November 2010
1 post
Get It Together!
In an effort to simplify my life, I’m consolidating various bits of my online personality. You can now read about S7 Labs, technology, business, and other musings on my personal blog, It Burns! It Burns!
March 2010
1 post
“If people put data on the Web - government data, scientific data, community data...”
– Tim Berners-Lee with an update on open data | FlowingData
February 2010
2 posts
WSHU PUBLIC RADIO →
“In this series, reporter Alison Freeland collects the stories, challenges, and goals of six businesses, and then goes to Yale professors Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres, who brainstorm on what these businesses can do to reach those goals- and we learn something about the economy and business.”
Graham on Start-ups, Innovation, and... →
January 2010
1 post
5 tags
easy_install and setup.py
If you’ve used easy_install and setup.py before, you may have noticed that running something like “easy_install -d PATH” versus “python setup.py install PATH” produce different directory hierarchies. If your development environment consists of both packages pulled from the Cheeseshop and your own code (or even your modifications on Cheeseshop hosted packages), then...
November 2009
1 post
Bing and online newspapers: Web-wide war | The... →
I’m skeptical that a Bing-News Corp deal would actually be beneficial for News Corp. I think the Google brand, when searching for general news, is stronger than the actual news source.
For example, if I want to know about Michael Jackson, I search “Michael Jackson”, and to a degree I don’t care what source gives me what I want to know. However, if I want to search for an...
October 2009
2 posts
2D Boy: I love you, 2D Boy! » Blog Archive
»... →
Ever since I read about the pay-what-you-want-for-bagels model in the Freakonomics book, I’ve been curious whether or not I might be able to apply it to other transactions. I’m glad to see someone testing the waters. About 40% paid all they could afford, or paid specifically because of the model, which suggests that a large percent of these sales would not have occurred had the model...
Fact Sheet - The Health Insurance Portability and... →
There’s a little bit of misconception running around about pre-existing conditions and the evils of insurance companies. The HIPAA link explains that when you switch insurance carriers, the new one can’t exclude pre-existing conditions. The key here is that you can’t let your insurance coverage lapse; if you’re laid off or you quit to work on a startup, you absolutely must...
September 2009
9 posts
Musings on Markets: The dangers of relative... →
Larry Summers mocked efficient market theories, saying that they’re as insightful as finding that two quart bottles of ketchup are twice as expensive as one quart bottles. Relative valuation seems the same deal to me.
5 tags
CyLucene released!
We’ve officially released CyLucene, a Python interface to CLucene. CLucene is a C++ implementation of Apache Lucene, the popular search engine library.
Python developers wishing to use a well supported search engine typically head to PyLucene. PyLucene’s approach is to build an interface to a C++ layer using their custom grown JCC compiler, which then talks to Java Lucene via JNI....
5 tags
9.3. collections — High-performance container... →
Very glad to see named tuples!
When I was a Python n00b (maybe I still am?), I asked on Stack Overflow whether or not such a feature existed. I received one particularly arrogant response, in my opinion, along the lines of “why insist that your code looks like C++? It destroys my Python zen.”
That comment is contrary to one reason why I’ve become such a Python fan — the...
2 tags
import this
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Feb 6 2009, 19:02:12)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is...
5 tags
Opid, a Python WSGI OpenID app. →
I’m excited to announce the first official free software release by S7 Labs! I wrote Opid to replace the AuthKit module for OpenID authentication in Standing Room. AuthKit, built for the Pylons framework, provided more functionality than I was looking for, and proved to be difficult to customize. Opid is orders of magnitude smaller in code size and more flexible, IMO, though it leaves a user...
Watch“What do you do, guaranteed?”
Best of TBT — Your Business Card is Crap is Today’s BIG Thing - SEP 07, 2009
4 tags
Beaker sessions with file backend.
The Beaker documentation mentions that you can use a file backed session backend, along with numerous other methods (memory, dbm, various SQL flavors, even Google App Engine datastore).
What they don’t explain is how you actually use a file backend, and searching around was turning up nothing. It turns out to be similar to how you configure Beaker caching, a la with data and lock...
“Frameworks ought to gracefully fade away as you replace them, bit by bit, with...”
– Snakes on the Web
1 tag
The simplest security measure.
Why don’t more sites offer the ability to send you an email when someone logs into your account? name.com does it. I figure all banks should do it too. I don’t expect all sites to offer that feature, but at a minimum the ones that require explicit security.
August 2009
4 posts
Standing Room r3 is live!
standingrm:
Just got back from a much needed vacation and released the new version of Standing Room. We now can expose links to sets, which will open the door to some handy upcoming functionality. As always, there were also behind the scenes stability and usability fixes.
Enjoy!
joshua's blog: on url shorteners →
My opinion: URL shorteners are evil, in large part because they hijack data for no benefit. Regardless of motive, a shortener service that banks on the 140 character Twitter limit does not exactly have a strong business position. If Twitter was to discount the character quota by any embedded URLs (who sends links in SMS anyway?), bit.ly, for instance, would instantly evaporate.
How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less... →
July 2009
6 posts
1 tag
Standing Room r2 is live!
New release of Standing Room is live. See the announcement here.
3 tags
WatchDharmesh Shah regurgitating an entertaining mush of advice and lessons learned for startups.
5 tags
pkgsrc python25 and sqlite3
We use pkgsrc to maintain a consistent set of development sources across OS X, FreeBSD, Debian, and other Linux distributions. pkgsrc works reasonably well, has a decently large repository of packages (relatively easy to add a new package), active development, and is mostly portable.
Note: what follows is really only interesting if you’re looking into using pkgsrc, otherwise it’ll...
1 tag
Startups: 10 Things MBA Schools Won't Teach You →
“Sleep is that time you’re working on startup problems with your eyes closed.” Well said.
4 tags
Why not do user experience testing during the...
Whitney Hess asked software entrepreneurs at the monthly meeting of New York’s Ultra Light Startups pow wow for a show of hands: how many people sat down with a potential customer and did user experience studies in the design phase of a site?
Silence. Few if any. Her followup: why?
Because it’s hard. That’s the best answer I got.
There are so many horrible interfaces out...
2 tags
S7 Labs, fix up artist.
I intend to grow S7 Labs into a multidisciplinary group that applies math and software technology to unmined areas.
Woody Allen said “eighty percent of success is showing up.” Permit me to riff on that: eighty percent of solving a problem is finding it.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Intellectual Ventures, a group of smart folk who brainstorm for problems and solve them. Gladwell gives...