- National Day of Service
Somehow I missed Monday is being changed from just a holiday to a day of service. Unfortunately, I have to work but perhaps I can still figure out a way to get involved.
Seth Godin put together a great list of possible ways to make an impact in the world.
Obie and the crew at Hashrocket are going to build things for the Apps for America contest.
I don’t know what I’m going to do but I want it to be meaningful whether that is Monday or beyond.
- Flow Chart for Data Visualization
When you are wondering how best to show data, use this flow chart. [via]
- 2009: The Year of LinkedIn
In the current economic struggles, I think a site like LinkedIn is going to become more and more important. Sarah Lacy posts about this with the view of how LinkedIn’s engagement is going to up since more people will be looking for work and using their social contacts to find work.
- Starting a Newspaper
Seth Godin writes about he would start a newspaper with roughly six people or so. What about the institutions that have many more people already writing for publication?
When I was at The Times, a few of us had this idea, trying to capitalize on everyone’s belief that focusing on local news is the way for a newspaper to survive. Since everyone lives in a neighborhood, why not use that for the beats? Make sure everyone has a laptop which can handle the reporting as well as any video / photo editing that needs to happen as well as a camera which can also do video.
Editors should lay down the law that anyone seen in the office more than once a week would be in serious trouble. Instead, they should be talking to local businesses about what’s going on, interviewing local high school athletes and becoming a known entity at all city meetings. This would allow for local stories to be reported on in a much different way. Blogs could be started for cities that would become must-reads for everyone involved. A few times a week, have blog entries reverse-published into the print edition but overall make everything focused on the Web.
Would this work? Would this save a newspaper? Who knows but really at this point, what do they have to lose?
- New Year, New Hope and New Challenges
Tomorrow I start employment at YellowPages.com / AT&T Interactive. Though I’m very excited and can’t wait to get started, there is still plenty of sadness and disappointment about leaving The Times.
If someone were to ask me exactly why I was leaving, I couldn’t do much better than pointing them to this post by Jeff Atwood and drilling down to this quote:
Also, having programmers who believe that their employers actually give a damn about them is probably a good business strategy for companies that actually want to be around five or ten years from now.
I could go on and on, citing specific examples but really what would be the point? I’d burn bridges and embarrass the people I know and respect who are still there. That’s really not my style.
Instead I’ll just say I had an amazing time while working for The Times and I’m very proud of the work we did for Topics and the Archives. Those will hopefully stay around and benefit the world at large.
But that’s all in the past now. Tomorrow is a new day, filled with new challenges.
- Wrigley on Ice
Tomorrow at 10AM Pacific, I’ll be glued to the set, watching the Blackhawks battle the hated Red Wings. I’m pretty excited to watch this game though I did try everything possible to get back to Chicago for it. By not going though, I’m able to watch with the kids and that’ll be much, much better.
- Bridges to the Future
Kevin Matheny has written a really excellent piece at BusinessWeek, extolling the virtues of agile software development. I think it can be one of the toughest battles within a large organization but if you win and are allowed to be flexible, the benefits are easily more than any struggles you’ll have.
What this means for managing projects—including any project that relies on the Internet to deliver its value proposition—is simple: The longer your project timeline, the greater the risk that what you deliver will not be what you or your customers need when you deliver it. Not only are longer-term projects more likely to fail due to changes in requirements or conditions during the project, they’re more expensive. This increases the cost of failure. And because we can only do a few of them in a year, the impact of any one failure is huge.
- Hadoop 0.19 Overview
It’s been out for a month or so but Cloudera gives a great overview of the changes.
The things I’m most interested in are the ability to append to files in the HDFS, chaining MapReduce jobs and the inclusion of Hive.
- Lists to Check Out
At the end of every year, plenty of time is spent reviewing what has already happened. Here are couple of lists that are worth your time…
- Dynamic DNS
When I worked at CollabNet many moons ago, I used a laptop for my normal development but also used a desktop as a server for builds and testing things locally.
Since I worked from home, both were behind a router but I didn’t want to pony up money for a static IP so you never knew quite was the IP was if things were reconnected. Obviously this wasn’t a big deal when I was sitting at my desk home but became an issue when I was up at HQ in San Francisco.
My solution was to have a cron job run every hour on the server and compare its IP with the one it had an hour ago. If it changed, it emailed me so I would know.
I mention all of this because Jeremy Zawodny has done the same thing though he has made it much more Web 2.0-compliant by using Twitter.
I imagine I would do exactly that as well if I needed to right now.
