My business has been taking me into elevator machine rooms recently. It’s amazing how far the technology has come.
These elevator drive motors are circa 1938, and still work fine.
These drive motors are new, and a fraction of the others’ size. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Noble Open Source*
Contribute day and long night
Landlord, Grocer scoff.
* I know I should say Free Software, but it ruined the meter.
Frank Wiles discusses hiring programmers.
- Finding good programmers is hard in any language. And that a good programmer can be as effective as 5-10 average programmers.
…
- You don’t need to hire an expert in language X, you can and should look for expert programmers that are willing to learn language X. An expert can easily cross over from being a novice in any language in a matter of a few weeks.
More:
What is an expert programmer?
Experience is key, but not necessarily in ways you might imagine. Time in the saddle, with a particular language is not as important as diversity of experience. Someone who has worked in several disparate industries, a generalist, is often a much better developer than one who has spent years in the same industry. There are exceptions to this, but in general I have found this to be the case.
If hiring and managing software developers is something you do, the article is well worth the read.
Via Slashdot
I was looking for a years-old appointment and realized I’ve been using a PDA for ten years now. My data goes back to 1997. (I think I’m on my fourth PDA, but I’ve lost count.)
It was a strange realization on a few levels.
It was pretty cool seeing appointments from ten years ago. What was I doing then? What was I working on? Who was I hanging with?
It was strange suddenly looking into my life ten years ago.
It was strange, too, seeing things that I have no idea today what they were (or meant).
Guy Kawasaki, web entrepreneur:
During the dot-com bubble, you needed $5 million to do stupid ideas. Now you can do stupid ideas for 12 grand.
Doing some exploratory work for a VoIP application, I bought this nifty LinkSYS VoIP adapter. But I find that adapter only knows how to find Vonage. The firmware is programmed that way. Easy for Vonage customers, useless to us.
But it seemed to be a reasonable business decision for LinkSys. Sign on with a big player.
Or is it? Vonage recently lost a lawsuit from Verizon, so their future is uncertain.
That makes all these boxes useless. (Or will someone find a creative way to redeem them?)
I threw away a bunch of old software today.
I threw away the CD-ROMs but kept the (plain) sleeves. Ironic, that.
Reminds me of a story I heard: Post-World War II Germany’s hyper-inflation, where someone stole a wheelbarrow full of cash. They stole the wheelbarrow, but dumped the cash.
I’d say this software’s hyper-deflation is about equivalent. (Not to make light of that country’s hardship.)
Software has a life.
I’m disabling comments on both new posts and old ones.
Comment spam is truly pernicious.
Please e-mail me if you have a comment! I’m glad to hear from you.
Not man as in manly/male, but manual. You know, user’s guide.
Here are a few on-line “man-page” repositories that are pretty useful. I just came across SoftwarePlug.com now, and it looks like a best-of-breed resource. Man and info pages for a slew of operating systems, and not a gooogle ad in sight.
Here’s a picture from my old blog.
Even concrete pipe sections have URL’s on them now. Archeologists will find these thousands of years from now.
