After getting off to a slow start behind Hulu in the professionally made content arena, it looks like YouTube is finally getting serious. Depending on the relevance of the content they negotiate, we could finally have some serious competition in the streaming media market.

This is all well and good, but both services now fail in one department: the iPhone. I don't know whether it's AT&T or YouTube and Hulu, but it is simply inexcusable to continue having no access to this content on my mobile. I understand that flash seems to be a buggy, bloated POS, but somehow regular YouTube videos play just fine. I wonder how well Boxee will handle this "new" YouTube format?

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It's nice to see a human side to the people who are now the industry leaders. Take this story about one of Bill Gates earlier ventures called the "Traf-O-Data." Aside from having a terrible name the idea actually ended up as a moderate success. The first real demonstration, however, ended in Mr. Gates begging his mom to explain to the demo participants that it actually worked earlier.

As we all know, Microsoft was later founded and the rest is history. Just because one idea doesn't pan out exactly the way you hoped it would is no reason to completely give up. Technology changes rapidly and new opportunities show themeselves all the time.

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The founders of The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of breaking copyright laws and sentenced to 1 year in prison and ordered to pay damages to copyright holders. We can all sleep well at night knowing that the boogeyman got his.

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I am a college graduate. I received my degree a number of years ago and I have been working in my chosen field for most of the years since my graduation. I attended 3 different schools as I floundered about trying to decide exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I learned very little that was of real value. This begs the question: why do most people continue to push kids to go to college?

Attending college or not was never really in question for me, I was placed on the path very early on. There was no debate about it...I was going. I took all of the advanced placement courses offered in my school and decided on the vague profession of "engineering" as my aim. I knew basically nothing about what I was doing and I was about to spend massive amounts of someone else's money (scholarship!) on this decision. Naturally I hated everything about these courses within two months of beginning and I found my way out of there and eventually into information systems.

Somewhere over the years there seems to have been a shift in the perception of education in the US. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when this shift started, but the results are evident. You may have seen the "Education Connection" advertisements on television. According to them you will potentially earn ONE MILLION more dollars over your lifetime with a degree than someone without. Has college become merely a glorified vocational school, is it sliding into complete irrelevance, or is everything A-OK?

Technical education has started to present a very unique set of problems for higher learning institutions. Look for posts about these issues later on, perhaps as part of a series.

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This looks like an outstanding piece of backup software for Linux. According to Lifehacker, all of the crontab and rsync commands are set for you by a great UI. Currently I run OS X as my home server but Linux on my laptop, and while Time Machine is very easy, there aren't many options you can set. I'll be installing this tonight to see how well network share backups are supported.

UPDATE: Well, I've followed the steps outlined in the comments section of the Lifehacker post to update synaptic with the backintime sources. Installation was a breeze, and backups are simply a copy of the files and directories chosen to your selected location. Very simple as advertised. The interface seems intuitive and easy to use. I still need to configure a network location for testing, but based on the location selection abilities of the application, this shouldn't pose any issues. I have also not tested restore capabilities yet.

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The EFF has a great example of how people fear what they don't understand. This one is amazing. How many of us have ever used an operating system that was "a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on" before?

EVERYONE. All of the popular PC operating systems have this functionality. How do they know he didn't just have a command prompt up in windows maximized to full screen? I just don't understand how this type of insanity continues to be perpetrated within the court system. Blatantly invalid technical details seemingly run rampant.

I think any law activity (warrants, trials, etc.) that includes anything with this much technical detail should be reviewed by someone with at least a slight inkling of what the jargon means. This abuse would have been caught almost immediately if the officer or judge had any training as to what they were attempting to do in this arena.

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I have been in the software development industry for a number of years now and I consider myself a moderately seasoned developer. I have experience with several different languages and I try to learn something new every day. I have seen most types of code, and sadly a large majority of it is crap. I understand that sometimes you simply must make an app work and work now, but there is no way that this happens often enough to merit what I've seen throughout my career.

I'm not under any delusions about the causes of this bad code; there are a million reasons. The deadline was too short. The requirements were too vague. We just hired a whole group of COBOL developers to write our enterprise level Java app because they were cheaper (and no, I'm not joking on this one). While these are likely the biggest issues, there is another that could be stopped before it begins.

This post got me thinking about the topic. Besides the code I've actually seen and had to deal with, I have now been part of more interviews on the "I've already got a job" side of the table than the "please hire me" side. The years of experience listed on the resume usually mean nothing at all. Occasionally you will hit on the right combination, but normally there are numerous caveats that come along with those "15 years of .Net experience and an expert in SQL." The saddest part of this is the developer in question generally believes they truly have loads of experience they are bringing to the table. 

If someone with the attitude of knowing more than anyone else in the room is brought in, it can easily become toxic to a development team. Any insight that comes from an outside source is quickly objected to even before any discussion begins. Where is the motivation for anyone else on the team to put any of their ideas forward in this situation? This will lead to poorly executed projects and crap code in most cases, and this could have been prevented on the front end.

How can you get through to someone who falls into the perpetual novice bucket?

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While most of my professional work has been ASP.Net based and quite IE centric, I've found that utilizing Firefox for troubleshooting makes development far less tedious. Here are 15 add-ons for Firefox designed to assist with development work. I have used a number of these in the past and they were quite helpful.

The ones that look the most interesting to me are LinkChecker, Web Developer, FireBug and Colorzilla. If I were a PHP developer I'd check out FirePHP for sure.

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Here is a very interesting dissection of a series of posts about why programmers act the way they do under stressful situations. The basic gist is that stress can be a good thing and a motivator if it is not overdone.

The problems arise with chronic stress. From the series linked from the blog post above: "Fear becomes conditioned and habitual." When you enter this mode it is VERY hard to break out of it. You begin to worry about every imaginable boogeyman and you'll have no luck getting into a focused state, which is necessary to write any type of good code.

As much as it would be a wonderful asset, I do not perform my best work while under loads of stress. When I'm programming, I generally need time to think through a problem to come up with a good long term solution. When the stress of a very close deadline looms I tend to throw out whatever code will suffice just to meet the deadline and end the stressful situation. I had a bad project a couple of years ago where the deadlines were already extremely tight and the client was allowed to add all sorts of change requests to those deadlines. This resulted in LOTS of long hours and poorly implemented ideas.

Overall, the biggest overlooked problem facing software developers is "the interruption." It comes in many shapes and sizes and is extremely unpredictable. It seems to be a bigger issue in what is considered to be an "open working environment," where everyone is visible merely sitting at their desk working. This is an invitation for anyone to walk up to you and break your concentration at any time. The only method of fighting this seems to be wearing headphones, even if they are turned off...and even that is only moderately effective.

For the best productivity from developers, try out what is going on at Fog Creek Software. For most businesses this is a pipe dream, but I believe it would make a BIG difference in the ability of developers to deliver quality products. The best quote from the page above: "A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office, a great computer, unlimited beverages, an ambient temperature between 68 and 72 degrees (F), no glare on the screen, a chair that’s so comfortable you don’t feel it..." Many developers instead must try to focus through various project status meetings in their sitting area, conference calls right by their desks, and project management people who need updates multiple times per hour.

Imagine if we had the ability to focus on a problem and actually figure it out.

Update: I've written more on this topic in my post "On Your Working Environment".

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If you have young kids and you would like them to begin working with computers, this will interest you. Qimo is based on Ubuntu Linux and is made specifically for children aged 3+. According to the site there are very few menus to use and the OS is designed to be very intuitive to youngsters.

I'll be attempting to install this on a laptop well below the recommended specs for my daughter. I'll post an update in the next few days to let everyone know of my success or failure.

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If you have fastidiously been avoiding IE8 for one reason or another, it's time to listen up. You will be upgraded by automatic updates...at least if you run XP or newer.

I'm kind of torn on this. If this were the process all for newer versions of Windows software, perhaps the malware/virus situation would be far better than it currently is. Changing things this late in the game, however, could cause some issues. I know of some applications still in production environments that are still only compatible with IE6/7, and they will need to be updated prior to this roll-out.

Overall this should be a good change and a worthwhile upgrade. IE8 should be quite a bit more secure than 6 or 7. Once users get used to this type of upgrade path, development for the latest and greatest platforms could be quite a bit easier. No more specific code for out of date browsers!

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This should be a very high profile alert if you currently use VMWare for your virtualization needs. Evidently someone figured out a way to execute code against the host machine from inside the virtual machine. I believe we all thought that this was inevitable, but it is still quite unnerving to hear about.

The Software Developer Times has more info. Who knows how long this has been going on? I do know of numerous companies who use VMWare to run production services, and this will likely have a HUGE impact on them.

How often do you think of patching virtualization software anyway? It's one of those "set it and forget it" software installations, at least in my experience. I guess it's a good thing I'm a developer and not a part of an infrastructure team!

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