Okay, perhaps this isn’t the Chick tract parody that Cory Doctorow and the EFF would produce, but DRM Will Ruin Your Life and Kill Your Dog [133K GIF image; some swear words] is pretty amusing…
Accept copyfighting into your heart and you shall be saved! Click the image to read the whole comic.
[P.S. In case you’re not hip to the lingo, “DRM” is short for “Digital Rights Management“.]
There’s more to being a programmer than just programming: a lot of the job involves “managing up”. I do it with Boss Ross, Boss Ross does it with his Boss Noss,
and Boss Ross’ Boss Noss does it with the Illuminati/Mason/Alien
Conspiratorial Triumvirate, often with a suitable sacrificial goat and
a PowerPoint deck.
But seriously, folks — over at the blog I get paid to write, The Farm,
I’ve started posting articles that you, a techie, can take to
management. These articles are marked with this unmistakably suit-y icon:
The first of these articles is Ajax Linkdump,
a laundry list of some recent interesting articles covering the web
programming paradigm of the moment. The last item in the list points to
an Adaptive Path white paper which explains Ajax to management,
including some answers to the all-important question: how’s it going to affect the bottom line?
Feel free to use these “Suit-Friendly” to make your case, support your
arguments or just to make it look as if you don’t spend 30 minutes doing
actual work and rest of your day looking at pictures of women with no
pants on.
Don’t say I never did nuthin’ for ya!
Here’s the job that my friend Jay Goldman is offering. Tell ’em you heard about it from the “Accordion Guy” blog.
Job Code:
DEV02Location: Toronto
Type: Full Time
Radiant Core has an immediate opening for a full-time Integrator. You
will be responsible for implementing client sites based on Architecture
and Design Documents, including HTML/CSS, images, and integration with
Radiant Core’s Foundation Website Management Platform. You feel at home
in a self-directed team environment and love producing work that
pleases both you and your clients. You are comfortable building HTML in
a text editor, fixing cross-browser/platform rendering issues, and have
some amount of programming experience in either JSP, PHP, or ASP. You
understand the importance of web standards and are often heard
muttering about validation and cross-browser compliance testing.
You will work very closely with our Architects, Developers, and
Designers as a member of our Professional Services Team, reporting
directly to our Vice President, Professional Services. You will be
responsible for implementing client websites based on Architecture and
Design Documents, as well as ongoing work to improve our processes and
client services.
standards-compliant websites (XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS2.0) without the use
of WYSIWYG editors as we hand-code our sites. We are not, at this time,
hiring implementers who are not fluent in CSS2. Please do not apply for
this position if you use tables to lay out your websites as your
application will not be considered.
Compensation
Compensation will be commensurate with your level of experience. Our
employees enjoy competitive pay, flexible hours, a prime downtown
location, and potential ownership opportunities. We are in the process
of finalizing our benefits package and stock plan.
How to Apply
Please send your resume, in an electronic format (e.g.: Microsoft Word,
PDF), along with a link to your portfolio site, to “careers at radiantcore dot com”. Please reference job code DEV02 in your
subject line.
I’ll be speaking at the blogging workshop of the CASCON 2005 Conference
which takes place next Wednesday, October 19th from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Sheraton Parkway Toronto North Hotel and Convention Centre in Richmond Hill.
Here’s the abstract for the workshop:
Many components of pervasive computing are already in place, including
collaborative and communication applications such as instant messaging,
e-mail, text messaging, and conferencing. In addition, mobile devices
are providing ubiquitous computing and communication capabilities.
Improved methods are now needed to support collaboration that goes
beyond explicit authoring, messaging and conferencing. Techniques such
as collaborative filtering (e.g., in book recommendations by Amazon),
social networking (using systems such as Orkut), and blogging, are part
of an emerging domain of social computing. We are interested in the
impact of blogging and related communication and collaboration
activities, and how social aspects such as community building can
enhance the performance of business activities.
This
workshop will provide a forum for the discussion of issues related to
the development and usability of social computing systems and
applications. Part of the workshop activity will include requirements
analysis for applications of social and pervasive computing. Speakers
from academia and industry will describe their experiences in
researching and deploying social computing applications.
Topics of
interest include: blogs and wikis, semantics, creating and building a
community, e-commerce, and information epidemics. Specifically to
blogs, the workshop will address bottom-up (grassroots, personal,
diary) blogs versus top-down (topic-oriented, corporate sponsored,
political party, etc.) blogs. Other topics to be covered will include
musicblogs, photoblogs, mobile phone blogs (moblogs), and videoblogs.
The syndication and aggregation of blogs using RSS (Really Simple
Syndication) will also be discussed.
…and here’s the abstract for my ten-minute talk…
Businesses have adopted a number of technologies that once
weren’t thought of as essential. The telephone, fax machine,
photocopier,computer, web site and high-speed network all made the leap
from niche gadgets to must-have business equipment. Twenty years ago, a
business without a fax machine would have been considered archaic;
today, abusiness without a presence on the world wide web seems equally
so.
My talk will cover the business applications of blogs and related social
software technologies for companies ranging in size from the solo
entrepreneur to the multinational corporation, based on my
own experience and observing other business blogs. We’ll take a look
at some business blogs that I find interesting, and I’ll tell
some stories of the right and wrong ways for companies to make use of
the power of blogs.
Presenting along with me will be:
Admission to the conference is free. If you’re interested, visit the registration page today!
You may want to check out these links:
My thanks to Alvin “GadgetMan” Chin and Sascha Chua for organizing the event, inviting me to participate and putting up with my general non-availablity last month!
[I originally posted this to The Farm, but thought that it might be of general enough interest to post here.]
This one got pointed out to me by Alain Chesnais, Tucows’ new Director of Product Management. Google the following phone number:
There are nearly 19,000 results for this phone number at the time of this writing. That’s a little odd.
Also of note is the fact that although 214 is the area code for central Dallas and parts of northeast Texas, the first page of Google results also reports that the number for four cafes with free wi-fi in San Francsico, Santa Cruz and Fremont, all cities hundreds of miles to the west, in California. It’s also reported as the phone number for the Jackson County, Florida Chamber of Commerce. And an inn in Labrador.
What’s happening here?
I looked at the number on Friday morning, not thinking much about it until lunch, when it occured to me that I if I ignore the phone number formatting, it becomes:
2147483647
…which should look very, very familiar to most programmers. That’s the largest value for a signed integer that can be represented in 32 bits, or MAXINT for many programming languages…and databases.
These Google results for the MAXINT phone number are most likely coming from database-generated pages (and maybe a few static pages in which someone dutifully copied the number from a database-generated source) in which the phone number was stored as a signed 32-bit integer value.
This will work for phone numbers with the following area codes…
\
and some subset of numbers in the 214 (Central Dallas) area code.
The moral of the story: don’t store phone numbers — or for that matter, any number that has no actual value as a quantitative amount, such as social security numbers, serial numbers and so on — as integers!
My friend Hector contacted me asking if I knew any Java developers
looking for a new gig. I said I didn’t, but I thought I’d post it here
and see if any of you might be interested. Here’s the basic info:
If you’re interested, drop me a line or leave a comment and I’ll send you Hector’s way.
Marc Canter, in a roundabout way, has played an important role in my career. He was behind the multimedia authoring tool Director, the first development tool I ever used after graduating from school.
Although my computer science degree and strong marks in my database courses meant that I could’ve landed a job at a bank or insurance firm, I wanted slightly more offbeat work. I ended up working for an interactive multimedia company, Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, where I used Director. Thanks to Director and Mackerel, I’ve been doing “road less travelled” techie work ever since.
(Cory Doctorow wrote a piece about Mackerel for Wired titled Burying the Fish. Although commissioned, it was never published.)
Canter’s in Accordion City this week, and sent Boss Ross some email inviting him for lunch. The most notable line in the email, which was cc’d to me:
OK dude - so how 'bout lunch on the 8th?We’re staying at the Four Seasons – wanna do dim sum or something like that?
Bring Accordian Boy.
That’s Accordion MAN, dude!
Coming along with me and Boss Ross is Tucows’ new VP of Product Development, Alain Chesnais, who in former lives worked at ATI and Alias, partially because this is the sort of meetup that he should be attending and partially as a “welcome to the herd!” activity.
It should be a fun lunch — dim sum — and I’m sure photos and a blog entry will follow.