Archive of month: November 2005

Great customer service

Two of my toys blew up last week. My 18 month old 17″ Viewsonic LCD monitor just stopped working and about the same time my 6 month old 512MB Compact Flash camera card died. I was (pleasantly!) surprised to see that Viewsonic offer a 3 year warranty on all LCD monitors – they just came […]

An evolutionary approach to starting a company

Here’s a nice post by a VC taking a look at two ways of building a new business – either start well-funded by VCs or start as a one-man-band in a garage (or a two-man-band from sofas for Kyran and I). “We don’t have a preference for one way or the other, but I will […]

Grant for Investigating an Innovative Idea

In an earlier post I alluded to a government-awarded grant that Kyran and I had used to evaluate a business idea. I hadn’t applied for a government grant before and it was a bit daunting – perhaps explaining the experience will be of benefit to other UK entrepreneurs. Back in April I worked with the […]

Review: Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional

I highly recommend Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional to anyone looking to learn or improve their Python programming ability. I recommended this to a colleague who had a lot of programming knowledge (in old Microsoft QuickBasic, would you believe) but no experience of Java, C++, Python. Within a few days he was comfortably doing […]

Hacking stuff – MAKE: magazine

I’d been futilely waiting to see one of these in Borders, then stumbled across a link on Amazon. I knew that Tim O’Reilly (founder of the insanely good O’Reilly computer-manual empire) had wanted to make a magazine aimed at techno-tinkerers and hackers and I really wanted a look. Seeing as it was only £6 at […]