May 2011
2 posts
“To me, a lifestyle business doesn’t equate to running a tiny business as an...”
– Startup vs. Lifestyle Business (a Short Comparison from a Guy Who’s Done Both)
There’s some interesting stuff in the comments too.
Product or service?
I once tried to be an entrepreneur.
I moved to Luxembourg with my wife, set up a company, and then wondered what I was going to do. I couldn’t decide if I should build a product of some sort - and then, what? - or if I should provide services. Predictably, I floundered for a few years.
I suspect I’d have made a better job of it had I been able to read What Should You Do With Your...
February 2011
1 post
On Launchpad we agonize about going read-only for 60-90 minutes a month to make database changes. Waitrose, however, have quite a different idea.
They’ve built a new website:
…you can continue to shop at Waitrose.com as normal.
However, in order to allow us to transfer your details over to the new website, you will be unable to make any changes to your Waitrose.com Account,...
November 2010
1 post
3 tags
Script to control native Spotify on Linux
Almost the simplest possible Python script to control the native Spotify client on Linux:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import dbus
import sys
if __name__ == '__main__':
session = dbus.SessionBus.get_session()
spotify = session.get_object(
"org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify",
"/org/mpris/MediaPlayer2")
for command in sys.argv[1:]:
getattr(spotify, command)()
Use...
October 2010
2 posts
“I tried appending “/rss” to the URL of one of my tag archive pages, and somewhat...”
– Per-tag RSS feeds for Tumblr by Paul Mison.
2 tags
Tagging installed Python libraries
Generating TAGS for the project I’m working on with the addition of an installed library - Twisted for example - can be a pain:
$ python
>>> import twisted
>>> twisted.__file__
'/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/twisted/__init__.pyc'
>>>
$ etags -R src /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/twisted
I got bored of that.
Enter pyctags to take the pain away:
$ pyctags -e...
September 2010
1 post
Free ticket folly
Norwich drivers asked to take the bus
Norwich has been selected as a pilot for a nationwide scheme to get people to swap one in every 25 journeys from their car to the bus … To help make the vision a reality, a million free bus trips are being given away nationally to get car drivers on board.
I know what the bus is like, thanks, and a free bus journey is not going to change my mind....
June 2010
3 posts
My issues with PayPal
Sean Murphy on Identi.ca asked me:
What don’t you like about PayPal?
There are several factors, most stemming from their ubiquity/monopoly in the web payment area that forces me to use them:
Site full of stupid usability issues; I don’t want to trust my money/details to something so broken,
Every time I log in there’s another hurdle to jump before I can get my money, move...
Coding Cheat Sheets by Dave Child →
schwuk:
cameronmoll:
A collection of free, printable quick references for a variety of languages and web technologies—PHP, CSS, Subversion, Ruby on Rails, Microformats, etc.
I’ve already used these cheat sheets today, and I like the way he asked for donations (“I’m saving donations towards a a new Cobham mesh chair! £98.41 (of £126.99) to go!”, and a little progress...
Arse mouth
My wife starts off any discussion of our new overlords government by referring to David Cameron as “arse mouth”. She doesn’t like the way his mouth looks. This has proved to not be a good way to start a reasonable and balanced discussion of policy.
May 2010
1 post
Landscape
Today I start a 6 month long rotation onto Landscape. Weirdly, I’m not nervous, just keen to be productive as soon as possible, to learn as much as I can, and to have fun all the while :)
April 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Reply to "Downstream bug reports – fail!"
Johannes Schmid wrote a short piece about Ubuntu and bug reports on Launchpad and I wrote a reply. Unfortunately a server error on blogs.gnome.org prevents me from commenting directly on his post, so I’ll do it here:
This is something we’re working on; it’s in the interests of Ubuntu to get bugs reported upstream.
Launchpad already has a decent level of integration with the...
December 2009
5 posts
Free Thrash!
Lost World Order - a thrash band I’ve never heard of before today - have released their album Marauders for free download. It’s pretty good.
“I have added this switch to the production checkwatches crontab, and it seems to...”
– Chex, on adding --jobs=10 to the Launchpad checkwatches cron job. In other words, checkwatches is now running with multiple threads. I wonder if/when it’ll blow up.
The Biscuit Scale of Programming Languages
Defined as:
“The number of biscuits, per hour, that one needs to program for a given programming language.”
Python is around 1. That’s about ideal, because less than 1 is probably pushing human endurance. I wouldn’t expect anyone to do anything for less.
Javascript is about 10, or maybe 8 really hardcore biscuits. However, serious gotchas in the language can quickly push...
November 2009
2 posts
Multi-threaded woes
I’m making Launchpad’s checkwatches system multithreaded.
For those not in the know, checkwatches is a script and a ton of supporting code that, every day, pulls in status information from 1000s of bugs residing in other bug trackers.
So far it has been a single-threaded blocking application, but now that we have so many remote bugs to check it’s not actually able to keep up....