onfocus

An application similar to BookPost: MTAmazon. [via BlogPopuli]

Hope you're having a good holiday. I'm in Nebraska spending time with family (and spending it away from the Web). The trip here involved a 24 hour wait/drive through a blizzard in the Cascades. And a mad sprint through the Denver airport to make our connecting flight to Omaha. We survived, our luggage made it, we caught up on sleep and we're relaxing now. The best part is, I now know how to put chains on my tires. You learn something new every time you travel.

A house just isn't a home until the all-seeing TiVo eye is blinking with life.

Wondering what to get that politically active Lord of the Rings fan on your Christmas list? It's because you haven't seen the Bush is Sauran (save the Shire!) T-shirt yet. (You can order those shirts—and lots of other similarly-themed stickers, pins, and T-shirts here.)

Rafe Colburn posted some good thoughts about career planning for programmers (like me), and whether to go broad or deep with your skillset. He says, "Aside from my specific knowledge of HTML, Perl, Java, SQL and other things like that, I have general knowledge of what makes sense for developing applications, how to get projects finished on time, and how to evaluate and make decisions on technology." For many jobs I've applied for, these general knowledge skills like application design and user experience design rarely come up. In fact, I've often had to fill out a grid of numbers: years of experience with given technologies. I imagine they take these grids and input them into a computer, calculating scores for all applicants. I know it's not that cut and dried in reality, but when programmers are hiring programmers it makes sense that they'd come up with an algorithm so they don't personally have to focus on the task. I wonder if there's a way to hack this standard hiring algorithm, and which method (breadth or depth) works best for scoring.

I'm at a similar decision point. I've always worked with Microsoft technologies: SQL Server, Visual Basic, IIS, ASP. Do I dive completely into .NET? Or do I widen my non-general skillset to include more open source technologies? Based on my experience with applying for jobs, I should stick with Microsoft so the numbers on my application can keep climbing. That's frustrating.

Ben (on Six Apart's swanky new Six Log), discusses extending PGP-signing with a centralized verification/web of trust service. I agree that would be fantastic. But I don't think it needs to exist before implementing PGP-signing in open systems. Signing and verifying can already be done with desktop tools. If PGP-signing catches on, tools to make the process easier would be a void that someone could fill with a centralized Web application. It seems natural.

I think part of what makes this PGP-signing approach nice though, is that it doesn't rely on any one central service. It makes identity management completely decentralized.

I'm going to loose this site's status as a photoblog if I don't get out with a camera soon. ;)

I wrote a little tutorial about PGP-signing comments for this site. It has step-by-step instructions (with screenshots) for signing comments with PGP 8. It's a pretty simple process, but I thought the visuals might be good for anyone who's curious but hasn't tried it.

OJR: And the meek shall inherit our bylines. Mark Glaser discusses weblogs and their connections to camera phones. He also mentions their potential watershed moment could be the possible military conflict with Iraq. (Calling it Gulf War II may be cute, but it's not accurate and diminshes the gravity of the situation.) I disagree that this could be a big moment for weblogs. If everyone in Iraq was blogging when/if a war happens, then we'd see a watershed. Or if the US troops and policy-makers themselves were blogging.

I believe the real power of weblogs will be shown in their ability to relate firsthand accounts of participants in world events—as in the Venezuelan blog I pointed to on Sunday. It's the power of everyone being a witness and having a voice that will have the biggest impact. (Though a system of galvanizing attention is also very important...and Big Media has a handle on that right now.)

He takes a final jab at weblogs with his last line, "Welcome to the world of lowered expectations." I counter with, "Welcome to the world were intermediaries aren't enough."

Update: The Reuters Article (Blogs May Pierce the Fogs of War) he mentions makes a better case of how exactly weblogs may contribute during a war. But I think this article still describes bloggers as mini-journalists and misses the point about firsthand descriptions of events directly from participants.

Neat: AP Day in Photos.