Terry Jones

Author Archive

Passion and the creation of highly non-uniform value

Monday, November 10th, 2008 Posted under me, twitter. | 31 Comments »

Here, finally, are some thoughts on the creation of value. I don't plan to do as good a job as the subject merits, but if I don't take a rough ... Read more..

Expecting and embracing startup rejection

Sunday, November 9th, 2008 Posted under companies, me. | 21 Comments »

When I was younger, I didn't know what to make of it when people rejected my ideas. Instead of fighting it, trying again, or improving my delivery, I'd just conclude ... Read more..

Brief history of an idea

Sunday, November 9th, 2008 Posted under me. | 19 Comments »

In 1997 I had a fairly simple idea. I spent a year thinking about it obsessively: where it might lead, what it would enable, how to implement it, etc. As ... Read more..

A Python metaclass for Twisted allowing __init__ to return a Deferred

Monday, November 3rd, 2008 Posted under deferreds, python, tech, twisted. | 4 Comments »

OK, I admit, this is geeky. But we've all run into the situation in which you're using Python and Twisted, and you're writing a new class and you want to call ... Read more..

Twitter’s amazing stickiness (with a caveat)

Friday, October 31st, 2008 Posted under companies, twitter. | 2 Comments »

I just followed a link to a site that shows the date of the first tweet of 50 early Twitter users. I wondered how many of these early users were ... Read more..

Digging into Twitter following

Monday, October 13th, 2008 Posted under companies, python, twitter. | 10 Comments »

This is just a quick post. I have a ton of things I could say about this, but they'll have to wait - I need to do some real work. Last ... Read more..

How many users does Twitter have?

Monday, October 13th, 2008 Posted under companies, python, twitter. | 1 Comment »

Here's a short summary of a failed experiment using the Principle of Inclusion/Exclusion to estimate how many users Twitter has. I.e., there's no answer below, just the outline of some ... Read more..

Pond scum

Friday, September 5th, 2008 Posted under other, tech. | 17 Comments »

I had breakfast this morning at a bar in the Santa Caterina market in Barcelona with Jono Bennett. He's a writer. We were reflecting on similarities in our struggles to ... Read more..

GPS serendipity: Florence Avenue, Sebastopol

Monday, July 14th, 2008 Posted under companies, me, other. | 2 Comments »

I drove from Oakland up to the O'Reilly Foo camp last Friday. The O'Reilly offices are just outside Sebastopol, CA. I stopped at an ATM and my GPS unit got ... Read more..

Minor mischief: create redirect loops from predictable short URLs

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 Posted under other, python, tech. | 2 Comments »

I was checking out the new bit.ly URL shortening service from Betaworks. I started wondering how random the URLs from these URL-shortening services could be. I wrote a tiny script the ... Read more..

Giants in the Born!

Saturday, June 28th, 2008 Posted under barcelona, music. | 2 Comments »

Another day, another great sight in the Born. I was sitting here 15 minutes ago when I became aware of lots of drumming and piping outside. I tossed up whether to ... Read more..

Paella for 325 people

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 Posted under barcelona. | 2 Comments »

Once a year they cook paella in the Born. They put out two long lines of tables and chairs. Anyone who wants a ticket buys one (8 euros in 2008) ... Read more..

Sardanas in the Born

Thursday, June 19th, 2008 Posted under me, music. | 7 Comments »

OK, this will be a quick one. I'm trying to post occasional videos taken in my neighborhood. Here you have a typical Catalan scene: a band playing and people dancing Sardanas. ... Read more..

Embracing Encapsulation

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 Posted under me, python, tech. | 43 Comments »

[This is a bit rambling / repetitive, sorry. I don't have time to make it shorter, etc.] Last year at FOWA I had a discussion with Paul Graham about programming and ... Read more..

Sequoia Capital is the new Delphic Oracle

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 Posted under books, companies. | 8 Comments »

In a belated attempt to educate myself by reading some of the things that many people study in high school, I'm reading The Histories of Herodotus. It's highly entertaining and ... Read more..

Random thoughts on Twitter

Monday, June 9th, 2008 Posted under companies, tech, twitter. | 23 Comments »

I've spent a lot of time thinking about Twitter this year. Here are a few thoughts at random. Obviously Twitter have tapped into something quite fundamental, which at a high level ... Read more..

Python: looks great, stays wet longer

Sunday, June 8th, 2008 Posted under python, tech. | 12 Comments »

I should be coding, not blogging. But a friend noticed I hadn't blogged in a month, so in lieu of emailing people, here are a couple of comments on programming ... Read more..

Bandoneón

Saturday, June 7th, 2008 Posted under barcelona, music. | 2 Comments »

I'd never even heard of a bandoneón before last Thursday. There was a performance of the guitar class at the kids' school and after they were done the two teachers played ... Read more..

Manhole

Friday, May 9th, 2008 Posted under me, other. | 2 Comments »

[Listening just now to the Tiger Lillies song Bankrobber Blues I decided to post another little fictional story I wrote some years ago. The first in the series was Lucky ... Read more..

Google maps miles off on Barcelona hotel

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 Posted under barcelona, companies. | 6 Comments »

I'm a big fan of Google maps. But sometimes they get things very very wrong. In January I posted this example of them getting the location of the San Francisco international ... Read more..