Global Nerdy

For you developers out there: some of the most interesting application development links I found today…

• Security and Obscurity [DMiessler.com]: Many of us are familiar with a concept know as Security by Obscurity. The term has quite negative connotations within the security community — often for the wrong reasons. There’s little debate about whether security by obscurity is bad; this is true because it means the secret being hidden is the key to the entire system’s security. Obscurity itself, however, when added to a system that already has decent controls in place, is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, when done right, obscurity can be a strong addition to an overall approach.
• Ruining the User Experience [A List Apart]: AJAX can be used to make wonderful web applications, but for people without JavaScript (especially those using mobile phones), AJAX means unusable sites. Aaron Gustafson suggests that site designers should consider these levels of user need:
  1. No frills.
  2. Make it pretty.
  3. Make it sing.
• Applied Web Heresies [Phil Windley’s Technometria]: Phil Windley’s notes from the ETech 2007 tutorial by Avi Bryant, Applied Web Heresies, in which Avi invites the audience to join in an exercise in coding a Seaside-like web app framework. I met Avi at DemoCamp 5, where he demoed DabbleDB, a nifty little app that takes spreadsheets misused as databases and converts them into proper database-driven applications.
• How to Beat Google, Part 1 [Skrentablog]: “Grow a spine people! You have a giant growing market with just one dominant competitor, not even any real #2. You’re going to do clean-tech energy saving software to shut off lightbulbs in high-rises instead? Pfft. Get a stick and try to knock G’s crown off.”
• 7 Signs Your Project Will Never Make it to Production [Rail Spikes]: An article from a Ruby on Rails group blog where my friend Luke Francl is a contributor. The seven signs, according to Ben Moore, are:
  1. The client doesn’t have any wireframes or UI mockups.
  2. The client would rather describe the app over the phone than with a document.
  3. Creating the app fulfills a personal mission for the client.
  4. The client asks: “Are you interested in working for equity?”
  5. After a payment or two, the client asks you to reduce your rate.
  6. The client says “I’m going to lean on you heavily to tell me what this application should do.”
  7. The client doesn’t have a customer who wants to use the app before it’s built.

Back in October, when I last wrote about flash drives — storage that your computer “thinks” is a hard drive but uses persistent RAM circuitry instead of spinning magnetic platters — the largest available one was 32GB, a little more than half the capacity of the hard drive on my main computer, a 12″ 1.33GHz G4 Aluminum PowerBook. Samsung have doubled the size of their previous offering and now have a model that packs 64GB in the same 1.8″ enclosure.

At 64GB, Samsung’s flash drive is now at the “minimum reasonable size” for a hard drive in a new machine (for “minimum reasonable size”, I use the smallest hard drive included with a current-model Apple laptop as my guide; Apple’s always been stingy with the hard drive capacity).

The advantages of Samsung’s 64GB solid-state drive over an 80GB traditional platters-and-heads drive are:

• 4 times the read speed
• More than 6 times the write speed
• 75% less weight
• 1/3 to 1/15th the power consumption
• More resistant to impact

For more details, see the specs at the bottom of their press release.

It’s shaping up to be a long week in the blogosphere, and it’s only Tuesday! What with apologies for bad ideas, ungentlemanly non-apologies, and Dave Winer and Nick Denton joining forces to form a great moral vacuum (So THAT’s where the sucking sound is coming from!), expect Techmeme and just about every other techie blog out there to participate in the online discussion of what is and isn’t appropriate online behaviour.

In the interest of keeping things a little less noisy on this blog, I’m going to post any opinion about Kathy Sierra’s situation on my personal blog, starting with this entry: The Star Trek “Nazi Planet” Episode, MeanKids.org and Kathy Sierra.

Barely minutes after I dashed off a quick post about how having a web presence can greatly improve your job prospects in the high-tech world, I found out about Kathy “Creating Passionate Users” Sierra’s article that reminds us of the downside of a web presence, especially if you’re a woman.

She writes:

As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I’m not. I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I’ve been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that’s not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs… blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you’ve probably heard of.

What follows is her description of some very nasty threats made against her, and as a result, she’s decided to cut back on blogging, cancel her much-anticipated appearances at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference and call the police (and with good cause: remember, death threats are illegal, and hey, don’t dismiss ’em until you get one yourself).

I can only have the vaguest understanding of what it feels like to get a death threat. The warning that I got over the phone from the creepy guy from Quick Boys Moving and Storage — “Remove that comment. That’s all I’m going to say” — was somewhat unnerving. I imagine that getting death threats and seeing Photoshopped photos of yourself in gags is far, far worse.

I am reminded of a line from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash — the one about the sexism in high-tech circles being a particularly bad case, since male techies often consider themselves “too smart to be sexist”.

I encourage all of you to speak out against these evil and illegal actions and do what you can to make sure stuff like this doesn’t happen again. And, if you’ve got the time and inclination, please leave a note of support over at Kathy’s blog.

Hang in there, Kathy. We’re all looking forward to your return.

Those of you who’ve been following my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, might recall a posting from way back in 2004 in which I wrote about my appearance in an article in the Globe and Mail titled Net Diarists Blog Their Way to a Job. The article also covered how the blogs helped the charming, telegenic and tech-savvy Amber Macarthur land her job. For reasons I will never fathom (but for which I am grateful), they used my picture for the article instead of hers.

The general gist of that article from a couple of years ago was that having a blog can help build your presence on the web, which in turn can help get you a job. Today, a ComputerWorld article posted today takes it to the next step: it says that not having a web presence can actually hurt your job search.

In a 2006 survey by executive search firm ExecuNet in Norwalk, Conn., 77 of 100 recruiters said they use search engines to check out job candidates. In a CareerBuilder.com survey of 1,150 hiring managers last year, one in four said they use Internet search engines to research potential employees. One in 10 said they also use social networking sites to screen candidates. In fact, according to Search Engine Watch, there are 25 million to 50 million proper-name searches performed each day.

In today’s job market, turning up missing on the Web may not be a fatal flaw, and it’s probably better than having a search result in a photo of you in a hula skirt. But over time, the lack of a Web presence — particularly for IT professionals — may well turn from a neutral to a negative, says Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems Inc.

“Particularly because we’re a core technology provider, if someone came looking for a senior-level job and had left no mark on the Internet, I’d see that as a big negative,” he says.

The article provides these tips for boosting your presence on the web:

1. Know where people look. Do a “vanity search” on your name on search engines and blog search tools like Technorati. See what the first three to five pages of results have to say about you.
2. Start a blog. Blogs, when used well are SEO goldmines as they often are:
   • Heavy on the text
   • Rich in links
   • Updated often
   • Well-formatted (from an HTML point of view)
3. Join the open source community.
4. Build a web page.
5. Create a web profile.

Andy Beal added another four tips to the list:

1. Buy your domain name. “Even if you don’t do a lot with it, you should own a domain name that matches (as close as possible) your name. Your online brand is important, and guess what, despite how many employers you may ultimately have, you’ll likely keep that same name for life!”
2. Understand your Google profile. “Most potential employers are going to use Google, so you may as well focus on the search results there. What’s being said about you, what pages are indexed? Don’t just look at stuff that is about you, look at listings that are about someone with the same name, yet maybe negative. You should be prepared to explain that the person convicted for 3 counts of armed robbery, is not actually you.”
3. Own your brand. “When someone searches for your name, you should try and make sure you have as much control over what they see, as possible. Set up a Flickr account, LinkedIn profile, blog, user-group profile, etc.”
4. Destroy the evidence. Ok, so while most stuff you put online is there for eternity, that doesn’t mean you can’t try some damage control. “That blog post you uploaded – the one where you went on an all night drinking binge and broke into the local Krispy Kreme – remove it! While it may still exist somewhere on the web, it is less likely to show up in the Google search results, if you’ve removed it from your own blog/social network.”

Andy also points to an article of his from last year that might come in handy: Online Reputation Monitoring & Management Beginners Guide.

A couple of recent articles — Mike Arrington’s Print Media Demise, Cont. and Susan Mernit’s recent blog post, The pile on to declare print (newspapers) dead, reminded me of a story I recently heard from my friend Chandra, who teaches what you might call an “English for business” course at a community college in Toronto.

She posed this question to her class: “Suppose your company was facing some negative publicity in the papers. What would you do?”

Here students that there’d be nothing to worry about. The general gist was that nobody gets their news from newspapers anymore.

She then changed her question slightly. “Okay then,” she said, “what if the bad publicity came from blogs?”

The response this time was different. Bad press in the blogosphere? Okay, now you’ve given us something to worry about.