A: Soon trains will be wheel-less and integrated to the track!

B: What?

A: Engines are the new wheels.

B: No, you need an engine and wheels to push against the track.

A: New carriages can power trains.

B: That makes them engines.

A: Anyway, in the long term the rails will become the engine and the wheel is a squeaky relic of history.

B: I think you mean a maglev. Which is really a very different system to...

A: Precisely.

A: Would it make any difference to the traveller from a business perspective?

B: Well, no...

A: See.

B: Arrrrrgggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh !

I've written up what I have recently learned about mass mailing as a little guide. It's just notes and a link dump, but I think it covers all the important things you need to do.

The event horizon, the boundary of the region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape, acts rather like a one-way membrane around the black hole... One could well say of the event horizon what the poet Dante said of the entrance to Hell: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." Anything or anyone who falls through the event horizon will soon reach the region of infinite density and the end of time.

"What's interesting about bills of exchange is that they're just, well, information"
— True, about as much as your driving license/ credit card is just a piece of plastic…

AC@FinancialCryptography

Disclaimer: I've spent my career working for firms too small to afford "proper" enterprise kit. I've never bought a network connection wider than a 100Mbps drop.

The cost of silicon has collapsed; power usage is under control; bandwidth isn't an issue if you're sensible. "Enterprise" is a misnomer, most it is barely distinguished from what's on sale at Dixons. Within a few years, IT in well run companies will focus almost solely on improving the use of people. CTOs of the future will spend their lives trying to cut phone support and replacement call out costs.

A few months ago, I had a discussing (read argument) with some more left-wing friends (full disclosure: I'd like a 30% smaller, highly localised state, with the rich paying for everything) about the Tobin Tax. A tax to be levied on a small percentage of the value of each foreign exchange transaction. Apparently this will stabilise the FX markets, making incidents like the Asian currency crisis less likely.

Any decent sized website that sends emails needs a way to keep its email addresses up-to-date. The standard for doing this is Variable envelope return path (VERP). With VERP, we send a unique id in the Return-Path header of every email. If the mail's bounced, we pick the id out of the To: header and invalidate the associated email address.

Oddly Django doesn't seem to offer this.

Having spent some quality time with SMTP whitelists latently, it's occurred to me that all these lists exist to do is costly signalling. In my experience, all that getting added (or being removed from) a list takes is a polite note confirming you're real and have a reason to send bulk mailings.

If you want to off load your statics hosting to CloudFront, Have a look at the snippet below. It's currently powering we20.org. You'll need to adjust it to your own file layout.

Requires s3-cmd.

First we need pre-gzip our content. [CloudFront won't do it for us.] Then have the script grab our svn rev number and push all our content to S3 in a folder of that name. We need to have the rev. number in the URL, as CloudFront can take up to 24hrs to refresh content from S3.

Having your own office phone system can be huge asset, but commercial systems are often limited or expensive, and the free solutions have their rough edges. These are my notes from re-building our office PBX. Hopefully they'll save someone some time.