Sometimes I run through the search terms people use within my site, or to get to my site, and I see some interesting stuff. Over the years, I’ve written perhaps hundreds of technical blog posts and articles at various sites and in magazines (and a book), but I have never once touched on the “history”…
Category: Productivity
Throw out your Perl: One-line aggregation in awk
I ran into a student from a class I taught last summer. He’s a really sharp guy, and when I first met him, I was impressed with just how much Perl he could stuff into his brain’s cache. He would write what he called ‘one-liners’ in Perl that, in reality, took up 5-10 lines in…
Holiday Project: Plot Google Calendar Events on Google Map
[UPDATE: 2009/08/08]: I’ve now gotten stuck on two separate projects, trying to find a bridge between Python code that generates data, and javascript code that is apparently required in order to present it. I haven’t found such a bridge. For one project, I was able to do what I needed with ReportLab (there was no…
What Ordinary Users Think About IE: Debunked
Point all of your chain-mail-forwarding family and friends at this post. It’s a collection of things people have said to me, or that I’ve overheard, that reveal little tidbits about what people are thinking when they use IE. I have to use IE – it’s my internet! IE is not your internet. IE is what’s…
Open Source Technology US Conference Calendar
One of the best ways to keep up with your field and network at the same time is to attend conferences. It’s one of the things I look forward to every year. After learning that O’Reilly has decided to commit blasphemy and *not* hold OSCON in Portland, Oregon the same week as the Oregon Brewers…
How Are You Staffing Your Startup?
I have, in the past, worked for startups of varying forms. I worked for a spinoff that ultimately failed but had the most awesome product I’ve ever seen (neural networks were involved, need I say more?), I helped a buddy very early on with his startup, which did great until angel investors crept in, destroyed…
WordPress 2.7 – Ahhhhhh!
I guess WordPress doesn’t consider the changes they’ve made in 2.7 (released today) to be big enough to warrant a change to the major version number (which would make it 3.0). However, there are a few features now built-in that I’ve been dreaming about for so long that simply incrementing the second number seems to…
Linux on Laptop = Epic Fail
I brought my MacBook Pro in for a warranty repair yesterday around noon. Since then I’ve been using a Lenovo T61 to get basic work done, and also to see if any progress has been made in the area of Linux support for my laptop. I bought this laptop specifically because a website said that…
On Remote Workers and Working Remotely
I’ve been on both sides of the remote worker relationship. On the manager side, I’ve managed some good-sized projects using an all-remote work force. Indeed, I’ve hired, managed, fired, and promoted workers without ever knowing what they look like. On the worker side, I do most of my work remotely, and I have for some…
I’m a Top 25 Geek Blogger… for some value of “Top”
I’m not someone who wakes up every day and looks at how my blog is ranked by all of the various services. I check out my WordPress stats, but that’s really about it. However, someone went and did some of the work for me, and they’ve decided that, of the blogs that they read or…