Terry Jones

Author Archive

Finishing Proust, redux

Monday, June 21st, 2010 Posted under books, me. | 2 Comments »

Back in December 2006 I wrote about finishing Proust and made a rough argument about how often anyone on earth finishes the whole thing. The argument was a bit subtle. ... Read more..

bzr viz is so pretty

Monday, January 18th, 2010 Posted under programming, tech. | Comments Off on bzr viz is so pretty

A visual summary of my coding work in the last week, creating branches, working on them, merging them back into the FluidDB trunk. Read more..

At what point does an Amazon EC2 reserved instance become worth it?

Friday, January 8th, 2010 Posted under companies, tech. | 2 Comments »

If you purchase an Amazon EC2 reserved instance, you'll pay a certain amount up front (pricing). If you don't use the instance much, it will be more expensive per hour ... Read more..

Twisted code for retrying function calls

Thursday, November 12th, 2009 Posted under deferreds, python, twisted. | 4 Comments »

These days I often find myself writing code to talk to services that are periodically briefly unavailable. An error of some kind occurs and the correct (and documented) action to ... Read more..

Fault-tolerant Python Twisted classes for getting all Twitter friends or followers

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 Posted under python, twisted, twitter. | Comments Off on Fault-tolerant Python Twisted classes for getting all Twitter friends or followers

It's been forever since I blogged here. I just wrote a little Python to grab all of a user's friends or followers (or just their user ids). It uses Twisted, ... Read more..

Crowdsourcing Arabic-to-English translation in the Geneva airport

Saturday, October 10th, 2009 Posted under books, me. | Comments Off on Crowdsourcing Arabic-to-English translation in the Geneva airport

Today I met an extraordinary Iranian man in the Geneva airport. He's written a 1000 page book in Arabic about (at least in part) his experiences in Cyprus. He approached ... Read more..

Facebook release Tornado and it’s not based on Twisted?

Saturday, September 12th, 2009 Posted under FluidDB, python, tech, twisted. | 17 Comments »

[caption id="attachment_613" align="alignleft" width="160" caption="Image: Jay Smith"][/caption] To their great credit, Facebook have just open-sourced more of their core software. This time it's Tornado, an asynchronous web server written in ... Read more..

FluidDB has launched!

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 Posted under me. | 2 Comments »

In case you missed it, FluidDB has (finally) launched. I wont be blogging here about FluidDB or Fluidinfo, though will continue to post personal things and of course random bits ... Read more..

Python code for retrieving all your tweets

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 Posted under python, twitter. | 13 Comments »

Here's a little Python code to pull back all a user's Twitter tweets. Make sure you read the notes at bottom in case you want to use it. import sys, twitter, ... Read more..

Paella

Sunday, June 14th, 2009 Posted under other. | Comments Off on Paella

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A middling tower

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 Posted under Fluidinfo. | Comments Off on A middling tower

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2 cents

Friday, June 5th, 2009 Posted under companies, Fluidinfo, me. | Comments Off on 2 cents

My bank account hits rock bottom, at 2 cents, while building Fluidinfo. Read more..

Full tilt at the center of the earth

Sunday, May 31st, 2009 Posted under books, Faulkner. | Comments Off on Full tilt at the center of the earth

It was cold that morning, the first winter cold-snap; the hedgerows were rimed and stiff with frost and the standing water in the roadside drainage ditches was skimmed with ice ... Read more..

Slides from FluidDB talk at PGCon

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 Posted under me. | Comments Off on Slides from FluidDB talk at PGCon

Here are the slides from my talk on May 22, 2009 at the Postgres Conference (PGCon) in Ottawa. The video will be available soon. The design, architecture, and tradeoffs of FluidDBView ... Read more..

Talking at Postgres Conference (PGCon) in Ottawa

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 Posted under me. | Comments Off on Talking at Postgres Conference (PGCon) in Ottawa

Here's just a quick note to mention that I'm talking at the annual Postgres Conference aka PGCon. The talk is titled The design, architecture, and tradeoffs of FluidDB, and is ... Read more..

A mixin class allowing Python __init__ methods to work with Twisted deferreds

Monday, May 11th, 2009 Posted under deferreds, python, twisted. | Comments Off on A mixin class allowing Python __init__ methods to work with Twisted deferreds

I posted to the Python Twisted list back in Nov 2008 with subject: A Python metaclass for Twisted allowing __init__ to return a Deferred Briefly, I was trying to find a ... Read more..

Balcony music

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 Posted under music. | 41 Comments »

Today I discovered the wonderful Grooveshark and some thoughts occurred to me that I feel like writing down. I haven't spent much time thinking about rights over digital media, downloading, etc. ... Read more..

The first loud ding-dong of time and doom

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 Posted under books, Faulkner. | Comments Off on The first loud ding-dong of time and doom

But not for a little while yet; for a little while yet the sparrows and the pigeons; garrulous myriad and independent the one, the other uxorious and interminable, at once ... Read more..

OK, it’s a pandemic. Now what?

Thursday, April 30th, 2009 Posted under me. | 35 Comments »

Here are some more thoughts on the (now official) influenza pandemic. I would like again to emphasize that I'm not an authority and I'm not trying to pass myself off as ... Read more..

A few comments on pandemic influenza

Sunday, April 26th, 2009 Posted under me. | 94 Comments »

Here are some thoughts on the current swine influenza outbreak. These are just off the top of my head - I will undoubtedly think of more to say and add ... Read more..