Global Nerdy

A cute image, courtesy of Reddit:

I have a confession to make: in spite of the fact that I work for an internet services company and get paid to wirte on internet-related topics all the time, I haven’t fully worked out my position on network neutrality.

Don’t get me wrong: I tend towards the pro-neutrality side. It’s just that my leaning is based not on serious study of the issue, but on a general gut feeling. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’d be willing to bet that most of you can look back on your life experiences and say that the times you wished you’d gone with your gut outnumber the times you’ve asked yourself “Why did I trust my stupid instincts?”.

What I haven’t done is work out some reasoning to either back up or disprove that gut feeling. I’m devoting way more brain cells to revamping the Tucows web sites for which I am responsible, working out new applications for the company APIs, mastering Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and working on some ideas with George. Guys like Om and the Valleywaggers — they have the time and resources to look at the problem from all angles and perhaps work out a rationale. I wish I did.

What’s partly responsible for my gut feeling is my distrust of the people who are campaigning against network neutrality, and the latest volley of spin from Hands Off the Internet, as written up in the TechDirt article Hands Off the Truth only helps to justify it. One of the Mikes from TechDirt writes:

If we get something factually wrong, we’ll admit it and correct our mistakes. Apparently, Hands Off The Internet doesn’t feel the same way. They certainly don’t allow comments on their blog. I emailed them to point out their mistakes and to suggest they make a correction — but rather than do so, they put up a second post referring to our post, without bothering to correct their factually incorrect statements. While we might have some common ground with them — though our position isn’t as extreme as theirs — it really makes you wonder why they’re so disconnected from the truth. It doesn’t make anyone any more likely to support their side. It just makes us wonder how truthful even their seemingly legitimate points are. If they play so fast and loose with the facts on such obvious points, perhaps they can’t be trusted on anything else as well.

Link

Although it may not seem obvious at first, publishing and nerds go hand in hand. Think back to college or even high school, where no yearbook or newspaper staff was complete without its nerds.

George and I did a lot of bonding on Sunday nights at Crazy Go Nuts University’s humor paper, Golden Words, where we took on every task, from brainstorming to writing to editing to typesetting to cartooning to graphic design (and I’ll give George bonus marks for also doing photography). Since it was a paper run by the school’s engineering society, we weren’t the only nerds there; we were two of many who had some kind of affinity for tech. I believe that if neither George nor I had the knack or interest in computers — or perhaps if we’d been born decades earlier, we’d have gone into journalism or publishing.

Working for a college paper in the late 1980s, we saw the transition from traditional layout (when cutting and pasting involved using actual knives and wax or rubber cement) to the introduction of newfangled things we take for granted today: desktop publishing software, laser printers and bitching about how much better it would be if we used Macs instead of PCs. Suddenly having a knack for working with computers was a much sought-after skill in the newsrooms.

Between the old school nerd-newspaper connection and the way “publishing” is increasingly moving away from paper and towards bits (see this entry in O’Reilly Radar where Tim explains why they’re having a publishing conference in Silicon Valley rather than New York), it’s no wonder that my reaction to this article on PBS’ MediaShift site — Web Focus Leads Newspapers to Hire Programmers for Editorial Staff — was “Well, it’s about time!” rather than “Huh?”

The article covers a number of people who mash up newspaper work with software development:

• Adrian Holovaty, creator of the Python-based Django framework, “the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines”, and ChicagoCrime.org, a mash-up that cross-references the city’s crime blotter with Google Maps to provide a map of where crimes took place.
• Aaron Ritchey, who functions as a “news programmer” at Tacoma’s News-Tribune, where he’s put together all manner of applications such as map mash-ups, survey generators, article formatters and reader-searchable databases.
• Jacob Kaplan-Moss of the Lawrence Journal-World, who says “If you find the right newspaper, working for a newsroom can be far better than working for any dot-com. My job is hands-down the best job I’ve ever had, in no small part because newspapers need us for their very survival. Most news organizations, although slow to adapt and late to the party, are finally realizing just how compelling web-based journalism can be, and they’re creating positions for us faster than we can fill ‘em.”

Also covered in the article are such topics as:

• Computer-assisted reporting
• Concerns programmers taking over journalists’ jobs
• What journalism school can do to prepare students for the journalism world to come
• Getting the techies working for newspapers out of the IT ghetto and into the newsroom
• Motivating newsrooms to hire programmers

As for why a programmer would want to take a job at a paper rather than a tech company, especially when the pay scales at tech companies tend to be better, Aaron Ritchey has a good answer:

At the News Tribune, I am the programmer. If I were working at a company that hires dozens of programmers, I would be just a programmer. I enjoy the extra responsibility of being the planner, the developer, and the tester.

It sounds like the reason I took my first job at a CD-ROM multimedia company, where I was a computer science grad surrounded by people who went to art school.

Link

I’m looking around for a decent content management system for the Tucows Developer site, which I plan to bring back from its rather comatose state. The site should be a place where developers who build upon or integrate with the Tucows platform of services (domain name registration, email and anti-spam, and so on) can get documentation, download client and example code, look for information on a wiki, read news and announcements and so on.

One of the enticing systems on the list is the open source CMS Joomla!, which looks half-decent. If you have any experience with Joomla!, I’d like to know what you thought about it. Let me know in the comments or email me.

In case you haven’t had a chance to check out the new fonts included with Windows Vista, I present six of them below:

It’s odd that all their names begin with the letter “c”. I am reminded of the business world urban legend that stated that Eiji Toyoda (as in “Toyota”) was told by a fortune teller that it would be good for his business if all his car models began with the letter “c” (Corolla, Corona, Camry…), which they did until recent years. Perhaps someone at Microsoft consults with the same fortune teller.

Matt Thomas points out an easy way to get these fonts without having to fork out the money for Vista and without resorting to illegal copying: by downloading the PowerPoint 2007 Viewer application (which lets you “play” PowerPoint decks without requiring you to have the full-blown version of PowerPoint 2007.) Part of the installation process is installing the six Vista fonts shown above.

Mac users: you can always download and install the viewer on the PC they make you use at work (or with Virtual PC), and then copy the files over to your Mac. Just a quick note: Matt writes that OpenType fonts — that’s what these fonts are — render quite poorly in Firefox 2. The problem should be fixed in Firefox 3.

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This article at CIO Online says that these 5 things are:

1. The Inconvenient Checkbox: Understand the Role of Requirements. “But that’s the easy item. Most developers say their CIO understands the importance of requirements. It’s what happens after that where things get … interesting.”
2. Don’t Throw It Over The Wall: The Right People Should Define the Requirements. Involve the stakeholders, not just at the beginning, but throughout the project. And they’re not the only ones — “If you don’t include us [developers and testers] on the time line generation, don’t expect us to meet the time line. If the general contractor on a building project doesn’t ask the brick mason or the electrician how much time they need, how do they expect to generate a realistic schedule? They can’t. If you don’t include developers and testers when you’re generating your time lines, don’t think you’ll hit them.”
3. Superficially Complete: Define Requirements With “Enough” Detail. “So, how do you know how much detail is ‘enough’ for a software specification? There probably isn’t a single right answer. The savvy manager will recognize or create an appropriate corporate culture—which may mean asking developers and testers, during job interviews, ‘How detailed do you prefer application requirements to be?’ Because if a CIO thinks the requirements documentation should be one way and the development team wants it another way, friction is inevitable.”
4. Working from Ignorance: Recognize that Requirements Change. “There is no cutoff point where requirements stop changing, believes developer Stefan Steurs, but many CIOs assume a point exists when everything is perfect and coding may commence. When developers, testers and users get involved in reviews, development, testing, prototyping, piloting and other activities, they feed the discovery process with new elements, some of which can be very disruptive.”
5. Carpet Yanking: Pay Attention to the People on the Front Line. “Get out of the office. Talk to people. Manage by walking around. Find out whether the software requirements are being instantiated in the real world…But don’t pretend to listen if you aren’t going to take action.”

No idea whether this will help you get a deal on an iPhone, but in the wake of Consumerist’s article with 8 tips from an ex-Verizon sales rep on getting the best deal on a phone from his former employer, an ex-Cingular rep has stepped up and provided this list:

1. Avoid contract extensions by changing your rate plan at a store. “If you want to change your rate plan, do it in a retail store instead of on-line or over the phone.”
2. Features are your friends. “You can just about get about get a rep to do anything you want if you offer to get a text package or a data package, and they can be cancelled on-line or over the phone the second you leave the store.”
3. Upgrade more often with a higher priced rate plan. “[Cingular’s] upgrade policies are similar to Verizon’s, if someone’s rate plan has been 75 dollars or higher (including features, but excluding taxes) for the last three months, they can upgrade 1/2 way through their contract.”
4. Get the rebate in the store, and at home. “Try to get the rep to give you the rebate in the store, they’ll be likely to do this if you agree to get accessories. You can get go online and print out the rebate form from www.cingular.com and send it in anyway.”
5. Make the store compete with the website. “Remember that the retail stores can match prices for the cingular website, so check those prices before you go into a store.”
6. Get credit for your mistakes. “If you go way over on your text messaging one month, go into a store and ask if they can credit you the difference if you sign up for a bigger text package. They should be able to do this, and you can always drop your text back down after you’ve gotten your credit.”
7. Use the internet for $20. “Also, regardless of what kind of phone you have a $20 mediaMAX data package will give you unlimted access to the web that will not use your minutes, whether you’re using a phone, a PDA, or even a laptop card.”

I’m still waiting for a Bell Mobility ex-employee (or hey, a current employee will do) to spill the beans…