Blog Posts in "simon willison"

Simon Willison on vim

Posted at 09:57:44 on Mon, May 12th 2008 by graham
in: programming python quotes simon willison vim

Here:

I’d use these [tips on using Python with vim] if I wasn’t still scarred from the time vim encrypted my file instead of saving it because I had caps lock on by mistake.

Bless.

The future is probably weirder than we can imagine

Posted at 19:14:22 on Sun, July 08th 2007 by graham
in: charlie stross fiction futurology links simon willison snippets

Charlie Stross has a written a nice piece illustrating the difficulty of positing plausible possible futures.

Unpacking the Zeitgeist (via Simon Willison):

... it is making my head hurt because there are too many prior assumptions nested recursively inside it to unpack easily.

...

There are thirty years' worth of future shock condensed into this one news item. And the reason I'm writing about it is that I don't think I could get away with putting such an conceptually overloaded incident into one of my novels; it would take too much set-up and require so much infodumping that many readers would lose interest.

Finally

Posted at 16:47:41 on Fri, April 27th 2007 by graham
in: django django_openidconsumer new site novel-the-second openid python simon willison writing

Looks like we're up-and-running. Bon. The DNS propogation took longer than I expected, partly because the update didn't go out until 9:30 GMT, which I'd managed to not notice. Anyway, seems like everything works (for the time being at least), so I'll call it a win.

There are still a couple of tweaks that I need to make, but they're mostly on the back end, so you won't see them. For the most part though, Django handles things admirably, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Doing the development work for this site - and in turn learning how to use Django - has been a lot of fun, so I'm going to keep playing with it; you might find you see a lot more tech-oriented posts on here now as a result.

That's not to say, however, that I'm not still making things up; on the contrary, I'm steeling myself to start on Novel-the-second in the very near future (probably next week or the week after). It's just a case of getting all if my creative ducks in a row (it's the shooting them part that worries me). I've got plenty of ideas and plenty more to come but I can't help feeling that if I don't start now one of two things is going to happen:

  1. I'll spend all my time world-building and writing down ideas and not actually write any prose or
  2. Someone else will write the story before I do.

And now I need to fiddle with my Python.

[Edit]

Before I forget, props must go to Simon Willison , whose blog introduced me to Django (he co-created it) and whose django_openidconsumer library I used as a replacement my own, less comprehensive OpenID consumer implementation. Many thanks Simon.

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Graham Binns is a writer, photographer, musician and software developer from Lancaster, England, with far too much hair, a penchant for odd t-shirts and a magnificent hat. He has been making things up for as long as he can remember and has been making code work for long enough to make a living from it.

He has written one novel, which is in the process of composting, and is working remembering how to write before embarking on a second. In the meantime, he photographs things, since it's easier not to have to make the world up in his head all of the time.

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