Impromptus

I was watching a series of piped processes execute, and then I noticed that bzcat, route_btoa, and my python process, which were all chained up in a pipe together, were all executing on separate processors.
This is important! This means something! I just wrote parallel code with an almost perfect speedup BY ACCIDENT!

Another Socratic Dialogue in the form of an IM cut-and-paste:

Peter
New internet startup idea – build AND HOST (all caps == the new part) an e-learning tool that sucks less than Blackboard
Jesse
sounds good
Peter
Everyone I know hates Blackboard
Peter
And there’s a very natural revenue model if you are hosting it yourself
Peter
You are, however, kind of trying to squeeze [...]