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Showing posts from July, 2007

Pausing in High Definition

This is a tale of the worst customer service I have ever been witness to. I am the victim in the story. Were it not for my love of On Demand, I would have been on the phone with DirectTV days ago. I'm still considering, but it depends on some things. All I wanted was High Definition television and a DVR box from my new cable company. Now, for background, I am renting my current house from my mother-in-law, to keep the house for her, while she works a temporary position with her company's training infrastructure. We're trying to keep as much as possible in her name, so that her move back is easier. Here is the tale, in bullet point: Call and schedule an appointment and backup appointment for HD DVR and a cable modem installation. Miss the first appointment and figure they were busy. Call first thing on the day of the backup, to remove the cable modem from the order. The phone company gave me a discount to keep the DSL, that saved me more than a bundle from the cable company.

Me, Too, Python Magazine!

Thankfully, Brian Jones has finally went public with the Python Magazine he is launching. Why am I so thankful for this? I can talk about it now, and how I'm a technical editor, columnist, and will most likely author an article some issues aside from the column. The working title for my column is "And Now For Something Completely Different" and I think I will stick with that. It is all very exciting. Being a huge fan of education of and through Python, the magazine is really fantastic in my eyes. Whatever I can do to help it along and turn it into a positive move for the community is worth the effort. Keep your eyes out here for a surprise about the magazine before the first issue comes out. See his original post: Python Magazine Lives Technorati Tags: python , magazine , programming , development , pythonmagazine

Page Chunking, Like Chunky Milk, Is Bad

Search results suck past the first page . Google might have a billion results for some search, but it won't give them all to you in the result page. You are probably only interested in the first five or so results. To be nice, you get a whole ten results on the page. If you want more, you need to go to page after page of ten results at a time, possibly millions of pages worth to get every single result. Obviously, you won't do that, and for two reasons: You don't care about all ten of the results on the first page, much less the thousands or millions of other result pages. Refining your search is far easier than going through one page at a time. Having or bringing the information you want to the top of the listing is better than looking for it further down in the listing. That being the case, our solutions should center around making it easier to bring information up from the mountain of results, instead of finding ways to bury you inside of it. Some interesting headway has