James Tauber
About: Entrepreneur, Python and Web guy.
Blog Posts
iPhone 3G First Impressions
--I stood in line on Friday to upgrade to an iPhone 3G. It took about 2.5 hrs to get to the front of the line but the process after that was very eas...
iPhone Upgrade
--So, I'm planning on upgrading my iPhone, if not Friday then pretty soon afterwards. I may upgrade my existing phone to the 2.0 software right away,...
Turing Chess
--At the HTM Workshop there was a lightning talk by David Doshay on Computer Go which is another application I thought of as soon as I read On Intell...
The Rocker
--My friend and filmmaking partner, Tom Bennett used to manage a band and still owns a Silver Eagle Coach from back in the day. About a year ago, he ...
On Intelligence and the HTM Workshop
--Like a lot of geeks, I've been interested in how the brain works for most of my life. Artificial Intelligence was always one of my interests within...
Changes to Google Maps Satellite Images
--It used to be obvious in Google Maps where the boundaries of different satellite images were. Each image had different brightness, contrast, colour...
The Annotated Turing
--Some books entertain, some inform; some confirm what you already knew, some make you change your mind about something. But then there are some book...
Pinax Progress III
--In the six weeks that it's been around (that's not six weeks since launch, that's six weeks since coding started), the Pinax platform and community...
Back to Blogging
--Last month was my worst blogging drought ever. It happened for a number of reasons: I was travelling almost 3 weeks out of the month; free time w...
Two Podcast Interviews
--In the last week two podcasts have come out which I appear on. The first is the Google Summer of Code podcast where Titus Brown and I were interv...
Question-Driven Commenting
--I've always loved Titus Brown's notion of stupidity driven testing. It's okay to make a mistake but you write a test to make sure you don't do it a...
Pinax Progress II
--Yesterday I reported that we'd added the following to Pinax in the last 24 hours: user profile pages gravatars user-to-user messages (via django...
Pinax Progress
--Here is what the team of brosner, leidel, floguy and myself have added to Pinax in the last 24 hours: user profile pages gravatars user-to-user ...
Programming as Jazz
--I'm starting to appreciate that programming has more similarities to Jazz than just the project naming conventions encouraged by Django. When I s...
Funcom's Epic Fail
--So the other night I decided to purchase the adventure game Dreamfall by FUNCOM as a digital download. They provide their own downloader, that's fi...
Creating Gradients Programmatically in Python
--For various sites I often want to create a narrow gradient image. This site has two, for example, the grey background gradient and the purple heade...
Metrics Provide An Inner Product
--Another post for the Poincaré Project. We've already seen that a one-form is a linear function from a vector to a (for our purposes) real number....
Introducing Pinax
--In the post Reusable Django Apps and Introducing Tabula Rasa I mentioned my project to create an out-of-the-box Django-based website with everythin...
Elite Oolite
--When I lived in Brunei in the mid-80s, a neighbour had a BBC Micro and I would go over there to play the space trading game Elite. The hidden-line ...
LOTRO on VMware Fusion
--I've hardly played Lord of the Rings Online at all the last six months and not at all the last three. My only copy of Windows is a VMware Fusion ...
Reusable Django Apps And Introducing Tabula Rasa
--The excellent 42 Topics blog has a post entitled Popularizing Django — Or Reusable apps considered harmful which makes (or attempts to make) the c...
Metrics As Mappings Between Arrows and Stacks
--Another post for the Poincaré Project. Back in Coordinate Systems and Metrics we saw that a metric for a coordinate system tells us the "distance...
Factoring Out Common Args To Zipped Generators
--I'm playing around with some additive synthesis in Python. I've implemented an oscillator as a generator that takes a number of parameters. It is...
Moiré Waves
--I was playing around with some additive synthesis in Python, generating various basic waveforms and checking them visually, in Soundtrack Pro. Th...
Grammar Rules
--One downside to having a background in linguistics is that one is more sensitive to various so-called grammar rules that people regurgitate from th...
UPS Invents Time Travel
--and who is BERT in Provo?
Why Colour Correction Only Needs Two Sliders
--Duncan Davidson (who I still think of as James) asked on Twitter: Color Temp works on the Blue/Yellow axis. Tint on the Green/Magenta. No need to...
Auto-Scrolling in jQuery
--I mentioned in my previous post New Site Look that, inspired by 37 Signals, I wanted to auto-scroll pages in my website in two circumstances: when...
New Site Look
--If you read this in a feed reader, you might want to go to my actual site to see what I'm talking about :-) Usually, when I rewrite the underlyin...
django-email-confirmation
--This simple django app is for cases where you don't want to require an email address to signup on your website but you do still want to ask for an ...
Barry and Frank
--Continuing on from the previous Barry and Frank story... Colin comes up to Barry and Frank and says "I've just tossed this coin 100 times and rec...
Probability Thought of the Day
--If I ever taught probability and statistics, this is the problem I'd put on the board the first lecture: Colin comes up to Barry and Frank and sa...
History
--via James Bennett and Bill de hÓra: $ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head 120 cd 111 ls 78 python 73 svn 17 mat...
More About Twitter
--On my previous entry about Twitter, Nelson commented: I still don't really get what Twitter is... would it be useful to me? I could describe T...
Game Neverending in Django
--In the early hours of April 2nd I heard via Twitter that Game Neverending, the online game that never launched but which gave rise to Flickr, had c...
Twittering
--I've been using Twitter a lot lately. My page is http://twitter.com/jtauber if you'd like to follow me. I've also set up a Twitter account for Qu...
April Fools
--Best Joke I Fell For Tim Ferriss announcing he's been outsourcing his blog writing the last year. What was brilliant about this was that I felt ...
Thunks, Trampolines and Continuation Passing
--Here is a thunk, a kind of delayed apply that takes a function and arguments but, rather than calling the function right away returns another funct...
Coordinate Systems and Stack-Type Vectors
--(on a bit of a roll with the Poincaré Project recently) Back in 2006, I talked about the notion of a coordinate system which, for some region of ...
The Rubik's Cube Can Be Solved But Is It Grammatical?
--In my previous post I mentioned Joyner's paper Mathematics of the Rubik's Cube. The phrase "The Rubik's Cube" sounds odd because you can't normal...
Twenty-Five Moves Suffice
--I've talked about the Rubik's Cube before and linked to last year's paper by Kunkle and Cooperman proving Twenty-Six Moves Suf?ce for Rubik’s Cube....
First to Hit 100
--So I was about to blog on the fact that in the last two hours I've read about both Opera and WebKit reaching 98/100 on the Acid 3 Test and that I w...
Latin Mottos on Japanese Running Shoes
--The name of Japanese athletic equipment company ASICS is an acronym for the Latin phrase anima sana in corpore sano—"a sound mind in a sound ...
Documentation Can Speed Up Your Code
--I just was documenting some code that looked (roughly) like this: def a(x, m): for i, o in enumerate(sorted(x)): if o > m: ...
One-Forms Form Linear Spaces
--One of the important takeaways from arrows and stacks as duals is that Every linear space has a dual space whose elements are the linear, scalar...
Graded Reader Discussion and Code
--Owing to the amount of interest I received about A New Kind of Graded Reader, I have started a mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group...
Arrows and Stacks as Duals
--Part of the glacial Poinaré Project. We've introduced the notion of a linear space and seen that, in the context of a manifold, there are at leas...
Another You Me Us We Review
--Forte Magazine has a review of Nelson Clemente's EP and had this to say about You Me Us We (which I composed and co-produced): Aussie boy Nelson ...
Relatively Speaking
--Special Relativity uses straightforward mathematics with mind-bending physical implications. General Relativity uses mind-bending mathematics with ...
Relatively Speaking
--Special Relativity uses straightforward mathematics with mind-bending physical implications. General Relativity uses mind-bending mathematics with ...
Inconsistent Symlinks
--Set up directories as follows: drwxr-xr-x 2 jtauber staff 68 Mar 18 17:57 A drwxr-xr-x 3 jtauber staff 102 Mar 18 17:58 B lrwxr-xr-x 1...
PyCon Update
--I am proud to announce that a couple of hours ago, I was elected to both membership and to the board of directors of the Python Software Foundation...
PyCon
--On Wednesday, I'll be heading to Chicago for PyCon. I'm looking forward to catching up with people there and getting a lot of Django hacking done.
I Have A Song On iTunes
--I have a song on iTunes! Previously, I've written about my song You Me Us We which was a finalist in the Unisong International Songwriting Contes...
Google Summer of Code 2008
--Well, the Google Summer of Code is on again and the Python Software Foundation have asked me to coordinate for the second year (mustn't have screwe...
Another Dictionary Trick
--Continuing on from my previous post about python dictionaries. Imagine you're using a defaultdict to count objects. That is, you set up like this...
Evolution of Default Dictionaries in Python
--I write a lot of code where I use a dictionary of sets (or lists or counters, etc) Method 1 dict_set = {} if key not in dict_set: dict_set[k...
Time Machine Isn't What It Used to Be
--Yesterday, after a mammoth session importing and organizing photos in Aperture 2, Time Machine informed me that the backup drive was full. That d...
Script Breakdown
--This weekend, I'm trying to finish an initial breakdown of the script for In the Light of Day. As a preliminary step to scheduling and budgeting, a...
A New Kind of Graded Reader
--Back in 2004, I talked about algorithms for optimal vocabulary ordering. Then in 2006, I talked about using this and other techniques in teaching ...
JMW's Strange Meeting With Romeo and Juliet
--Back in the late 1980s there was a new music group in Perth called EVOS. In my final year of high school, I was involved with the EVOS Youth Ensemb...
Django Collaborator Wanted
--Just on the off-chance I find the right match amongst the readers of this blog... So here's the deal: I'd really like a django developer to colla...
Usavich
--(via Ned Batchelder) Usavich has to be just about the strangest thing I've ever seen. And yet I'm addicted. I can't summarize this minute-or-tw...
Statistics
--Following Bob, Joe and Ryan, here are my Browser / OS stats for the last month (rounded to nearest tenth of a percent): Firefox &nbs...
Marcie Lascher
--For a while now, Marcie Lascher has been asking me to write a blog entry about her. She doesn't care what I say, she just wants to have a blog ment...
Macworld Keynote
--Lots of good stuff of great interest to me. No wow moments during the video given rumours and spoilers beforehand, although I did like the way he...
Keynote Bad Request
--Yet again I can't watch the Macworld Keynote Address Quicktime because of a "Bad Request" error. Has happened every year and I have to wait a day o...
Quisition User Goals for 2008
--Last year my goal for Quisition was to hit 1,000 users. My goal this year is much more ambitious. It is to have 1,000 active users. To put that i...
BibleTech 2008
--I don't think I've mentioned it here before but next week, I'm one of the keynote speakers at the BibleTech 2008 conference in Seattle. While I've ...
Quisition Gets a Shiny New Look
--I decided it was time for a redesign of the Quisition site. I started with the logo and things just took off from there. I wanted to make the log...
The Cringe Test
--Back when I was editing Alibi Phone Network in 2004, I found that cuts that seemed fine to me when I watched them alone would make me cringe when I...
Some Goals for 2008
--produce first feature film — In the Light of Day dramatically increase the number of Quisition users (more on this soon) launch habitualist...
2007 in Review
--At the start of the year, I launched Quisition, my flashcard site. By the end of the year, I had reached my goal of 1,000 users. I've already added...
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