Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information [...]
I’ve just been reading this Forbes article called “The Rise of Developeronomics”. The author argues that because increasingly software is the core value proposition that differentiates companies from each other, that software developers are more and more becoming the wealth creators in society. The author recommends investing in software developers as a way of leveraging [...]
Python’s IMAPv4 client library imaplib is a really light-weight wrapper over the IMAP4 protocol. As such, it isn’t that intuitive to use. The best reference I’ve found on it is a cheat-sheet over here.
I have just been importing some music into iTunes from an external drive. Sometimes iTunes doesn’t recognise songs as belonging to the same album, even if they have the same Album name. (Bad iTunes!)
I just picked up my Jawbone UP from the Post Office last night, so thought I’d post my first impressions.
There is an absolutely awesome bit of Neal Stephenson’s book Reamde, that goes like this: The brain “was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu. A whole lot was going on in Mogadishu that required copper wire for conveyance of power and information, but there was only so much copper to go around, and [...]
The Luddites were a 19th century anti-industrialisation movement (and militia), who believed that their jobs were at risk because of the industrialisation of manufacturing. They proceeded to try and destroy mechanical looms in a vain attempt to turn back the rising tide of industrialisation. These days anyone seen as a “Luddite” is perceived to be [...]
I just finished reading the Kindle book Race Against The Machine, a book I thoroughly recommend. This was the driver of the NPR article I blogged about recently. The book is mostly oriented towards the US, although the issues they discuss seem to be prevalent across all major economies. The authors make the case that [...]
I’ve just read two blog posts on creating written content programatically. The first was the article How I automated my writing career by Robbie Allen. This article gives a brief description of how the author’s company generates web-site content automatically using the quantitative analysis of data.
Here is a great presentation given by Jason Yan and David Cramer of Disqus fame about how their site was architected in order to scale to handle 75 million comments. DjangoCon 2010 Scaling Disqus View more presentations from zeeg.