October 2005 Archives
For anyone who attended the Atlantics 25 year reunion gigs in Bellingham in August (or wishes they had), Bill Tootell sent some pictures which I've put online over on .Mac.
I particularly like this shot of me playing the 5-string.
Over at BoingBoing, Cory notes that today was the ending of Daylight Savings Time in much of the US.
You can imagine what the effect of changes in DST dates has on the authors of software that has to keep track of these things (like clocks that automatically switch). Not all places switch on the same dates. As more and more people travel the world with devices that track times and dates, the complexities of this apparently simple system get more exposed and more difficult to deal with.
At a recent meeting of the CalConnect calendaring consortium I was astounded to learn that there is no official body that tracks timezone data around the world. The best information is in the tz database ( http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm ) which is maintained, as I understand it, on a completely voluntary basis by Arthur David Olson, a systems administrator at NIH, for whom this is not even his regular day job. This database is apparently the basis used by almost all operating systems and software around the world to keep track of timezone information. And there are some wacky things to keep track of - for instance, Myanmar is +6.5 hours from UTC, and Nepal is +5:45 hours!
Reading through the comments in the tz files is fascinating - for instance:
# From Paul Eggert (2005-07-26):
# We have wildly conflicting information about Mongolia's time zones.
# Bill Bonnet (2005-05-19) reports that the US Embassy in Ulaanbaatar says
# there is only one time zone and that DST is observed, citing Microsoft
# Windows XP as the source. Risto Nykanen (2005-05-16) reports that
# travelmongolia.org says there are two time zones (UTC+7, UTC+8) with no DST.
# Oscar van Vlijmen (2005-05-20) reports that the Mongolian Embassy in
# Washington, DC says there are two time zones, with DST observed.
# He also found
# http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/index.php?subaction=showcomments&id=1111634894&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&
# which also says that there is DST, and which has a comment by "Toddius"
# (2005-03-31 06:05 +0700) saying "Mongolia actually has 3.5 time zones.
# The West (OLGII) is +7 GMT, most of the country is ULAT is +8 GMT
# and some Eastern provinces are +9 GMT but Sukhbaatar Aimag is SUHK +8.5 GMT.
# The SUKH timezone is new this year, it is one of the few things the
# parliament passed during the tumultuous winter session."
# For now, let's ignore this information, until we have more confirmation.
There are now some efforts to get IANA to maintain an official timezone registry for the Internet, but I don't know if it'll get anywhere.
It's a wacky world we live in.
I keep forgetting about the fabulous Colloquia series at our Computer Science and Engineering department. I'm really kicking myself for having missed a couple of recent ones, like Patrick Baudisch (Microsoft) on Making Sense on Small Screens and Jeff Dean (Google) on BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System. Fortunately, both of those are available on archived video and audio.
There are a bunch of good ones still to come, including:
Gail Murphy (University of British Columbia)
The Emergent Structure of Software Development Tasks
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Colloquium
Tony Hey (Microsoft)
Cyberinfrastrucure for E-science
Tuesday, November 8, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Colloquium
Lenhart Schubert (University of Rochester)
Turing's Dream and the Knowledge Challenge
Thursday, November 10, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Turing Center Distinguished Lecture Series
Mary Czerwinski (Microsoft)
From Scatterbrained to Focused: User Interface Support for Today's Crazed Information Worker
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Colloquium
I'm going to try to attend more regularly.
I didn't go to the big Educuase conference this year, because I've travelled a bunch this fall and Orlando is a long way to go in hurricane season just to be with 7,000 of my closest friends.
So I was glad that Lisa Dusseault blogged the CalDAV panel over on the OSAF blog - this is getting real, folks!
Last week I was at Educause for a couple days, part of a panel o CalDAV implementors. I demonstrated Chandler, and indirectly Cosmo too, to show the university IT audience that CalDAV is real and gaining adoption. François Perrault of Oracle did the first demo, showing Outlook with Oracle’s connected installed client-side, putting a calendar onto the Oracle server (not using CalDAV). But then he showed Lightning could pull down that calendar and view it using CalDAV, and add/change events.
For my part of the demo, I brought up Chandler (m6) with a calendar that had previously been pulled from a Cosmo (0.2.1) server and explained this. Then I subscribed to François’s calendar on an Oracle server, and it showed up in a different colour. Finally I subscribed to a third calendar on an RPI version of UW Calendar, adding a third set of events displaying along with the first two calendars. Except for a mysterious glitch where subscribing to the Oracle calendar didn’t work the first or second attempt but did work on the third attempt, it all went rather well.
The ever-thinking Joel Spolsky and his crew at Fog Creek Software are starting what sounds like an innovative management training program - if you're interested in management at a technology company, and in living in New York City, this could be worth checking out:
Thus: how do we develop the next generation of managers? We don't really want to hire MBAs, because there's too much evidence that MBAs substitute book-learnin' for common sense or experience. We'd much rather hire someone who created and ran a profitable lemonade stand than someone who has taken two years of finance courses at Harvard, especially since the Harvard MBA is going to think he knows a lot more than he really does.
Our latest thinking is just to train a new generation of leaders from the ground up.
To that end, today we're launching an experimental new program, the Fog Creek Software Management Training Program. That's a terrible name, but bear with me!
It's an entry level program, meaning, significant work experience is not required. A college degree is a big plus. The program will last about three years. It will provide experience working in all aspects of software development except for the actual coding itself, along with some formal training.
It's a job. It includes a great starting salary, restricted stock in Fog Creek Software, and the full raft of benefits, from Aeron chairs to free lunch. You don't have to be a programmer or a CS major, although you do have to be ridiculously smart and you have to be the kind of person who gets things done.
The key component of this program is rotating through just about every job at Fog Creek Software. We'll rotate trainees through about ten different jobs over the course of three years:
* Project Management
* Tech Support
* Inside Sales
* Software Testing
* Usability Testing
* Software Design
* Program Management
* Beta Management
* Marketing
* Build Management
...sometimes all on the same day! The theory is that nothing can better prepare you for leading a high tech company than gaining significant, substantial experience with everything a high tech company does, under the mentorship of experienced veterans.
To supplement that, we'll add a component of formal training. There will be some coursework at nearby colleges, long lists of reading material, intensive offsite training programs, and we'll send you to industry conferences that we think are particularly valuable.
Unlike full-time MBA programs, you won't have to pay $120,000 in tuition and $200,000 in foregone salary. You'll be earning money and if Fog Creek does well your stock may be worth something. Unlike management consulting, you won't have to work 18 hour days and fly to some small town in the midwest every Monday morning and live out of a suitcase in a hotel.
University of Washington President Mark Emmert gave his annual address to the UW community yesterday. I was very impressed both with the substance of the address - where he didn't shrink from addressing real issues and problems facing the University, and with his relaxed and engaging style.
There are multiple formats of streaming video and an mp3 audio file of the address available on the President's page.
Media Companies Go Too Far in Curbing Consumers' Activities by Walter Mossberg.
The beauty of digital media is the flexibility, and that flexibility shouldn't be destroyed for honest consumers just because the companies that sell them have a theft problem caused by a minority of people.
Instead of using DRM to stop some individual from copying a song to give to her brother, the industry should be focusing on ways to use DRM to stop the serious pirates -- people who upload massive quantities of music and videos to so-called file-sharing sites, or factories in China that churn out millions of pirate CDs and DVDs.
Cool - hope it helps.
There's a new CBS poll that shows that 51% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form. Hoo boy.
But apparently, the makers of Guiness beer feel differently - check out this commercial.
I'm gonna hoist one to the Irish brewers tonight!
I'm glad to see that the Association of American Publishers can be just as determinedly nearsighted in their approach to the Internet as the RIAA and MPAA.
Woman arranges a book shop display
Google reckons its plans will raise awareness and sales of books
Internet search engine Google is being sued by a group of book publishers over plans to put millions of titles online.
The Association of American Publishers, which includes firms such as Penguin, has filed a suit in New York claiming Google will infringe their copyrights.
As part of its Print Library Project, Google plans to index and scan millions of books from five major libraries.
Google countered that the lawsuit was "short sighted", claiming its idea will lift exposure and demand for books.
I finally got around to watching Dick Hardt's keynote on Identity 2.0 from the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in August.
Dick's brilliant presentation style, which violates every rule you ever heard about how to use presentation software, kept me totally engaged at 6:00 am while watching a fifteen minute presentation on what is, let's face it, not the most scintillating of topics.
Dick credits Lawrence Lessig for inspiration on the style, but I think it's a direct descendant of Bob Dylan's brilliant performance of Subterranean Homesick Blues at the beginning of Don't Look Back.
It's a whirlwind ride that does a great job of outlining why digital identity management really is a big issue that is extremely important and has a lot of work remaining to be done. Check it out!
The Open Source Applications Foundation has some paid internship openings - these are great, smart people doing very interesting work, located in the oh-so-hip South of Market area of San Francisco.
If you decide to contact them, tell 'em you saw it here.
From the OSAF Blog:
Our last summer intern left last week and it’s noticeably quieter around here. Anthony, Arel, Brendan and Olivier, we miss you. We were glad you helped us out this summer.
We did figure out that we can continue to handle a few interns and would love to have interns year-round, not just in the summer. Some schools allow internships in fall or winter but we’re not sure which. So if you’re interested in an internship at OSAF drop a line to jobs@osafoundation.org even if we don’t have a posting up. Let us know what period you’d be interested in and include a resume and references if you have some. Some highlights of an internship here:
* Paid
* Project-oriented — e.g. Olivier developed a set of performance test suites.
* If you don’t have much experience, we might be able to handle that anyway, particularly in QA.
* We do Python, Java and WebUI development work as well as QA and IT (our biggest needs are QA/IT) so there’s opportunities for a range of skills and interests.
* Open source means that your work isn’t lost to you at the end of the internship.
* Cool office, people and location.
While it was an awful season for our Seattle Mariners, Mo and I have been enjoying watching the playoffs this week. Mo was totally outraged by the bizarre ending to Thursday night's White Sox - Angels game, protesting with all of the moral outrage a seven year old is capable of.
It's a little bittersweet to see all of the former Mariners in the playoffs, including some we didn't even really get to know, like Scott Podsednik and John Mabry.
But it sure was nice to see Freddy Garcia pitch a great game for the White Sox tonight, and I love the way the Sox have had three games in a row with the starter going the whole game - apparently it's the first time that's happened in the postseason since 1973.
Today Mo told me that he couldn't wait till his next baseball season starts - now that's what a dad loves to hear!
Fredric Paul has a good piece in TechWeb titled Why Everyone Hates The Music Industry, as a response to a Forrester Research study titled Music Lessons: Is Your Industry At Risk?. One question I have is whether we should trust research opinions about record companies from research companies that charge US$249 for an eighteen page report. Anyway, Fredric's opinion piece is worth a look:
the record companies' real problem is that everyone hates them.
He Hate Me
Musicians hate them for habitually sucking the creativity out of the music and the profits from the CD sales. Usually they do it legally, if not morally, but all too often naïve musicians with few options end up swindled out of their rightful earnings.
And music lovers—don't call us consumers; music can't be consumed—see the record companies as greedy, clueless profiteers quick to jack up prices while placing limits on what music gets released and how you can listen to it.
Record companies add little real value to the process of creating and distributing music, and technological advancements make their role increasingly irrelevant. Movie studios and publishing houses still stand for something, some artistic orientation, but the big record companies don't. These days, who knows or cares which label their favorite artists happen to have signed with?
The good folks at Magnatune Music are encouraging you to share any music you buy from their label with up to three friends.
Yes, at Magnatune you can legally copy any album you buy for up to 3 of your friends.
Why do we do this? Because we know you've discovered great music through your friends. It's always been this way: from mix tapes, to CDRs to Peer to Peer. People fall in love with new music by being exposed to it by others. It's such an obvious point, and everyone knows the truth of it, yet the music industry has always fought it (despite the fact that you're actually trying to help them!).
Now that's enlightened marketing!
I'm on the road this week, so light blogging.
Ron Johnson pointed out this new interview with UW Computer Science prof Ed Lazowska in CIO magazine.
Ed has been co-chair of the President's (that's President as in GW, not as in the university) Information Technology Advisory Committee, which has been studying the future of computational science and cybersecurity. In this interview Ed is his usual brilliant, engaging, and completely forthright self.
You feel strongly that the government's treatment of cybersecurity R&D has been particularly neglectful.
PITAC found that the government is currently failing to fulfill this responsibility. (The word failing was edited out of our report, but it was the committee's finding.) Let me talk very quickly about three federal agencies that you might think are focusing on this but are not:
» Most egregiously, the Department of Homeland Security simply doesn't get cybersecurity. DHS has a science and technology (S&T) budget of more than a billion dollars annually. Of this, [only] $18 million is devoted to cybersecurity. For FY06, DHS's S&T budget is slated to go up by more than $200 million, but the allocation to cybersecurity will decrease to $17 million! It's also worth noting that across DHS's entire S&T budget, only about 10 percent is allocated to anything that might reasonably be called "research" rather than "deployment."
» Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is investing in cybersecurity, but has classified all of its recent new program starts in this field. It's fine to do classified research, but we must also recognize the negative consequences, and we should (but don't) fund nonclassified research to make up for it. One negative consequence is that classified research is very slow to impact commercial IT systems, on which the entire nation, and even much of the Department of Defense, relies. Another negative consequence is that the nation's university-based researchers cannot participate, because universities do not perform classified research. This eliminates many of the nation's best cybersecurity researchers. It also means that students are not trained in cybersecurity—the training of students is an important byproduct of research.
» The National Science Foundation (NSF), in FY04, mounted a new cybersecurity research program, which was able to fund only 8 percent of the proposals it received. PITAC recommended immediately adding $90 million annually to the NSF Cyber Trust program, as a start. Thus far, there is no sign of any action on this recommendation.
