Open Source programming recruting

At the Reboot conference, I attended a less formal talk-session on how to make money on Open Source programming. In the group were among others: myself, David Axmark of MySQL AB, Copenhagen’s Umbraco (.NET content management system/framework), and the nice guy from Portugal.

You can read the points in this article at NewsForge “Finding an open source programming job”.

The recruiter’s short advice: Open Source activity is a sound business move. Package and release your code! Help others! Be good to new-comers!

Job positions, and who to fill them

Very seldom do we see this kind of lists in job postings. This here is an ad for a job in Portland, Oregon. (“PERL Application Developer”) We cut to the chase, to the last part of the posting, where special extra attributes of the applicant are listed:

> Would like candidates with lisp, scheme, ml, ocaml, haskell, smalltalk, python and/or ruby experience either on the job or as a hobby.

> NOT LOOKING FOR: VB, php, oracle forms, pl/sql, xml, html, korn/bourne shell, csh
Continue reading “Job positions, and who to fill them”

Geo-location fun with Plazes

Now that I met Peter Rukavina, I am involved in the Plazes development effort.

This blog post explains what Plazes is. Peter does it, too, at his Rukapedia.

In the bar at the right-hand side of this page is a little location notifier, which says something about where I’m at. That Plazes data. It’s free!

Like hacking? There is an API, and a friendly community of developers out there at codeplaze.com.

Exam woes over: She made it

Luisa came through beautifully today, in an exam. The question for this oral exam was:

> Modern Copenhagen and the expansion of the urban public sphere

That is her core topic, her passion and interest. Also, that’s where she’s read the most, so she was (very) relieved to call and say she passed.

Yes! Ice-cream at the corner in 5!

**Dig deeper**: you might not know this, but the Danish Paradis Is chain of ice-cream parlours has an SMS service, for getting to know when they’ve done too much ice-cream, so you can go there and buy it on discount (30-50%). (Via Peter Rukavina)

On a personal note, as we are moving to Nørrebro, we will be further from this lovely, eco-vegan-friendly parlour. They have two parlours in Copenhagen, and a few in Århus.

Impressive Ruby on Rails social software: YubNub

Social software + Web 2.0 + command-line action: YubNub.

YubNub lets you create link shortcuts, like in Mozilla Firefox, after some configuration you could type this into your address bar: imdb life of brian, and have those strings glued to the search URL of the Internet’s biggest movie database. Very handy. Especially for extra-special, custom searching that you only you might be interested in.

YubNub’s superness is that all these shortcuts and fixes are saved in one place. You can reuse others’ commands.

This is a project I think will live to tell its stories.

A product of RailsDay, a 24hr programming contest which spawned quite a few nice usable projects. Winners to be announced.

Update: This summary article on the Web 2.0 conference has enough sound-bites to clue you in on the subject, if you haven’t got the time to read the full wikipedia entry.

Fixing ill-looking web content: Mozdev’ top50

This is an old post, which I’ll just publish, in the light of the increasing Greasemonkey adoption. An example of amazing Wikipedia usage. Yes, it’s the animate the diff list. Very fancy.

Here, the old text:

This thing started with me bashing a perfectly usable, but not perfect, website. I named names, being a complete asshole, which was far from my intention. Here, instead, is a gentler fix. This text aims to relieve the symptoms if not the root of the disease, which is non-standard markup. First, let’s assume you already use Mozilla Firefox. It is released in 1.0, and it is the least broken browser on the market.

Aim of the exercise: “Be able to set User CSS for a list of sites.” [Author’s note: Why didn’t I just think of using Chris Pedrick’s Web Developer Toolbar? It has that feature. And now I’m using it.]

OK, the place to start looking for extensions is, of course, the repository for Firefox extensions, Mozdev.org. Over at mozdev.org’s top50 is a list of the most popular extensions.

Greasemonkey: lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any webpage to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a webpage’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a webpage’s design or interaction.

Interesting, adding some behaviour to pages… Whoa! They said it! There is the link thing, the Thing, the Thing! (Add snazzy dance here.) OK, there is documentation for the browser I’m using. Fascinating!

Hm, interesting, Mozilla.org timed out twice on me. (Idea: **Websites We Trust that do not respond** is a *trouble indicator* you could use in fiction, or in RPGs.) [Author’s note: But everyone would blame their local ISP. No drama.]

Anyway.

Swedish art scene in few words

My main man and artist Paul Steen gives it up on the state of the art scene in Sweden, right now:

> Konsten lever i hålor och dunkla källare enligt min senaste
> undersökning i modetidningen bon. det är inne med subjektivitet och
> personliga berättelser i Sverige, och det är OK att teckna och måla
> igen. Det ena en reaktion på postmodern ironisk diktatur under
> 90-talet, det andra förmodligen effekten av en trevande men ökande
> marknad för att faktiskt köpa och sälja konst. Och att folk har
> tröttnat på relationell estetik och vill jobba med händerna igen.
> Letar efter ett ställe att ställa ut mina foton av när jag träffade
> pappa för första gången på 30 år.
> Hoppas få ställa ut mina arkitekturmodeller och lite dithörande bilder
> på ett konstnärsdrivet galleri i stockholm i vinter. och naturligtvis
> spela nÃ¥got trevligt pÃ¥ Älghult…

In English:

> The art lives in caves and dank basements, according to my latest run-down in the fashion magazine bon. Subjectivity and personal stories are in, in Sweden, and it’s OK to draw and paint again. One a reaction on postmodern ironic dictatorship during the 90s, the other probably an effect of a fumbling, but increasing market for actually buying and selling art. And that people have grown tired of relational aesthetics and want to work with their hands again. I’m looking for a place to exhibit my architectural models, and some related pictures at an artist-run gallery in Stockholm this winter. And, of course, play something nice at the Älghult festival…

Today’s Cosmonaut: Valentina Tereshkova

> Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova (born March 6, 1937), Soviet cosmonaut, flew on Vostok 6 in 1963 to become the first woman in space.

Check out the hair on that space cowgirl: Valentina Tereshkova.

Also, check out the Wikimedia Commons link at the lower right. “Wikimedia Commons has more media related to:”

Also, if you click her (rather funky) portrait – what eyes! – you get a little nugget about Soviet media copyright:

> All works published in the Soviet Union before May 27, 1973 were not protected by International Copyright Conventions and are thus in the public domain in many countries. (In Russia some of these works are protected by copyright.)