Archives of Life

“Set your own price” for goods?

[Update – added Kottke.org micropatron report near the end] RadioHead have taken a bold move with their latest album “In Rainbows” as they allow fans to set their own pricing for the digital download (summary, long write-up with pictures of the process). Except for a fixed credit-card overhead (around 45p) it seems that you can […]
17 years ago

Artificial Intelligence problems in Industry (things I’ve worked on)

A few days back Mihai commented an interest in the Artificial Intelligence work that I’ve undertaken in the past. I figure that a short run-down of the kinds of problems I’ve tackled might be interesting. Since 2004 I have run my own A.I. research consultancy – I’m blogging about the experience of becoming a freelance […]
17 years ago

Python at Google (YouTube, Groups, code.google)

Alex Martelli (uber-tech-lead at Google) writes in a thread on Google’s use of Python. I’d heard before but it is nice to see it confirmed: “YouTube (one of Google’s most valuable properties) is essentially all-Python” and there’s a link to a short slide presentation on Making YouTube Scalable with Python. He makes the following point […]
17 years ago

BarCamp Brighton

Last weekend we held our first BarCamp (blog) here in Brighton. 80 or so geeks attended both days, many were here anyway because of Friday’s excellent dConstruct. Jane took excellent pictures and many of the talks are listed in the schedule on the BackNetwork which Madgex kindly provided. My talk isn’t listed (duh, bad me) […]
17 years ago

Using OpenID for blog commenting

To leave a comment on Simon’s £5 App blog post I figured I might try OpenID (given that Simon is such an advocate). Previously I’d looked at MyOpenID and I figured it couldn’t be too hard…it took 5 minutes to configure my user (http://IanOzsvald.myopenid.com/) and 1 minute to sign-in on Simon’s blog. I can use […]
17 years ago

Brighton’s Open Street Map

Mikel Maron spoke at BarCamp last weekend on his progress towards finishing the Brighton OpenStreetMap.  The demo was really nice – apparently it’ll be ‘finished’ by November in time for the Digital Festival. I just tried out a demo – you can see the centre of Brighton with all the roads, train station, some of […]
17 years ago

eXpansys £10 voucher – someone please use it for me

I’ve just received a 4gb usb stick from eXpansys and I received a £10-off voucher (for a purchase over £20).  It is valid until 4th October 2007 and I’m not going to use it – it says ‘use it or pass it on to a friend’. If you’re going to make an order from eXpansys […]
17 years ago

ShowMeDo’s New “Services” Arm

I’m very pleased to announce that Kyran and I have completed the first version of services.showmedo.com. The site is our ‘commercial arm’ which aims to help companies with: Creating screencasts for marketing and training Premium video hosting We are already working for 4 Brighton-based companies and have garnered some very nice testimonials. Next – I […]
17 years ago

6th £5 App – Mac Shareware

Mine and John’s 6th Five Pound App Meet (feed for new events) event is coming up on Tues 11th September, Martin Reddington is speaking on his Mac shareware company: Martin Redington, of MildMannered Industries, talks about life as a small independent software vendor, writing mac software for the consumer market. This event is being sponsored […]
17 years ago

Spam – foreign emails and friend-of-friends address books

I’m getting lots more spam on my work account, apparently due to the storm botnet. Now I drag 10-20 new mails to the spam_to_learn folder every day and I check and delete 50-100 identified spams each day. Of the incoming spams – a small but steady percentage are in a foreign language. They use unicode, […]
17 years ago