Categories
Geek

"Year of the Developer"

2006: Year of the DeveloperFor the past couple of months, I’ve been engaged in the

annual Tucows tradition of drafting my portion of the strategic plan

for the department in which I work, Research and Innovation. This time,

we decided to go big and say that I’d make 2006 “The Year of the

Developer”. It may sound a little bit on the hokey side — perhaps it’s

a bit too much like those feel-good-but-do-nothing “mission statements”

that some companies are fond of posting in their waiting rooms — but I

think it’s a pretty good catch-all for all our plans for developers for

the coming year.

Developer

Resources

A development platform like ours is only

as good as the resources available for it. Without giving you what you

need to develop on our platform, it’s just a big lump of inert code.

Some of the new developer resources we’re working on

are:

  • Tucows

    Developer: The go-to site for

    developers who are writing code that either builds upon or integrates

    with the Tucows platform. You’ll be able to get documentation, client

    code, examples, how-tos, tips and tricks and news and announcements

    from this site.

    Tucows Developer is at developers.tucows.com.

  • Hacking: A developer

    wiki where developers can find and share information about developing

    for the Tucows platform and development in general. It is meant to

    supplement the documentation and allow people to share knowledge that

    would otherwise be lost. All sorts of people will be contributing to

    this wiki, from me to Tucows sales engineers to developers who build

    upon or integrate with the Tucows platform.

    Hacking is at hacking.developers.tucows.com.

  • API Helpdesk: We’re working to

    resurrect the old “API Helpdesk” site, which allowed developers to test

    calls to the Tucows API and see what the XML looked like. It was an

    independent project of one of our former sales engineers, and it was a

    useful tool for those trying to debug their client code or write new

    clients from scratch. We’ve got the old code now and we’re putting

    together an official version that we expect to have online in the next

    few days.

We’ll also be making fixes to

current resources, including:

  • Developer

    Documentation: I’ll be working with the

    documentation department to ensure that documentation is easily

    accessible, available in the formats that you want, complete and

    useful. We’re also working on ways to make it easy for you to know when

    the documentation has been updated.

    Developer

    documentation can be found at Tucows Developer’s

    “Documentation”

    page.

  • Discussion Forums: We’ll be working on

    a number of improvement to the Tucows Discuss forums, including better

    navigation, an improved RSS feed, a search function and keeping the

    discussions going.

    Tucows Discuss, our discussion forums site, is

    at

    discuss.tucows.com.

  • The

    Farm: The Farm is our blog devoted to software

    development in general. In addition to fixing up the layout, we’ll also

    have more book reviews, interviews with developers, downloadable

    goodies and new series on topics that you find interesting such as Ruby

    and Rails, JavaScript and AJAX, security and using web

    services.

    The Farm is at farm.tucows.com.

More

Outreach

We’ll be doing a lot more outreach this

year too. Among our plans:

  • Meeting You: You’re going to

    see me attending as many developer gathering as I can, such as the

    monthly BarCamp meetings

    in Toronto (where Tucows’ head office is). I’m also working on plans to

    hold developer meetups from local ones such as last

    year’s OPML meetup to out-of-town gatherings at various

    conferences such as the ISPcons in Baltimore (May)

    and Santa Clara (November), South by Southwest (March), the EDC Developer Relations

    Conference (February) and at least one of the upcoming Ruby

    on Rails conferences.

  • Promoting You: We’ll be

    posting interviews with developers doing interesting work — whether

    it’s on the Tucows platform, or something completely unrelated. Another

    idea we’re working on is providing free banner ads on The Farm to developers with

    weblogs or sites that link to us or who develop applications that build

    on or integrate with the Tucows

    platform.

  • Rewarding You: Last year, we

    started giving small gifts — not just Tucows merch, but Amazon.com

    gift certificates and such — to developers who went “above and beyond

    the call of duty” in developing applications or libraries or writing

    documentation or tips for the Tucows platform. We’ll be doing more of

    that this year, as well as sponsoring development contests with even

    bigger prizes.

When is All This Taking

Place?

We’re going to borrow some tricks from the

Agile Development crowd and start right now, implementing “Year of the

Developer” as an ongoing initiative. Over the next few weeks, you

should see the start of this year-long process and we hope you’ll like

the results.

If you have any comments or suggestions

for “Year of the Developer”, we’d love to hear them. Leave a note in

the comments, or send me

e-mail!

Categories
Uncategorized

"Achewood" on Hippie Food

This question is always burning in my mind whenever one of my hippie friends tries to feed me their latest meat-and-dairy-free organic creation or when I’ve been to the “Kind Kitchen” at the Om Festival:


Click the image to see the full comic.

Categories
In the News

Murder By Numbers, Part One

In the comments to the entry titled The Boxing Day Shooting, an anonymous commenter pointed me to a Globe and Mail article, Do We Need a Boston Miracle?  

The article ends with a table of the murder rates for a number of North American cities. Before I show it to you, let me first explain what is meant by the term “murder rate”.

“Murder Rate” Does Not Mean “Number of Murders”!

Many people misuse the term “murder rate” or “homicide rate” — they often use it when speaking of the number of people who have been murdered. The word rate implies a ratio, which is a mathematical term for a relationship between at least two numbers. For example, let’s take the recipe for one of the simplest cocktails out there: the screwdriver. Most bartender’s manuals recommend 2-to-1 ratio of orange juice to vodka, which means that for every 2 ounces of orange juice, you use 1 once of vodka. Want to use up a 10-ounce can of orange juice? Then you need 5 ounces of vodka handy. Got a pint of vodka? Then you’ll need a quart of OJ. Want a stiffer drink? Change the ratio of orange juice to vodka to 1-to-1. Want something a little less boozy? Make the ratio 3-to-1.

The murder rate is also a ratio: it’s a ratio of the number of murders in a given area to the population of that area. This number is a little more meaningful than just the number of murders in an area alone. Think about it this way: suppose a village of 500 people experiences 50 murders in a year. That’s a big chunk of the village: the ratio of murdered people to population is 1 to 10, which can also be expressed as “1:10” or “10 percent”. You could rightfully claim that the town has been decimated (the colloquial use of the term “decimated” is “killed a substantial amount”; the original meaning was “killed one-tenth”). Now imagine a city of 5 million people experiencing 50 murders in a year. That city’s ratio of people murdered to population rate is 1 to 100,000, or “1:100,000” or “one-thousandth of one percent”.

Since murder ratios (as well as other crime rates) are typically small numbers — usually some teeny fraction of one percent — they are typically expressed in terms of murders per 100,000 people; this is called the murder rate. The city of 5 million with 50 murders in a year that I mentioned in the previous paragraph has a murder rate of 1 (that is, one person for every 100,000 was murdered). The village of 500 with the same number of murders has a murder rate of 10,000!

Recent Murder Rates

United States

To give you an idea of what murder rate numbers are typically like, take a look at this table of murder rates in the US spanning the years 2001 through 2004 (taken from this page). Remember, this is a chart of murder rates, meaning that the numbers here are murders per 100,000 people.

Table 1: Murder Rates for Various Regions in the U.S., 2001 – 2004
Region 2001 2002 2003 2004
South 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.6
West 5.5 5.7 5.7 5.7
Midwest 5.3 5.1 4.9 4.7
Northeast 4.2 4.1 4.2 4.2
National average 5.6 5.6 5.7 5.8

A little quick mental math reveals that the average murder rate for the entire United States for this period is 5.6.

Canada

Let’s look at the murder rates for the provinces and territories of Canada for the years 2000 through 2004 (data from Statistics Canada):

Table 2: Murder Rates for Provinces and Territories in Canada, 2000 – 2004
Province/Territory 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004
  murders per 100,000 population
Canada 1.78 1.78 1.86 1.73 1.95
Newfoundland and Labrador 1.14 0.19 0.39 0.96 0.39
Prince Edward Island 2.20 1.46 0.73 0.73 0.00
Nova Scotia 1.61 0.97 0.96 0.85 1.39
New Brunswick 1.33 1.07 1.20 1.07 0.93
Quebec 2.04 1.89 1.58 1.32 1.47
Ontario 1.34 1.43 1.47 1.45 1.51
Manitoba 2.61 2.95 3.12 3.70 4.27
Saskatchewan 2.58 2.70 2.71 4.12 3.92
Alberta 1.96 2.29 2.25 2.03 2.69
British Columbia 2.10 2.06 3.06 2.26 2.67
Yukon Territory 6.57 3.32 0.00 3.27 22.43
Northwest Territories 2.47 9.80 9.64 9.48 9.34
Nunavut 10.91 10.67 6.96 10.29 13.49

Wow — when people said that it was cold in the Territories, I thought they were only talking about the temperature! More quick math reveals that the average murder rate across Canada for this period is 1.82.

The World’s Most Murderous Places

Let’s go outside the relatively safe bubble of North America and look at the ten countries with the highest murder rates in the period spanning 1998 – 2000 (data from NationMaster.com, which got its info from the 7th United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems):

Table 3: Murder Rates in the Top Ten Countries, 1998 – 2000
Country Murder Rate
(Murders per 100,000 population)
Colombia 61.8
South Africa 49.6
Jamaica 32.4
Venezuela 31.6
Russia 20.1
Mexico 13.0
Estonia 10.7
Latvia 10.4
Lithuania 10.3
Belarus 9.8

2004 Murder Rates for Various North American Cities

Here are the 2004 murder rates for various American and Canadian cities, a listed in the Globe and Mail article. I’ve highlighted Toronto in red.

Table 4: Murder Rates for Various North American Cities, 2004
City 2004 Murder Rate
(Murders per 100,000 population)
Montreal 1.7
Toronto 1.8
Vancouver 2.6
Boston 2.6
Edmonton 3.4
Winnipeg 4.9
New York 5
Dallas 7.3
San Francisco 7.3
Washington 7.9
Houston 8.0
Los Angeles 8.6
Detroit 10.0
Baltimore 12.5
New Orleans 25.5

A minute’s worth of spreadsheet work makes this data easier to visualize (click the graph below to see it at full size):

Graph 1: Murder Rates for Various North American Cities, 2004


I’ve got to get to work, so I’ll stop here and write more later. In the meantime, if you’ve got anything to say about these statistics or the current situation in Toronto, please feel free to do so in the comments.

Categories
Uncategorized

Drum Machine

To

help you get started with what is probably your first day of work this

year (at least in North America, anyway), here’s a cute Flash animation

titled Drum Machine [3.0MB; Flash file]. Enjoy!

Categories
Music

A Very Good Question, Indeed.

Over at the blog Making Light, Patrick Neilsen Hayden asks: “Why is there an entire web page devoted to Iron Maiden album covers with Spongebob Squarepants inserted into them?”

“The starfish came / across the sea / he brought us pain / and mi-ser-yyy…”

Categories
Music

Chanukah, Night Eight: Give the Jew Girl Toys

I haven’t yet seen Sarah Silverman’s film Jesus is Magic [the site’s audio, which plays automatically, is NOT SAFE FOR WORK!]  a “concert film” featuring her incredibly offenseively funny stand-up comedy act interspersed with her musical numbers, but I’ve heard good things about them. As the closing goodie for the final night of Chanukah, here’s Sarah’s plea to Santa Claus: a song called Give the Jew Girl Toys [3.3MB, MP3]

Happy Chanukah, and Happy New Year as well!

Categories
Uncategorized

Manigong Bagong Taon!

That’s “Happy New Year!” in Tagalog.

I wrote this post hours before midnight and set it to automatically appear at the start of the new year. I’ll at my friend Liz’s house party at midnight, so please accept these in absentia wishes. Have a good one!