Secrets of Power Negotiating

A few weeks ago I was recommended Roger Dawson's Secrets of Power Negotiating, and decided to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is full of practical tips and helpful pointers about negotiations of every type, be it salary increases, house purchases, and even negotiations between countries (especially helpful if you're eyeing some islands in the middle of the atlantic).

What I especially liked about this book is that it contains useful information, examples and techniques without veering into the all-too-familiar territory of most self-help books nowadays, which is to inundate the reader with a series of irrelevant or inapplicable anecdotes about how people who used technique X became rich and handsome.

Book clouds

As someone who is on the road a lot, I frequently have a lot of downtime during road trips. I don't like driving, because it's mostly wasted time, so I thought I would do something useful while driving. Unfortunately, about the only useful thing you can do while driving is listen to music, but there's something better: Audiobooks.

Audiobooks are a fantastic way to read (or, well, listen to) books on the road, and it's largely made long car trips bearable, if not desirable. On the last trip, I decided I would listen to some Lovecraft, as I enjoy his writing and the genre of horror in general, so I loaded "At the Mountains of Madness" on my mobile phone and off I went. While listening, however, I was struck by his frequent use of words like "terrible", "horrible" etc. I know he's trying to convey a sense of foreboding, but, come on, Howard, not every rock has to be grotesque.

Blog migration

The old blog software was showing its age, so I decided to write a few lines of code and move the blog over to Google App Engine. Most things should work properly, but if you notice any broken links please let me know by emailing me on the address on the "About me" page.

Thanks!

Πρόγραμμα καταχώρησης αποδείξεων

Note: Apologies to non-Greek readers, this post is not for you.

Πριν μερικές μέρες είχα την ιδέα να φτιάξω ένα πρόγραμμα καταχώρησης αποδείξεων. Μια μικρή έρευνα έδειξε ότι ήδη υπάρχουν αρκετά τέτοια προγράμματα, αλλά κανένα δεν ήταν αρκετά εύχρηστο, και μου φάνηκε αρκετά καλή ιδέα για να μάθω λίγα πράγματα για το Django στο AppEngine.

Οπότε, δύο μέρες αργότερα, είναι χαρά μου να σας παρουσιάσω το TaxBonus, το δωρεάν και εύχρηστο πρόγραμμα καταχώρησης αποδείξεων. Το TaxBonus σας βοηθάει να καταχωρήσετε τις αποδείξεις σας, να υπολογίσετε πόσες αποδείξεις χρειάζεστε για την επέκταση του ...

Delicious alternatives

Off the news that Yahoo! is shutting down Delicious, I’d like to suggest a good alternative: historious

historious is a search engine for your bookmarks, which means that you can search all of your bookmarked sites for any word in the pages, and not have to browse all the obscure title to remember where you had seen a particular article.

historious also archives all webpages, so you can refer to them and share them even if the original page has changed or is no longer available. You can also …

My Y Combinator interview.

As many of you will know, for the past few months I’ve been working on the bookmark search engine startup I created, called historious. Shortly after creating it, I applied to Y Combinator because, well, it couldn’t hurt. I didn’t really think I’d get in, with all the thousands of people applying and their rather strong apprehension towards single founders, but I had nothing to lose, so I did.

On the day they were to announce the interviews, I was fairly sure I would be rejected, so I was surprised to wake up …

How to finally understand how to use Unicode.

This post is not going to be long. It’s not going to have any examples, details, or anything of the sort. It will just teach you what Unicode is, how to use it, what an encoding is and what UTF-8 means (hint: it’s an encoding). If you sort-of, semi-understand what Unicode is, this should clarify everything.

Understanding Unicode is really simple. The first thing you need to know is that Unicode is a standard that is used for the representation and handling of most of the world’s writing systems. If you want to write a program that …

How to extend the Django admin site with custom views

Often I find that I need to include administration views in my site, such as statistics, management, etc etc. When these are more than just model CRUD views, a good idea is to extend the builtin Django admin site, as it's the easiest to do.

While looking at the docs, however, I realised they were a bit cryptic and lacked good examples. It didn't take me long to figure out how to do it, but here's some example code for people who might not want to waste time figuring it out:

~~~~.python from django.conf.urls.defaults ...

The mother of all URL validators.

One of the most often requested features for historious is del.icio.us link importing, so I researched how it would be possible to add that feature. It turns out that the delicious bookmark export is an HTML page with links, so it should be possible to upload this file, extract all the links and add them to historious.

While trying to do this, I found a URL-validating regular expression on StackOverflow which has the desirable property of not only validating a URL, but also being so thorough that …

Using SQLite for great science, part 1 (or 3, I guess).

Some of you might remember the great MongoDB saga, which ended with me migrating from MongoDB to SQLite after losing my data more often than not. After the Nth time I lost my data, I decided I had enough and decided to migrate to SQLite. I also decided not to use MongoDB for historious, as I had originally planned. I wanted to share my story with the world, just to give people another use case.

This is that story.

For reference, everything below ran on …