Researchers at University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K. conducting a leadership study found the use of “taboo language” made the workplace more tolerable
Fox News
Sounds like bullshit, to me.
Monthly Archive for October, 2007
Great editing.
I’m going to take a short break from studying for tomorrow’s midterm to rant about it.
The class? Internet Application Development. Sounds interesting, right? (It did to me). What is the class actually about? PHP and MySQL.
My instructor is knowledgeable, and yes, I’m sure I will learn things (I don’t want to be that guy, the guy who thinks he already knows it all). But still; when I signed up for “Internet Application Development” I didn’t think that all I’d be doing was PHP and MySQL, the sort of things I taught myself on the web 2 or 3 years ago.
I had hoped I might learn things like:
- Creating web applications that scale. Running your app and/or database on multiple servers if load gets too high; maybe even an overview/discussion of grid computing?
- The MVC pattern, its pros and/or cons. It would seem to be a good choice since nearly every web app framework I’ve ever seen uses this pattern.
- Possibly even a comparison of the different languages/frameworks which could be used for web applications. I would expect that only Java and PHP would be talked about, but even an attempt to weigh pros and cons would be interesting.
But no. Instead I get to “learn” how good PHP’s require() function is. Really? Well thank you very much.
The only thing that keeps me from abandoning a degree altogether is that I’ve invested so much time in it, I just want to finish.
Okay, rant over. Back to studying for said midterm.
I’m in the primordial stage of building a site which requires authentication, and I decided it was high time I dug into OpenID. At first I was thinking that this would be a way to avoid creating a native user authentication system — yay, less work, right?
Not necessarily. Not everyone will want to use OpenID; you don’t want to be turning away potential users who are confused or put off by an OpenID login. Conventional wisdom, therefore, is that you still have your own authentication system which people can sign up for, and not force people to understand/use OpenID.
As a developer then, you are suddenly faced with the prospect of implementing both your own user/password table and authentication, and allowing interested users to use their OpenID, if they elect to do so. Wait — we just went from less work to more work — why in the world would anyone want to do that?
The answer is simple, and, if you step out of your developer shoes, is obvious: the convenience of OpenID isn’t for you (the website developer) — it’s for your users.
No, using OpenID doesn’t make your web application simpler to design and code. But, for those users who are or will be using OpenID, it makes authentication a lot easier for them. That’s the idea.
And it’s a good idea (though Tim Bray had some interesting objections to OpenID… I’m not sure if these have been resolved since he wrote this).
For those who are using OpenID, allowing it on your site is basically a way of saying that you care about making their user experience more convenient. I find it hard to argue against that logic.
I notice that there are a lot of people on Twitter that I’m following, but when I view them, the link next to their name says “Follow”, as though I were not yet doing so. The couple times I mentioned this, I got several confirmations that others are seeing the same bugs.
The problem with this is that I’d like to be able to view my list of followers, and start following anyone on it who I’m not already following. Reciprocation, community, and all that. But since I can’t rely on Twitter to tell me who I am following, this system won’t really work. For completeness, I could just add everyone who still has the “Follow” link, but from experience I know this will result in me re-following several dozen people who are already on my list; if they aren’t filtering their Twitter notifications, that means I would keep giving them annoying “philcrissman is now following you on Twitter” messages, over and over.
With the huge number of people on Twitter, and the (most likely) large number of servers/databases which power the back end, it’s not inconceivable that bugs like this could exist; it would be remarkable if some bugs did not exist. However, this particular bug effectively makes Twitter unusable to track who I am or am not following. Frustrating.
Twitter, are you listening? I hope this is a known bug….
Thursday night was Minnedemo; it was my first time attending the event. The room (O’Gara’s Garage) was packed, which was nice to see. I’ve been wondering how the tech/start up “scene” was in the Twin Cities, so it was nice to see the turnout.
The common wisdom, for tech startups, is to move to Silicon Valley (1 2 3). I can understand the reasoning behind that, but I guess I’d have to put myself in the camp that wants to believe that’s not always necessary — mostly because I’m interested in startups, and I’m not looking to move right away. From that perspective alone, it was cool to see the local tech startups, and especially cool to see the dozens of others who signed up to demo, but were cut off (only 6 demos due to time restrictions… 6 was plenty for one evening, though).
One of the demos, Pokeware, looked like a winner. It’s not the sort of thing I probably would have tried to build, but I have a hard time seeing how they couldn’t do well. What they do is insert advertising hotspots into online video, but to keep the ads from being obtrusive, they only appear when the video is paused. A pretty neat solution, I thought — the numbers from their tests were impressive. That said… I did get one a business card from the Pokeware presenter, and the address was in California. Is that where Pokeware is based? That’s fine, but it confuses me that they would demo out here, in that case… regardless, it was cool to see.
Of the other presenters, FanChatter was cool, but I’m not their demographic — I enjoy sports, but not so much that I would want to chat about them 24-7, on the go, everywhere. Crashplan and Wonderfile both had very good looking apps, and I’m one of those people who think that GUIs matter, so that was also impressive.
All in all, all the presentations were good. The venue was good — it was packed, but not too packed, and parking was a little hard to find; but then again, I was a bit late.
I’m already looking forward to the next. Here’s to local startups. And no, I’ll have nothing to present… ask me this time next year. Maybe.
A real, actual list I found while moving; I had apparently created it in preparation for a vacation or trip, most likely at the insistence of my wife that I “needed to make a list.”
PACKING
- Food
- Read Amy’s mind
- Snack things
- See #2
- Clean entire house before you leave (this is called “packing”)
- More food
- Put ice in bags (this is for cooler)
- Towels
- SHOES!!***
- Get 2 of everything; leave half packed.
- Books/Bibles
- Homework
- Sweaters!
- Do laundry early
- Games (Amy doesn’t mean XBox)
- Keep some water in car (unless you’re flying)
- Gas the car (with gas)
- Relax
- Hurry up
- Take out trash
Yes, it’s new. I was having trouble coming up with color scheme, so I didn’t… it may change again.
Comments? Thumbs down? Thumbs up? Please let me know in a comment; thanks!
UPDATE: It was pre-mature to post the new theme. It will be back when it’s been made cross-browser compatible and had some more work done on it. Also, mental-note: creating posts to announce a new theme ought to be unnecessary. If anyone has been to the site before, they will know it’s a new theme.
I’m a relatively new Twitter user. I’m a big fan of the app, and I recently started a silly experiment in following an enormous number of people there, starting with Scoble’s 6,300+ list that he’s following. I thought that would be an interesting place to start, given Scoble is a well known blog/web/tech pundit I assumed that the list of those that he is following would be a large group of cool people.
Some thoughts:
- Have added about 1400 people so far. Many have added me back; judging from the tweets that scroll through my list, my initial assumption was correct; it is a large group of cool, interesting people.
- Yes, I did get a small spike of traffic to my site after doing this… That’s not why I did it, though I’m not too surprised given how many people I added. Blogging is more or less a meritocracy, though, so I don’t feel that this is manipulative. Sure, people may visit once to figure out who just started following them, but once they’ve seen it once, they’re only going to come back if they thought there was something worthwhile there. Social networks as a way to drive traffic are only going to work in the long run if you have a site people are actually interested in. Like I said, i expected that, and traffic was not my objective in the experiment.
- Misc was saying something interesting on reciprocity in twitter following/followers that made me think:
as a rule i only do reciprocal relationships on twitter. this raises the question, how long do you give someone to add you back?
1adding twitterers is different from subscribing to rss. it’s like saying “hey wanna be friends?” if they say no it’s cool to unfollow.
2in fact, if you follow the analogy to its logical conclusion, continuing to follow people who don’t add you back is kinda creepy stalkerish.
3I don’t feel creepy, so in some ways I’d obviously like to disagree. At the same time, I see his point. I guess, so far, I have been treating twitter feeds as though they were RSS feeds; I’ve tried to only follow public feeds, though some pretty cool people whose updates were private decided to add me anyways. My interest is in the whole conversation, and I’ve found some interesting people, websites, and ideas because of it… yeah, even just in a few days. So while I see Jesse’s point, I don’t think I’m going to go through a massive “unfollow” process. Not yet, at least. ;-)
Out of thoughts for now. I’m sure I’ll have more.
And for everyone who’s not interested in Twitter; I promise to try to write about something else, soon.
Thanks to mrBen and afongen for pointing out that comments were not working. Right now the entire site is down, after an upgrade to 2.3.
Frustrating… but at the same time, I’ve had almost no problems with Wordpress for over a year, so… oh well. Here’s to troubleshooting.
UPDATE: Comments working again.It was (I think) the ELA plugin that K2 used for the Archive page.
