10 Signs That Telecommuting Isn’t for You. Among the signs listed in this TechRepublic article from January: you fall prey to distractions, you can’t sustain enough proactive contact with the office, you can’t function without a lot of structure, you hate missing out on collaborative opportunities and your manager can’t or won’t manage remotely. You can read the article either on its web page or download the PDF.
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StackOverflow.com
If you’re a reader of Coding Horror — and if you’re a programmer or aspire to become one, you should be — you’re probably aware that its author Jeff Atwood recently left his job to work on his own projects. Today he announced what one of those projects is: StackOverflow.com, a joint effort with Joel “Joel on Software” Spolsky.
Here’s his description of StackOverflow.com:
So what is stackoverflow?
From day one, my blog has been about putting helpful information out into the world. I never had any particular aspirations for this blog to become what it is today; I’m humbled and gratified by its amazing success. It has quite literally changed my life. Blogs are fantastic resources, but as much as I might encourage my fellow programmers to blog, not everyone has the time or inclination to start a blog. There’s far too much great programming information trapped in forums, buried in online help, or hidden away in books that nobody buys any more. We’d like to unlock all that. Let’s create something that makes it easy to participate, and put it online in a form that is trivially easy to find.
Are you familiar with the movie pitch formula?
Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
Want to know more? They’ve recorded a podcast [MP3, 8.32MB, 46 minutes, 12 seconds] in which they describe their vision for StackOverflow.com.
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code.flickr Now Open!
The folks at Flickr have announced the opening of code.flickr, which bills itself as “Your one-stop shop for information, gossip and discussion with the Flickr developer community”. Among other things, you’ll find the Flickr DevBlog, browse their open source code either via the ticket tracker or their public SVN repository, hack the Uploadr, and discuss the Flickr API in the forums.
And to think that it’s Apple that gets associated with the term “Reality Distortion Field”: here’s an internal Microsoft video featuring a faux Bruce Springsteen band singing about how the Vista sales team “saw lots of sales” can expect to see even more now that SP1 is out.
Surprisingly, it’s not the most painful Windows-related musical number in a Microsoft promo video. That honour belongs to “I’m using W-w-windows W-w-windows three-eighty-six” rap in this video (the musical number starts at around 2:19):
While this video wasn’t made by Microsoft and doesn’t have any music, it does feature Windows, cheese and Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston. It’s a Windows 95 Guide and it’s groan-a-riffic (sample dialogue: one of Aniston’s line is “Taskbar? Is that anything like a Snickers bar?”).
Here’s part one:
and here’s part two:
Palestinian Girls, Dating and the Mobile Phone: danah boyd points to a paper titled Playing With Fire: On the domestication of the mobile phone among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel [PDF, 92K]. It looks at how mobile phone alters social dynamics, relationships, and the construction of gender in Palestine, where “boys give their girlfriends phones for the express purpose of being able to communicate with them in a semi-private manner without the physical proximity that would be frowned on.” An interesting look at how technology plays a role in people’s lives in unexpected ways.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
When I moved to my current position as Nerd Wrangler at b5media, I arrived to discover that the computer waiting for me was a Toshiba P200, a 17″ beast of a laptop that I’ve named “The Coffee Table”. This is the first time in about 5 years that I’ve worked with Windows as my primary operating system, and after a month in Vista, my feelings about operating systems are pretty much summarized by the picture below:
More on my experiences in a later post.
[Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.]