All posts of Ian

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 […]
19 years ago

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 […]
19 years ago

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 […]
19 years ago

Paul Graham – two new articles

Paul Graham has written a couple of new high-tech entrepreneur articles: Ideas for Startups and What I Did this Summer. The first is about ‘how to have an entrepreneurial idea’ and the second about their first year running their newly formed young-persons incubator fund (this year they had 18-28 year olds involved). The ‘Y Combinator’ […]
19 years ago

Entrepreneuring and Serenity

Wow, now it’s been a full month since I last posted. Time flies when you’re busy. I’m glad to say that I’ve finished the Government (DTI) entrepreneurship grant that I’ve been working on since April – and not only did the DTI like the report, they’ve also paid promptly. I’ll say more on that later, […]
19 years ago

Brighton Bloggers

I’ve made it onto the Brighton Bloggers site, and I’ve no idea how. Anyone want to own up to submitting me? The tag-lines for the two entries around me read “Diary of a booze hound” and “Therapy is expensive. Blogging is cheap. You do the math.”. Am I the only entrepreneurial geek in the village? […]
19 years ago

Etsy Time-machine

Etsy have come up with a cool toy – more fun to play with than useful though. The timemachine plays an interactive Flash animation of the most recent additions of hand-made goods on the site by its independent sellers. The items fly past from most to least recently added, like you’re flying through a cloud […]
19 years ago

Review: The Island

Hmmm, John had warned me that it was going to be a long film. Clones grown for body parts, a Ewan McGregor (Lincoln Six Echo) with a really bad American accent and a film that was about twice as long as necessary. After about an hour when our good-boy clone Lincoln Six Echo has escaped […]
19 years ago

Site was broken, now fixed

Apologies for the site going a bit wonky over the last few days – all is good again. I bought a bigger hosting package from GoDaddy and in the process they disabled the ‘mod_rewrite’ rule for some reason. This stopped comments, permalinks, categories and posts from working. All is now fixed, sorry for the interruption […]
19 years ago

Review: Hackers and Painters (Paul Graham)

Paul Graham has been writing online since before 2000, today he has 45 articles published for free online. New articles now make Slashdot‘s frontpage, quite a big event in geek circles. He published this book last year and it contains 15 chapters, 10 of which are online and 5 of which are new (and probably […]
19 years ago