I went to a school that required uniforms (private school in England). We were forced to be uniform.

This afternoon driving by the high school near my house I was amused to see uniforms everywhere - here a patch of girls all wearing the same types of shorts, with hair pulled …

My friend Paul Kedrosky's post on one of his main investment theses, the application of currently consumer oriented technologies to business (DropBox, Twitter, FaceBook, Yelp, …), got me thinking about how the future of work will look.

I've made a career of working far from where I live. I've generally considered …

Note to self, for future reference.

• Markdown reference

Generating static html:

import markdown2
file('classification.html','w').write( markdown2.markdown_path('classification.md', extras=["code-friendly"]) )

Retention bonuses don't work because they only motivate presence, not contribution.

The lovely folks at mo.com recently asked me about my experiences at Yahoo, the background and business model for Xpenser, and thoughts on funding and raising VC money. The interview has been published here, drop by and take a gander.

Here's a handy way of running a command on multiple boxes. In this case I wanted to check disk space on a series of machines.

Assuming you're using bash as your shell, the following will list the hostname and run df on machines racb13 through racb28 and spit out the …

I don't know why but I'm seriously in love with this drawing from the six year old; it seems to have a real style. Better than anything I could draw, methinks.

Mark Suster and Fred Wilson have both posted on the topic of being a good panelist. I'll throw in the best advice I ever got on the topic (from Alex, who got it from someone else):

Disagree with other panelists.

A panel of people agreeing with each other is generally …

I was surprised at how little information I found on making use of Django's permission system. Here are some quick notes on one way to use it:

Groups are groups of users. For example, you could define a group of users who have premium accounts, or have been verified in …

I remarked to a friend that Mark Suster's entrepreneurial roots show in his approach to being a VC - he's come out of nowhere and in short order aggressively pushed himself into being one of the most relevant voices out there. He seems to be working a lot harder than …

django-mptt is a library for storing tree oriented data using the Django ORM. It allows you to place your model instances into a tree structure and efficiently query for ancestors and children.

Here's a brief tutorial on how to use it:

After installing, you'll need to modify your model to …

I'm a big fan of Fantastic Mr. Fox. We just watched it again and it was a hit with everyone from the 2 year old to grandma.

The dialog an voice acting are excellent, and the animation is really refreshing. The story is smart and is different enough from your …

I was doing some log analysis this morning and was struck by the variety of user agents accessing Xpenser. Quite a bit of mobile access with quite a variety of different browsers, as well as some more exotic items (various tablet PCs I don't recognize, etc).

Then there's the API …

Here's a little script for finding files modified more than 7 days ago and moving them to another directory:

find . -type f -mtime +7 -print > /tmp/old_files.txt
cat /tmp/old_files.txt | while read line; do mv "$line" ../old_files ; done

dpkg -L package-name

Note to self, as I seem to need to do this on every new install:

Ubuntu ships with vim-tiny, which doesn't support syntax highlighting. Do this:

sudo apt-get remove vim-tiny
sudo apt-get install vim
sudo vi /etc/vim/vimrc
( Remove the quote mark from the "syntax on" line, uncommenting it …

Impressive Ted Talk by Chimamanda Adichie on how stories, and in particular "single stories", shape our views of cultures. Many parallels with how people typically see Iran.

A great quote from the talk: "The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue - it is that they are incomplete".

I used to be a vi guy who finally made the move to graphical editors. I looked for the simplest, lightest possible solutions, using ConTEXT for quite a while.

Some years ago I was forced into using Eclipse for reasons I can't quite recall; probably Java development. I didn't like …

I'm noticing how much the practice of finding a candidate and interviewing them has changed over the years.

First step is to look up the person on the web. Since I'm looking for a technical person I'm expecting a blog, contributions to open source projects, a twitter presence, etc. If …

I still have a big soft spot in my heart for Yahoo, but Yahoo mail, WTF?

Of the entire screen only the area I've highlighted in orange is dedicated to the contents of the message. And this is with the app maximized to full screen.

The interface is unusable as …