That John Martin

I was just on my way home from dinner at a downtown noodle house and decided to give Steve Rubel’s first podcast a listen. I thought it was really good, and a great bite-size format. In fact I wish more podcasts were around the 10 - 15 minute length.

Steve talks a little about the Browse. Search. Subscribe! tagline that Microsoft were pushing at Gnomedex. The more I think about this the more I like it. It’s a very neat and concise way of giving regular people a point of reference as to where RSS and subscription fit into their world.

BTW, the noodles were from a cruisy little place called Izakaya (reviewed here). Highly recommended.

For an unknown reason, or maybe no reason at all, the MySQLdb Python module only supports parameter substitution using %s. That means that regardless of the datatype you are passing in, you use %s. It’s dicussed further in this DB-SIG thread. (What the author of that post says makes a lot of sense, that is, the API should either support all of the format codes, or simply use a different paramstyle, like qmark.)

I’m a little surprised at the implementation of SkypeIn, specifically at the fact that the SkypeIn number that you buy is a number with a geographic location. Apart from a number that is slightly easier to remember, I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have made it possible to simply call a generic local Skype number and then punch in a particular person’s SkypeIn number. I’m a little disappointed to be honest, it’s not nearly as neat a solution as I had envisioned.

Is there a technical or usability (more than simply having a shorter number) reason for it? Or is it simply a play to sell more numbers?