Terry Jones

Author Archive

Sack the golden towns of Montezuma!

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 Posted under books. | Comments Off on Sack the golden towns of Montezuma!

"My dear fellow," Burlingame said caustically, "we sit on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will ... Read more..

Coding

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 Posted under me, programming. | Comments Off on Coding

Coding is what you do when you tire of dealing with other humans. You get to interact with a literal-minded idiot who slavishly follows your every wish. Unfortunately you have ... Read more..

bzr – not your grandfather’s VCS

Thursday, March 26th, 2009 Posted under programming, tech. | Comments Off on bzr – not your grandfather’s VCS

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The entrepreneurial spirit in literature

Monday, March 2nd, 2009 Posted under books, me. | 19 Comments »

Once in a while I run across a piece of writing that has little or nothing to do with being an entrepreneur, but which reads as though it did. ... Read more..

Rupert Brooke and Sep Kelly

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 Posted under books, me. | Comments Off on Rupert Brooke and Sep Kelly

My great grand uncle was Frederick Septimus Kelly (aka Cleg or Sep): On 22 April [1915] Kelly became aware that Rupert Brooke was dangerously ill. The following day Brooke died and ... Read more..

Loose cannon

Monday, January 26th, 2009 Posted under companies, me. | Comments Off on Loose cannon

Today I referred to myself as a loose cannon to Esteve. Tonight I recalled describing a former boss that way in an email (company name obscured with xxxxx). Here it ... Read more..

Just little and crazy

Monday, January 26th, 2009 Posted under me, other. | Comments Off on Just little and crazy

Tonight Lucas was crying about having to have dinner instead of being able to use the laptop. I asked him if he even remembered what life was like before he ... Read more..

FluidDB domain names available early (and free) for Twitter users

Saturday, January 24th, 2009 Posted under FluidDB, Fluidinfo, twitter. | 30 Comments »

Sometime in the next few months, Fluidinfo will launch an alpha version of FluidDB, the database with the heart of a wiki. It's a big engineering task, and there ... Read more..

Who signed up for Twitter immediately before/after you?

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 Posted under companies, python, twitter. | 2 Comments »

This is just a quick hack, done in about 20 minutes in 32 lines of Python. The following script will print out the Twitter screen names of the people who ... Read more..

10,000 things: Andrew Hensel lives (on Twitter)

Monday, January 5th, 2009 Posted under me, twitter. | 15 Comments »

Andrew Hensel was an extraordinary human being. We were graduate students together at The University of Waterloo in Canada in 1986-88. I met him on my first day there and we ... Read more..

Lucas does a crazy solo dance

Sunday, December 28th, 2008 Posted under other. | Comments Off on Lucas does a crazy solo dance

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Alexandopoly

Saturday, December 27th, 2008 Posted under Fluidinfo. | Comments Off on Alexandopoly

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Not alone

Friday, December 5th, 2008 Posted under companies. | 4 Comments »

Robert Scoble has just written a really nice article about Fluidinfo, calling us both "world-changing" and "unfundable". Funnily, Tim O'Reilly said something similar when I talked to him at OATV. ... Read more..

Twittendipity: a chance interview with Robert Scoble

Thursday, December 4th, 2008 Posted under me, twitter. | 12 Comments »

On Monday Tim O'Reilly posted a Twitter tweet suggesting to Robert Scoble that he contact me while in Barcelona. First off, Tim is very generous in doing this. He's ultra connected ... Read more..

Airports to install giant security mood rings

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 Posted under me. | 2 Comments »

In March 2004 I was in a silly mood (yes, a euphemism) and dreamed up the idea of airports installing giant mood rings as security devices. Prospective passengers would be ... Read more..

Serverpronto (Infolink) is a RIPOFF

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 Posted under me. | 37 Comments »

I signed up for a dedicated server from Serverpronto in late 2006. At $30/month for a real Linux box the price seemed great. I recommended them to a friend who ... Read more..

Amazon SimpleDB a complete flop?

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 Posted under companies. | 39 Comments »

Today Amazon slashed the price on storage in SimpleDB from $1.50 per Gb per month to just $0.25 per Gb per month. Note that you can buy a 1TB hard drive ... Read more..

Changing POV under Twitter

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 Posted under companies, twitter. | 16 Comments »

One thing I'd like to be able to do in Twitter is change my point of view. That is, see what Twitter looks like from the POV of another ... Read more..

A kinder and more consistent defer.inlineCallbacks

Friday, November 21st, 2008 Posted under deferreds, python, tech, twisted. | Comments Off on A kinder and more consistent defer.inlineCallbacks

Here's a suggestion for making Twisted's inlineCallbacks function decorator more consistent and less confusing. Let's suppose you're writing something like this: @inlineCallbacks def ... Read more..

bzr viz is so nice

Thursday, November 20th, 2008 Posted under python, tech. | 21 Comments »

A year ago we switched from SVN to Bazaar for source code control. I started using source code control in 1989 with RCS after comparing it with SCCS. Then I ... Read more..