on a ... Read more..

Twisted’s Deferred class chainDeferred method is too simplistic?

Saturday, August 14th, 2010 Posted under deferreds, python, twisted. | 1 Comment »

I think it's worth spending some time thinking about whether chainDeferred in twisted.internet.defer.Deferred is too simplistic. I've thought for a while that it could be more helpful in preventing people ... Read more..

Eleanor Roosevelt

Saturday, July 31st, 2010 Posted under books. | Comments Off on Eleanor Roosevelt

To read of Eleanor and Franklin is to weep at what we have lost. Gone is the ancient American sense that whatever is wrong with human society can be put ... Read more..

Asynchronous data structures with Twisted Deferreds

Friday, July 23rd, 2010 Posted under deferreds, me, python, twisted. | 8 Comments »

Earlier this week I gave a talk titled Deferred Gratification (slides) at EuroPython in Birmingham. The title was supposed to hint at how much I love Twisted's Deferred class, and ... Read more..