Apparently I am ruder in the office than I realise
Some quotes from the Dublin office last week make me think that I might owe "Master N" (as he will be called) an apology. Master N, you're nothing like a butterfly. You don't have wings.
On Virgin Atlantic premium economy
Welcome to Mikal's badly organised travel tips. On the trip to Dublin I flew Virgin Atlantic premium economy. That's kind of like anyone else's business class, given the classes on Virgin are economy, premium economy, and upper class. It's much cheaper than anyone else's business class fare to Heathrow though. I thought that premium economy was pretty good... The seats are old and both of the ones I sat in were subtly broken, but the seat spacing is excellent, the seat is wider than normal, and reclines just that little extra. The extra money was worth it given I got off the plane and walked straight into a meeting in Dublin, and on the return flight I got a heap of work done. Premium economy even offers power for laptops, although my corporate-issue iGo doesn't work with the new Lenovo x60, and Virgin didn't have a tip for the x60 in their collection. That's a pretty common compliant with the newer Intel Core2 laptops though -- they draw too much power for older universal power supplies. I got around the power problem with two "eight hour" batteries for the x60. The quotes are because I actually get more like four…
Dublin trip
I occasionally wonder to myself why I don't blog more these days, and I think the answer is that I'm not convinced that other people would be interested in what happens to me from day to day. For example, when writing the books, all that is really involved is a massive amount of time in front of a computer. The finished product is cool, but the process of producing it is actually quite boring. (Although I feel that I will one day write up my universal theory of project management... The short summary is something like: "project management is about removing obstacles to delivery of the project -- not deadlines, hassling, gantt charts, or general futzing". Or something like that.) The Dublin trip is similar. I had a good time, although am very tired. I flew Virgin Atlantic premium economy from San Francisco to Heathrow, and then BMI to Dublin. Virgin is great, BMI suck even more than I could have imagined. For example -- they advertise that they have the best on time record of any LHR flying airline, but they were late every time on my trip. Oh, and one of the planes had a power generation engine…
Book printed!
I got off the phone with Catherine a few hours ago, and apparently my copies of the book have arrived at home (I'm in Dublin for work at the moment). That's very exciting. Looks like now would be a good time to buy it, while it's shipping soon and still on special.
A large percentage of marriages fail
Apparently that applies to marriages involving goats as well. Such a shame. Who will think of the kids?
Australian Health Insurance
It sounds to me like it's time for some sort of wiki-based health insurance comparison service. As someone who has recently been insured in Australia and the US though, I should point out the Australian system is way less confusing than the US one.
Australian teachers advocate a China style firewall for Australian internet users
SMH article and the actual site It's logical really: Some Australian teachers are perceived as sucking by their students The students rate them on line, thus exercising free speech The teachers can't face a life of people knowing that other people think they suck Teacher's federation proposes some crazy firewall scheme Hurrah! Censorship is always the answer.
What do you do when the users who generate your content revolt?
Digg's answer was to attempt to censor the users -- they ultimately failed.
Dublin!
I'm in Ireland at the moment for work -- I've been here a couple of days now (which might explain why I am online at 4am local time, I am having some trouble sleeping). Anyways, it's nice here. I wasn't really expecting to like it after how much I disliked London the last time I went there, but there you go. Photos et cetera will go online just as soon as I manage to do something other than go to the office.
Domain name lookup helper for python?
Hi. I have a list of the domain portion of URLs which looks a bit like this: Whois lookup for fycnds.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for wvgpzdea.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for zhnsht.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for frigo25.php5.cz Whois lookup for handrovina.php5.cz Whois lookup for blabota.php5.cz Whois lookup for pctuzing.php5.cz Whois lookup for viagraviagra.php5.cz Whois lookup for poiu.php5.cz Whois lookup for flasa.php5.cz Whois lookup for yoy4.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for hskly.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for 2i0wjwbc.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for harnhjc.digitalpoimt.com Whois lookup for gqru.digitalpoimt.com I need some code which determines which portion of these hostnames is a whois-able domain name. My problem is this doesn't seem all that simple to do -- some countries have a second layer of TLDs, and some do not. Does anyone know of a python library, or failing that simple algorithm, which will do this for me? (For those left wondering, I am trying to do some analysis of the spam I get on this blog, and for that I want to know if the whois information for a domain that left a suspect comment indicates anything suspicious.)