a fistful of dollars

Posted by Dick on December 13, 2006

You’ve probably noticed the
‘10% off everything within our borders’
Christmas sale the States are having.
When you combine that with the price difference between US and UK shops,
it’s tempting to import stuff (although customs are trying hard to dissuade me ).

Luckily there no duty on bytes (give them time) . So it’s a good time to get non-corporeal booty (and I don’t mean Aaliyah).

(NB: I have these already – I’m not fishing (although I wouldn’t say no to a container if you’re going to the bar).

The final version of the DRM-free 2nd edition PragProg Rails PDF
has dropped.
Unlike the book, it gets regular errata updates, is searchable and you can download the code. It’s about 12 pounds.

If you want to clear out a houseful of servers, Textdrive shared hosting is less than a pound a week if you buy a year up front.

I’ve been with them over a year now
and it’s been really good. Last winter the host I was on was a bit flaky, but it’s been fine since. I got the $99/year deal in August and have had 0 issues that weren’t of my own making since.

They’ve also said that anyone who has one of:

  • $15/month of Strongspace (5Gb of https/ssh/rsync-able disk, 5 users)
  • $15/month of Joyent Connector (groupware, 5 users )
  • $15/month of the shared hosting I just mentioned

will be automatically upgraded in the New Year to ‘Joyent Core’ – which is all the above for $15/month.

I’m with jwz on groupware , but Strongspace uses
ZFS (Thumpers) for storage , so
I’ll trust it more than some other NAS I could mention .

If it sounds worth having, get a month of shared ($12) before shelling out for a year – davie is solid, but some shared boxes are more equal than others .

(Textdrive are actually doing a referral scheme, so in theory I could pimp them out, but it’s too much of a pain in the arse to get the dollars over here (they pay in bushels of straw or something)).

that clinking clanking sound

Posted by Dick on July 06, 2005

Well my predictions of Americas imminent financial collapse have been spectacularly wrong (100 bucks is now 56.5 ukp, up from 54.2 when I posted my ‘master plan’).

Also I’ve been watching anti G8 demos on the news, and while I vaguely feel most of those on the demos have their hearts in the right place, campaigning to ‘end capitalism now!’ seems as meaningless as trying to repeal the law of gravity.

Still, at least I know how little I know.
Economics and a basic financial Clue seem to have passed me by entirely. For some reason I saw physics as a good way to understand the world, which was a bit silly with hindsight. The worlds problems are caused by peoples
needs and greed(s), not neutrinos.

So I’ve decided to take a bit of time to read up on economics. Go go gadget wikipedia!

Also this online book , which is hopefully written by a bona fide capitalist bastard (who might know what he’s talking about).