Today, Timothy Noah points out that Strom Thurmond has never actually apologized for his blatant racism, despite the conventional wisdom that he has. Just to be fair, I have no idea whether Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia (who is reputed to be a former high ranking member of the KKK) has apologized for his racist past, either.

The bottom line is that I wish there were more hours in the day. Just as companies have to decide where to spend their capital to maximize value, software developers have to figure out how to spend their time to maximize their skill set. Not a day goes by when I don’t read about something that sounds interesting that I never follow up on. A few years ago, I was a Web developer who spent most of their time hacking on things in Perl, PHP, Cold Fusion, and many other more obscure platforms. I decided that I needed to turn the battleship and become a Java developer, in large part because I thought that Java developers were more employable than I was, and made more money to boot. As it turns out, I really enjoy programming in Java, but the bottom line is that I decided to make the transition for crass, commercial reasons.

Even more years ago, I could have decided that what I wanted to focus on was Visual Basic, and ASP. I decided not to because I knew enough VB to consider it extremely distasteful. (You don’t have to agree with me on this, I just found the entire Microsoft development ecosystem to be aesthetically unpleasing.) Anyway, we’re all forced to make decisions like these throughout our careers. And the thing that really gets me (even though I know it’s inevitable) is that as people, we have to deal with lock in just the way businesses do.

If Company A comes out with an enterprise software package that provides five times the functionality of Company B’s package at half the price, most of Company B’s customers will not move over because of the huge pain involved in converting the data, migrating the software, and teaching people to use the new system. Even in the open source world where licensing costs are not an issue, people still get locked in to data formats, interfaces, and just about everything else. Unfortunately, things are just the same for individual software developers.

I know some polymath software developers who are able to program well in many languages and on many platforms, but for the most part, broad and deep are tradeoffs. Time spent learning the esoterica that make you a great programmer in a particular language is time you don’t spend picking up that one extra scripting language that might be useful to you occasionally. Of course, there’s something to be said for learning many languages because picking up the different philosophies enables you to make better decisions about how to solve problems in general, but rarely will you meet people who have true expert knowledge in many different areas.

So the big picture question is how to create the most fulfilling career for yourself? One option is to delve really deeply into a particular technology and become a real expert on it. For example, I could try to expand my knowledge of Java as greatly as possible and learn other things that are complementary to Java expertise, and hope to trade on that in the years to come. However, of more interest to me is the idea of abstracting my skillset. I’d like to move into a position where there’s less heads down coding work and more mentoring of other developers, managing of projects, and focusing on the big picture. Aside from my specific knowledge of HTML, Perl, Java, SQL and other things like that, I have general knowledge of what makes sense for developing applications, how to get projects finished on time, and how to evaluate and make decisions on technology. The theory is that by being absolved of the need for esoteric knowledge, I could dabble more with things that interest me and have more fun at work.

Of course, the kicker here is that to do all that, you have to find someone who’ll pay you for it. In any case, I think this is a career transition that every developer has to go through — broader or deeper. If you’re a developer, I encourage you to think about it actively rather than putting your career on autopilot. Your skills are your asset, and rarely do they take you where you want to go by accident.

Some San Francisco hackers are working on rigging up a system that enables Laotians in remote farming villages to connect to the Internet using Wi-Fi and computers powered by pedal driven generators. For all the stupid crap that we do in the IT industry, it’s great to read about projects like this that are improving the lives of people. It’s also incredible to realize what a big difference simple inventions can make in the developing world. Not long ago I read about a system that includes a long hose and a bike driven pump that enables African farmers to irrigate fields using water in nearby wetlands. Before this incredibly simple device was introduced, they had to try to irrigate their fields by carrying water over in buckets. I love reading about projects like this, and dream that someday I can work on one myself.

Colin Powell: The U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative: Building Hope for the Years Ahead. I wonder why I’m not reading more about this speech. It might be the best foreign policy speech given by anyone in the current administration.

Coca Cola is following Warren Buffett’s lead and putting an end to issuing quarterly earnings forecasts. The Motley Fool’s take is that this makes sense as a measure to take the focus off of the constant pressure of focusing on the current quarter and actually returning to building for the long term. One of my great complaints for years has been the focus among businesses on quarterly results to the exclusion of everything else. Hopefully this will enable Coca Cola to build a better business and provide an example to companies in other industries (particularly the high tech industry) to drop their earnings forecasts as well. Unfortunately, Microsoft, the leading company in high tech, is absolutely masterful at manipulating the market by lowballing its forecasts and doctoring its revenue results to consistantly beat estimates every single quarter. I imagine that’s a habit that would be hard to kick.

Via Oblomovka, this New Yorker piece musing about what Philip K Dick would think of the Ministry of Information run by the reptilian John Poindexter. If the Information Awareness Office is allowed to progress on its present course, my prediction is that 5, 10, or perhaps 20 years down the road, it will implode after a huge scandal, a series of absurd but earnest Congressional hearings, and a multitude of promises that the government will never behave in such a manner again. In the meantime, people generally classified as America-haters will investigate and critique its bizarre and sociopathic methods to no avail. At least they’ll get to say “I told you so.”

Google News has gotten mixed reviews, but its introduction has actually improved my quality of life. I hear lots of rumors and unsubstantiated assertions, and if I’m going to post about something here, I generally like to have it from one reliable source, and preferably more than one reliable source. (That means an exclusive in a British newspaper never, ever cuts it.) Anyway, running down these stories used to be a huge pain for me. I’d hit Yahoo News, the WaPo, the NYT, and then if that didn’t pan out, several other papers to see if I could source stories properly. Now I just plug in the appropriate search terms into Google News to see what comes up. It also lets me compare and contrast between sites that are running the generic wire story and sites that provide more detail that their reporters actually dug up themselves. I feel like this has both improved the quality of the stuff I post and saved me a lot of time.

When I needed to get the exact quote Trent Lott uttered back in 1980 about Strom Thurmond, plugging “trent lott 1980” yielded it in seconds. When I wanted to find out more about the rumors of Microsoft acquiring Rational or Borland, “microsoft borland rational” got me all I needed to know. Dave Farber sent a couple of copy and pastes of news stories out this morning without the URLs to see them on the Web, and digging them up via Google News was a breeze as well.

The Google News home page is much maligned (even though it does a good job of letting you know what’s really widely reported), but to me, the value is in the search engine anyway. I’ve always been envious of people who have access to Lexis/Nexis and other news archives, and Google News gives me a little bit of that.

William Saletan on Trent Lott:

How many conservatives who denounced Lott this week appreciate the civil rights movement? How many have made careers out of deriding feminism, as though the women’s movement achieved nothing? How many worship Ronald Reagan, who helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment? How many defend Helms, who in 1990 defeated a black opponent by complaining in an ad that whites were losing jobs to blacks because of quotas? How many speak congenially to people who support them for what they know are ugly reasons? How many worry about the overlap between the positions of segregationists and the positions of people such as themselves, who defend the rights of states, neighborhoods, and private institutions? How many refuse to see that you can’t be nice to racists without being callous to the people they despise?

Here are a couple of items from elsewhere that you ought to read:

• Tim O’Reilly on piracy. It’s amazing to me that so many people understand this issue so well, and yet so few of them are on the payroll of companies that have so much to gain and lose by understanding it.
• Scott Rosenberg has a column on Kevin Werbach’s Supernova conference on decentralization.

Ed Felten posted a frequency chart for use of the terms “fair use” and “copyright” in various articles over the past 20 years or so to his weblog. It definitely seems like people are paying more attention to copyright issues than they once were.