Quick tab sweep

The great Interwebs have caused my tabs to expand, but here are a few bits I think a lot of you will find useful.
(Should’ve posted this about a week ago, but somehow, it never made it)

  • Joel Spolsky’s Travel Survival Guide – Joel recently went on a tour to promote FogBugz, and he comes up with some sensible tips. His air travel tips might be a little too technical, but the fact that they fly first class alone, interests me greatly. As someone that spends a great amount of time in a tin can, in coach might I add, I can appreciate companies that place you in business or first class. Large companies like IBM and HP generally have policies of placing anyone flying longer than n hours in business class – open source companies haven’t quite got the hang of this yet.
  • A month with FreeBSD, Zope and Plone – KageSenshi is a Fedora contributor, and currently works as an intern at Inigo Tech, the company started by my friend, Khairil. Main focus: Zope, Plone, and FreeBSD. The blog entry is interesting, because you can see that he enjoys interning for Inigo, is gladly willing to provide free publicity for Inigo, and it seems like he’s truly proud working for a startup. Thats a feeling a lot of employees in larger organisations don’t seem to have any longer – they just become corporate drones, IMHO. Here’s wishing Khairil and Inigo all the best in keeping the startup feeling alive and kicking.
  • Why Comp Sci Grads Can’t Hack (and why you need them anyway…) – Its refreshing seeing this in words, from someone else, other than me. Reading this, and the article that spurred it: Is Computer Science Dying? > Computer Scientists Can’t Program! can be pretty useful. A 3-4 year bachelors teaches you an array of languages and concepts, that in the end, one becomes something of a “know it all”, yet not an expert in any domain. There is just no room for you to become an expert, because the curriculum just isn’t free-flowing. Writing a library management system over and over again, in a different language even, just makes no sense at all, does it? (I picked on a library management system because Ditesh, Prabu and I had a good laugh about this yesterday).
  • CCPlus – This is Creative Commons at its best. I can do a By-Attribution-Non-Commercial, and also add a +Company Commercial License. This is what I’ve wanted for a few years. Now, when will Flickr implement this? In fact, sharing the original sizes for CC-licensed things on Flickr has always bugged me – I’m fine with everything but the original size (duh, I upload original JPGs). This will also be fancy for work, like training materials. I have a feeling I’ll be using this one very, very soon.

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