Dave Kellam

It doesn’t matter if you’re running a high-school yearbook, a indie zine, a campus humour newspaper or a national rag, you turn to your friends for help and stories. Omar and I did the CompSci thing at Queen’s, but neither of us was particularily enamored with the corporate culture that everyone seemed to be pimping. Now, he’s writing for Globe, I got a teaching degree and he’s decided to write an article about it.

The gist of the article is there were a lot of tech jobs, so a lot of people went into computer science. Then the tech industry blew up and there weren’t any jobs left. But the industry is bumpin’ again, and they can’t get monkeys to do the crap jobs.

The article is partially targetted at getting people interested in Computer Science again. However, the problem isn’t just a lack of enrollment at the university level, the roots go much deeper. Enrollment is down across the board, high-schools are dropping computer courses like rocks due to lack of interest, translating into very few teaching jobs for someone marketing themselves purely as a CS teacher.

Personally, I feel that a lot of the problems lie in the disconnect between the curriculum and how students actually use computers. The curriculum is very business and/or programming oriented, there isn’t a huge focus on the internet beyond research purposes. These kids use the internet for everything and have been using these machines for most of their lives. Telling to type up a form letter in Word excites them about as much as a fat man in a speedo.

That said, the internet creates a massive level of freak-out on the part of admistrators. “We can’t give these kids unrestricted access, they’ll be downloading bomb recipes, porno and rap-music.” Honestly, they’ll be doing that anyway and will end up more inclined to do so. Throwing up a big barrier just makes kids want to get around it. Besides, we all know there’s always a way to get around the human element of software configuration.

What can we do to get kids interested again? Teach them interesting stuff. And that goes for all levels. You can teach a 6 year-old to program, you can trust a teenager to build a website and you can actually teach something useful to university students.

Theory is great. Math is great. So are algorithms and logic and everything else that they teach us over the course of a CS degree. But where are the scripting languages? Where are the database-driven web applications? Where are the make files? Where are my CSS and web-standards? We don’t need ’em all but it would be nice to have an introduction to some of these things. I knew people in their third or four year that didn’t know how to ftp/telnet into the lab server so they didn’t actually have to walk over to submit programs.

Anyway, I thought Omar’s article was going to be a bit more along the lines of, “People don’t want to work for the man” and less, “Hay guys! We need worker-bees”, which might help this quote make more sense:

“I see no need to get myself stuck in a grey box somewhere pounding out code that may or may not be used inside some whale of an application,” Mr. Kellam says.

It’s not so much that I don’t want a tech job, more that I’d rather spend time freelancing or on my own company than being an under-appreciated, underpaid codemonkey. Anyway, it got my name, picture and wonderful work ethic into a national newspaper, so I’m not complaining.

I don’t know what the Globe archiving policy is like, so here’s a pdf copy of the article:

PDF: Where jobs are and students aren’t (online)

JPG: Where jobs are and students aren’t (print)

A few people have been asking about how I style the images in the sidebar and I’ve been lazy in replying. Basically, we just need a list of images and then apply a few css style to it.

For the flickrRSS crowd, go into the options panel and set before image to <li> and after image to </li>. In your sidebar code/template/whatever wrap your flickrRSS function in a list. We also want to add a <div> so we can style the list. It will end up looking something like this:

That’s it on the html front. It’s the styling that’s left. There are two essential things that we want to do, remove the bullets and remove the breaks. These two bits of css should take care of that:

Everything beyond that is gravy. Personally, I take all the margins and padding off the list and then style the images with a thing border and a bit of padding. My code looks something along the lines of:

That’s pretty much it. You could start doing fancy things like backgrounds, fading the picture on hover, etc. But we’ll leave that as an exercise in Google research. There may be better ways to do it, you’re welcome to comment.

Caught the Kid Koala show at the Elixir last night. He’s pretty sick. You watch him standing up there mixing, he’ll put something on, smile to himself and turn around to grab something else. Thirty seconds later you know why he’s smiling. It’s the bits of Radiohead or Monty Python’s Holy Grail or whatever.

My camera was being a bit flakey, but I grabbed a few decent photos. I also caught a bit of video footage of him doing his trumpet thing, it’s about 24 seconds long. Here it is for download:

Microsoft has introduced Gadgets, their forray into the world of desktop widgets. I’m not claiming that Apple has the most original thing in the world going with the Dashboard (see Konfabulator) but at least they both call them widgets. For some reason, Microsoft has chosen a name that is 70% similar but not quite the same.

I’ll give them the sidebar, I saw it demoed for my HCI class years ago and thought it was pretty cool. But they ditched it part way through Longhorn. This is called putting widgets into the OS and dressing them up with research that they’ve already done.

Also, start.com is kind of weird. Microsoft has added this statement at the bottom for clarity:

This site is not an officially supported site. it is an incubation experiment and doesn’t represent any particular strategy or policy.

An incubation experiment! Pod people! Yea. There’s also an Office 12 demo video, it’s over 400mb for the cautious.

I decided to buy Mint for eightface in the wee hours of the morning last night. It’s been out for awhile now, so I’m sure the post title is clever and original. For those living under rocks or those who don’t care about websites, it’s essentially a statistics package that allows you to see who is visiting your site.

Dreamhost includes Analog on all hosted domains, so it’s easy enough to get a rough daily statistics breakdown. It might not be enough, depends what your needs are though — the scope of analog is fairly broad and it’s a little on the cryptic side but it suits most people fine. If you’re one of the new-age blog freaks that lives on the 0-day edge and lusts after technorati and the like, Mint is right up your alley.

Like most web-apps these days, Mint is extensible with a plugin and api structure. If you offer up any files on your site, it’s probably worth getting the Pepper plugin download counter, which does pretty much what it says. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, check out the Pepper forum for more.

I’ve been keeping myself busy working on a number of different web projects and helping people move, so this site has been neglected a little bit. At some point, I need to clean up my mess of a stylesheet. I’ve also been meaning to overhaul flickrRSS for awhile. Hopefully, it’ll come up in the next little while. Marc has been messing around with the flickr api, it’s provided some inspiration to redo my plugin. Ideally, it needs to stay really simple — flickrRSS just works for most people as a simple badge.

I’ve also realized that it’s September. I don’t know how that happened or when summer disappeared. Regardless, I’ve been trying to enjoy the last vestiges of warmth and sunlight outdoors before the wonderful Canadian winter is upon us.

While I’m off on a personal entry, I’ll take this moment to endorse a few different objects for consumption: The Shield, Rome, Weeds, March of Penguins, The Editors, The Cribs. Three television shows, a movie and two bands. That will be all for now.

Technorati is sluggish — been that way as long as I can remember. It’s always managed to find a few links that others services haven’t. To be fair, other services produce results that Technorati doesn’t, so it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Kottke wrote about it, so everyone else needs to weigh in (it’s kind of fun using the service to track people bitching about it).

One of the site’s core problems is bloat. You think it would be obvious that size doesn’t matter when it comes to indexing weblogs. Quality, not quantity. Take a look at Technorati, they whip out their big numbers and slap ’em down on the top of the page. Over 16.1 millions blogs and 1.4 billion posts indexed. Pretty impressive eh? I bet that earns them all an extra glance at all the cool nerd parties.

Now, let’s try to come up with a solution that reduces the number of sites in the index, speeds up searches and returns more valuable results. Sounds like a bit of a tough one. So, lets take a look at a diagram (actually a screen capture, but diagram sounds better). Do you see any big problems? Maybe BlogSpot? Five of the last seven are AdWords abuse/spam sites. I’m not sure how valuable 16.1 million weblogs are when you have crap like this around.

Don’t get me wrong, I have friends that use BlogSpot, it’s a nice easy way to get started online and maintain a simple weblog. Something has to change though. I’m sure Google is aware of the problem, it’s probably screwing up their index too.

How do we fix it? Technically, it’s a problem on Google’s end — they own Blogger and should do something about so many fake sign-ups. In the short-term, Technorati could remove BlogSpot from the index, it’s a bit of a blanket solution but it could help speed things up . Although, it probably wouldn’t help them in terms of Google buying out the service. On the other hand, Yahoo might appreciate the damage to its rival. It doesn’t even have to be a full-out ban on whatever.blogspot addresses, maybe just have a holding period or a number of links to their site from non-BlogSpot addresses.

This Cringely article mostly deals with Google and the possibility of the company being at an apex (although without much substance or willingness to go out on a limb). He goes on to explain the Google is doing their own thing and probably not looking to be a Microsoft killer, instead pointing at Apple as the likely culprit. The kicker of an idea is at the end:

Every one of those iPods is a bootable drive. What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version — OS 10.4 — on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store?

It wouldn’t kill Microsoft, but it would hurt the company, both emotionally and materially. And it wouldn’t hurt Apple at all. Apple hardware sales would be driven by OS 10.5 and all giving away 10.4 would do is help sell more iPods and attract more customers to Apple’s store.

That could be fun. The idea sounds plausible but it probably won’t happen. Then again, Apple switching to Intel was never supposed to happen either. I could see Apple releasing an older version of os x that runs on any Intel hardware and making /home/user directories easily portable on the iPod.

Here’s a chunk of code for WordPress that will display a custom message on posts older than a certain date. You might ask, “Why would I need such a thing?” And I’d say you probably don’t but if the post is older than 60 days and not a monthly archive, the person has likely arrived via search engine or permalink.

So, who cares if someone is arriving via search engine? Well, they probably won’t stick around after you’ve given them their tidbit of information. However, you could direct them towards your site’s main page, some other content or even display some AdWords or other advertising (thus avoiding a hit to your loyal readers).

It’s a relatively straight-forward chunk of php code. You’ll probably want to put it in your post template, sandwiched between the function that displays content and the one that displays comments.

<?php 
	$entry_datetime = abs(strtotime($post->post_date)); 
	$time_since = time() - $entry_datetime;   
	$days_since = 60;
	if ($time_since > $days_since * 86400) :
?> 		
 <div class="message-age">
  ## Modify this message
  <p>This entry is more than 60 days old.</p>
 </div>
<?php endif; ?>

This code is GPLd, do whatever you want with it. You could have it display a different message for a post that’s a year old or two years old.

If there’s interest, I can turn this into a simple WordPress plugin but it doesn’t seem overly necessary.

Popped down to Montreal this weekend and stayed a night at Phil’s place. Didn’t get up to much, but I took a few photos Sunday afternoon. It’s still annoying not to have an lcd screen on my camera, I’ll get something new eventually. Here’s the full photo set on flickr.

It’s really hard to start writing about Vogue for Men, then again some organizations can write an entire article. There should be more than a few obvious jokes to work with, but the project on a whole just seems like another addition to the already massive pool of magazines. It may survive, it may not. I can’t see myself buying it.

I’m guessing that they’re trying to pull in an audience of modern, fashion-conscious men (you get a slap in the head for allowing meterosexual into your brain). I’m also going to go out on a limb and guess that they spent a lot of money photographing George Clooney and gave a five-year old some licorice to design the cover for them.

Look at it. I mean really look at it. Try to tell me that cover isn’t seven different shades of ugly — from the logo, to the use of four hundred different fonts. For a magazine that’s pimping style, it’s hard to figure out how this cover escaped into the wild.

It seems like you can’t turn around on the internet these days without running into the phrase “Web 2.0”. Some of the chatter is positive, some is negative — I’ll weigh in with the latter group. Why did they let this one leave the brainstorming session? Web 2.0 sounds like a bad Microsoft concept or at the very least an immature product. Then again, why stop at Web 2.0? It seems sort of minimalist. We should really go all-out and call it eXtreme Web 2005 Mega Enterprise Edition.

There are a lot of smart people around making a lot of smart things, but they need to stop pimping the phrase. I don’t think anyone can really step back and say, “Yup, sure looks like a point upgrade happened sometime around April. What do you think Frank?” That said, it’s mostly a marketing endeavor — people work well with acronyms and buzzwords. Take AJAX, there’s been some backlash related to branding a technology that’s been around for years, but it’s given everyone a common point to rally around.

Inventing buzz words is cool, I understand the need — but Web 2.0? We can do better. Why not come up with a term like AJAX that actually describes the underlying paradigm shift? How about Dynamic and Fluid Technologies (DAFT) or Dynamic User-Dependant Environment (DUDE) or Fluid Interactive Services Hub (FISH)? I could go on.

The whole web 2.0 thing is a semantic argument and kind of a pissy little thing to bring up, but no one in the “Web 2.0” crowd actually reads this site, so it doesn’t matter.