August 6, 2008
Dear weather people in Indiana, it is summer time. This is the time of year where you stop being able to predict anything that happens, weather wise, in my region. Perhaps you should stop issuing forecasts all together. Perhaps the forecasts you do issue should read “I looked out my window and it’s not raining. Might be the same at your house.”
Let me provide a real life example of where the failure of your many years of schooling in the prediction of an inherently chaotic system becomes obvious. Today’s forecast called for Partly Cloudy and 88F. I chose this example on purpose. Smart people understand that, while the weather system is almost pure chaos, there are patterns that occur. These patterns are fairly easy to spot and predict in the short term. Today’s weather forecast, as forecast today, should be pretty accurate. I’ll give you some temperature fluctuations. I’ll forgive the difference between partly and mostly cloudy. But look, asshole, you should be able to tell me if it is going to rain today.
Today, you failed me. A major thunderstorm is moving through despite your forecast of partly cloudy with no rain possibility until tomorrow afternoon. Not only did you fail me there, but you failed me at the current weather report. Moments ago, I heard thunder and went to check the weather report, since I thought it wasn’t going to rain today. Your report on current conditions indicated that it was partly cloudy, not raining, and all was fine. Looking out my window, I see overcast, humid, rain. In fact, I see evidence that it has been raining for 15 or 20 minutes, long enough for your “current conditions” report to have been updated.
So you see my quandry. You have many years of schooling and I respect that. However, during summer in Indiana, I think it’s time we boil your forecasts down to two modes: “We’re all going to die in the next 15 minutes.” or “Fuck if I know. Look out your window.”
Filed under: Humor |
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July 26, 2008
POE::API::Peek 1.32 just went out the door. nothingmuch contributed the ability to get the parent of a POE session.
You might notice the appearance of 1.31 too. Embarrassingly enough, I misspelled nothingmuch’s name while trying to give him credit :)
Filed under: Coding, Geekery |
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July 3, 2008
In my world, there are two types of programmers: those who program for the sake of programming, and everyone else. I’m only interested in the first group. The rest might do their job well but it will only ever be a job for them. I want the passion, the fury, the fire.
I ran across a good quote on the subject the other day that I want to share. It comes from the introduction to Stephen King’s “Skeleton Crew”.
All the same, you don’t do it for the money, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of the bottom line, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you’re a monkey. In the end you don’t even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because to not do it is suicide.
Filed under: Coding, Geekery |
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June 23, 2008
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m hiring my replacement at work. Yes, I’m getting out of hiring and going back to development. However, I still have lots of thoughts on hiring and will be training my replacement accordingly. Since I’ve not written the big treatises on hiring that I promised, I want to open the floor to questions. I’ll take any reasonable ones and answer them as best I can. Leave your questions in the comments.
Filed under: Administrivia, Geekery, Hiring |
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May 5, 2008
Watching all the fun over on The Twitter Blacklist brings to mind one of the industry acronyms I hate the most: SEO (Search Engine Optimization). There are ways of increasing PageRank and the like for a site in legitimate manners. Most SEO folks, however, are trying to “trick” search engines into higher rankings by using fake trackbacks, twitter links, facebook profiles, etc to get their site’s links and spammy content out as much as possible.
I see web sites in 3 distinct categories: sites with fresh, changing content; static sites; and assholes (spammers and domain squatters fall in this category). Sites in category 1 have no real problems getting excellent placement in search engines. If the content is even slightly compelling and updates on a fairly regular basis, a reader base will develop and drive banner ads, adsense, or whatever other monetization platform the site chooses. It’s not a fast way to make money on the web but it’s a start. (Hell, even this pathetic site has a small reader base that I don’t quite understand.)
Sites in category 2 and 3 have a problem. Once their site has been visited, there is no reason to come back. Let’s use an example out of the ’static site’ category just because spammers piss me off. Most web site design firms have a meager web presence. The site might have a portfolio, displaying their work on other sites. Generally, there’s a section that talks about their wonderful staff. That’s all well and good. If the company looks talented, I might bookmark the site in case I require their services later. When I’m done with that though, I’m never coming back. Why would I? I’ve seen it all.
How does a company like this generate fresh content and maybe drive a little publicity their way? My suggestion is to talk about your work. In our example of a web design firm, the company is obviously doing work on a regular basis. If they don’t have contracts or clients, they can’t survive. Set up a prominent section of the site that displays recent clients and projects. Get clearance from clients to talk about the technical and visual nature of the work. Most importantly, put RSS behind it. Give me a way to track your company without thinking.
I can hear you all mumbling: “Do people really track that sort of content?” Yes, they do. I know I do. I have a section in my RSS feed reader (NetNewsWire, for the record) dedicated to tracking companies I enjoy doing business with and companies whose progress I am interested in tracking. I follow the corporate blogs of unsanity, OmniGroup, linode, dreamhost, and quite a few others. I care when OmniGroup puts out a new revision of software I don’t even use because I can see the direction of the company and their new thoughts on UI. I care when dreamhost or twitter hire a new admin because that might impact my services.
Am I a giant freak, some sort of feed reading aberration? It’s possible. Here’s the thing, though. If you are in the second website category, with a nice pretty static site that no one seem to care about, do you want to spend lots of time figuring out shady ways to bump yourself up in search results or do you want to spend a little bit of time to build yourself a small community, fans willing to pimp your services and philosophy to their friends and family? Personally, I’d rather spend time on the latter. That might just be me, though. Just a thought….
[ And for the record, the technology necessary to add a bit of dynamic RSS mojo to your site is trivial these days. The amount of content management systems, running from barebones setups like vee and nanoblogger to massive professional setups like drupal, simply stagger the mind. ]
[ Oh, and sites in category 3? The assholes and spammers? You all can just die in a goddamn fire. ]
Filed under: Industry |
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