Posts

Here’s an online copy of Norman Matloff’s testimony before congress on the IT labor shortage, or they myth of it anyway. You may or may not know that Dr. Matloff has made a career of attacking proponents of increased allocations of H1B visas over the past few years. I’ve read arguments from both sides of this debate, and I’m still not sure where I come down. I can say that I’m having an awfully hard time finding qualified applicants for the jobs we have open where I work. I can also say that there are many unethical employers who exploit people working under H1B visas terribly. My gut feeling is that the debate needs to be expanded beyond the simple question of whether or not we should increase the pool of H1B visas. ...

A domain name does not a business make. Even so, business.com has launched a sorry Web site on the back of their $7.5 million payout for their domain name. A quick survey of the most successful Internet businesses finds them using names like yahoo.com, ebay.com, and amazon.com. A tip for would-be Internet entrepreneurs … what you need is a business plan, not a URL. Why 100% Pure Java is a Crock. ...

A dog that was freezing to death in an unheated cargo hold on a passenger flight was saved when the pilot diverted the coast to coast flight and landed in Denver on the dog’s behalf. Bruce Schneier’s latest newsletter discusses the proper way to think about computer security. His fundamental point is that it’s all about risk management, and not threat avoidance. Holy crap, Collab.net has gotten 35 million bucks from investors to continue doing what they do. Right now, SourceXchange is the biggest thing they have going, and they have less than 100 customers there. They’ve only completed four projects. ...

Some people never learn. If there’s one thing I love to hate, it’s hypocrisy. The latest and greatest example being Napster’s cease and desist order sent to the band Offspring for selling Napster-trademarked merchandise on their Web site. Depressing news from the dot com world: APBNews.com is broke. Great site. I find it amazing that they had 140 employees, though. (Thanks to Jason Levine for the link.) A List Apart has a decent (if light) article on interdependencies on Web teams that will probably be useful to people who aren’t actually on Web teams. (Everyone on a Web development team should already know this stuff.) ...

Gamasutra has a postmortem on Asheron’s Call, the massively multiplayer game developed by Turbine and published by Microsoft. I love reading these articles, especially on projects that are interesting to me. Salon has a story about an elaborate Joey Skaggs prank involving a death theme park, and the number of media outlets, government agencies, and Web sites that bought into it. Note to the author: they’re called paragraphs, you might try them out sometime. ...

OK, Network Solutions has reached a new low. This weekend, they sent an email to me for every domain that I hold with the word IMPORTANT at the beginning of the subject. You’d think that they mark messages as important because despite the fact that they’re major spammers, they do send messages that their customers actually need to read. Wrong. It was spam, too. Where do these guys get off? They’re a utility, for goodness sake. If the electric company sent me an advertisement disguised as a bill, I’d be dashing off a letter to the public utilities comission in a heartbeat. ...

One of the coolest features of SourceForge is the compiler farm that allows developers to compile their applications under several different Linux distributions. They recently added some computers with Intel Itanium (IA-64) processors to the mix so that Linux application developers can get a head start on developing applications that work with the new processor. This is an incredibly cool service for small developers who don’t have time or money to set up multiple development environments for compiling and testing. ...

One of the more interesting Internet tales that I’ve followed in a cursory manner over the years is phone booth in the Mojave desert. The final chapter in the saga is the removal of the phone booth at the request of the federal government because it attracted too much traffic (the area where the phone booth is now part of a national park). Interestingly, one can attribute the increased traffic in large part to the Web page about the phone booth that I’ve linked to. (Thanks to Lake Effect for the pointer.) ...

O’Reilly has an interesting news story up that attempts to sell their Windows book to Unix users. (Incidentally, it sounds like a book I should own, since I spend more time in Windows than in Unix by far.) It’s not really surprising to me that many (probably most) Unix advocates use Windows whether they like it or not. I’ve been working on a paper listing the things that are keeping me from doing my day to day work in Unix, but I’m not finished with it yet. Maybe someday … ...

The new Salon layout is a total mess. The biggest problem is that there are a lot fewer links to individual stories on the home page, so I have to go to the individual section page to see a list of stories. Putting a little summary of what’s in each section of the site is just dumb, a list of headlines (with links preferably) would be much, much better. In other words, what they used to have is much better than what they have now. I certainly hope that this redesign wasn’t driven by a need to get people to view more pages per visit in order to get more ad dollars. When a site makes it more inconvenient to view the content I want to see, they’ll get less clicks from me, not more. ...