On the "Skills Shortage"

Companies: You cannot complain of a "Skills Shortage" if you expect the moon and sky for "skills requirements" (esp. if you refuse to accept anything but a full match), are hiring for one person to fill the workload of three people, and pay below-market value.

There wouldn't be a skills shortage if you were willing to A) pay a decent wage for what you're asking for (if you must have a perfect fit), B) plan to hire someone "close enough" (especially with cross-compatible skills) , and/or C) provide training.

(Hint: if any of the people related to the hiring process mention recession or unemployment as reasons that people should be willing to accept lower pay, right there is where you're hurting yourself, and are part of the problem.  If you do hire someone, they will leave you as soon as a reasonable offer comes.)

"On Crap Detection" By Howard Rheingold (O'Reilly Media)

I found a video series titled "Crap Detection 101: How to Distinguish Good and Bad Information Online" by Howard Rheingold (available from Oreilly Media), and was instantly intrigued.  When the opportunity came up to see it free as part of the Blogger Review Program, I felt that it would be a good choice.

The short version:

If you are a cynic and/or have been on the net for any significant amount of time, this series probably isn't for you.  If you have children, it's a good idea to watch this so you can frame how you want to talk to them.  If you know older (non-web-savvy) people getting on the net, perhaps for the first time, buy this for them.

The main points that I boiled this down to are:

• Be aware of Bias
• Look into the source
• Wikipedia is a place to begin research, not end it.  (See previous)

Accounting for my personal biases, and assuming the intended audience, I give it a 4/5.

The Long Version:

This video series by Howard Rheingold (UC Berkeley and Stanford University lecturer) addresses the basics of protecting yourself from misinformation and fraud while going about your daily online life.  Broken up into 11 videos (including a short intro and conclusion video), this series is probably short enough for someone new to the material to take in all in one shot.  Personally, being a cynic and long-time internet user, I found it to be slow and fairly basic.  However, I am not his target audience.

Mr. Rheingold addresses his target audience as pretty much everyone who is encountering the internet for the first time.  That is tricky, however, because even my four-year-old son has used the internet.  A few years ago, my In-laws decided to get off of WebTV, and I was to be the instrument of their transition.  (No, I didn't have a choice.)  Had this video existed at the time, I would have purchased it for them without hesitation.  I had given them a brief list of warnings ("No Nigerian prince is going to ask you for help with a financial transaction" and "Don't click on links in emails that claim to be from your bank, even if it looks real"), but I think that the presentation of this material was better.

Being a parent of youngin's, I think that they're going to grow up with a strong sense of cynicism.  This video series may help inform you about topics to bring up, but anyone younger than middle-aged will not be able to sit through the video.  The tone is conversational, and the pacing is fine, but Mr. Rheingold is just not a good fit for a younger audience.

The production and presentation of the video gives me mixed feelings.  The video looks great.  But it looks to be done in Mr. Rheingold's home office, which I find I have mixed feelings about.  It's certainly better than the blank light-beige conference-room wall common to most informational videos, but the posters and monitors in the background are distracting.  Rheingold is joined by Mark Brokering of Safari Books Online, who asks leading questions on each topic.  Rheingold's sound level is fine, but Brokering's is often a little too low.  My final criticism on the presentation is that Rheingold references his laptop, especially when demonstrating a site.  When he does this, it seems to distract him, and he forgets what he was saying.

I think that this series covers very well the idea of "Being aware of Bias".  In fact, I think that it is mentioned in every section.  There is an excellent example early-on regarding Martin Luther King, and he covers ways to begin looking into the people presenting information to you.

Later on, he touches on some sources to leverage to investigate urban legends, hoaxes, etc, which I think is especially helpful to the target audience.

I especially appreciate that he addresses Moral Panics ("Protect the Children!"), and by pointing out that censorship is against the founding ideas behind the internet, and that censorship would destroy it.

I think that two topics that really deserved treatment were neglected (or under-served).  The first is Privacy Settings.  I think that making people aware that there are different levels of visibility to the internet (especially when using social media sites/apps), is of crucial difference.  To this day, I see faux-pas on Facebook where an uncomfortable topic is posted on someone's Facebook Wall instead of in a private message or chat.  (Personally, I don't like Facebook having that information at all, but sometimes it can't be avoided.)

The other topic, somewhat related, is Over-Sharing.  My sister is 10 years younger than I, and when she first set up her Facebook account, her information was widely-viewable, and she'd posted her phone number, mailing address, and talked freely about her comings-and-goings.  It took yelling at her a few times before she finally fixed some of the issues, but at least some of those were taken down.

In Conclusion:

All in all, this series is a great resource for older Net-Newbies, and a decent starting-place for parents.  But if you've been on the net for some time, it's probably not for you.  All in all, I give it a 4/5 stars (attempting to account for my biases.)

-Waldo

Indie Game: The Movie Soundtrack

The digital edition of "Indie Game: The Movie" was finally released today.  I was disappointed that the movie has been on-tour for so long before this happened, but I understand and acknowledge that they had their reasons.  I look forward to seeing it.


But this blog post isn't about the film.  As a special "thank you", Jim Guthrie's soundtrack for the film was released today as a bonus I believe to the Kickstarter backers.  For this I am grateful.


Let me start by saying that I had purchased his previous album for the Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery game "The Ballad of the Space Babies", and I have found that to be fairly amazing.  There are a several tracks that I simply love, and I think I've listened to it every day for the past two weeks.


Unfortunately "Indie Game: The Movie (Soundtrack)" has not resonated with me thusly.  In fact, it has left very little impression with me, (other than one song reminding me strongly of Sunny Day Real Estate.)  My biggest disappointment is that I was hoping to experience a similar reaction to BSB, but instead it strikes me as a bunch of incidental music.  It may complement the film spectacularly, however it is not an album that I think I will ever sit down and listen to and experience again.


I mean no disrespect to Mr. Guthrie; this is but one man's impression.


-Waldo


UPDATE: I've just finished watching the film. It is a wonderful story wonderfully told, and the soundtrack fits in perfectly. That doesn't change my earlier opinion, but the soundtrack does indeed suit it's intended purpose.

Adding Unix to Active Directory

Thanks to the Many Roots of All Evil Rants blog for pointing out Likewise-Open to me.  (I tried to post this thanks as a comment, but commenting is either broken or they've given up on notices that the blog owner has comments set to be reviewed.)

Somehow I had never come across Likewise-Open, but basically it takes all of the fiddly bits of adding a *nix machine to Active Directory.  That is correct! No more do you have to mess with NTP, Kerberos, Samba, and Winbind!  Huzzah!  Finally, someone wrapped all of that crap up!

In the article, the poster (who is unnamed, otherwise I'd use it) noted that he was unable to ssh using domain credentials, but could locally.  I found this to be true initially, but it appears that he may have been suffering at the hands of syntax.  I was able to get ssh to work from a *nix host using any of these syntaxes:

ssh 'domain\user'@sshserver

or

ssh "domain\user"@sshserver

or

ssh domain\\user@sshserver

As we're a Windows shop, I'm using mRemoteNG as a connection-manager, and it wraps the username in doublequotes automatically, so simply domain\user works there.

Being a Ubuntu server (I'm moving to 12.04 Precise Pagolin), I prefer to keep to the sudo mentality, so I've added this line to my /etc/sudoers:

%ernstinfo\\domain^admins       ALL=(ALL) ALL

This could be done better in terms of granularity, but that's a yak for another day...

-Waldo

On File Paths

This has bothered me for years, but when Microsoft FINALLY dropped "\Documents and Settings" for "\Users", I rejoiced.


Right up until they forgot to fix "Program Files" too.


Microsoft, here's how to do it without breaking backwards-compatibility: C:\Programs.  Then, an alias named "Program Files" points to Programs.  And add a warning to MSDN and the Packaging and Install tools to stop using retarded conventions.


(Incidentally, I did this when installing Strawberry Perl because it can't handle living under a directory with a space.  On one hand, I can't blame them, but on the other ...really, guys?!


Besides, you don't need a directory off of the root of the drive.  Stop with that C:\Strawberry nonsense.


-Waldo

Dealing with MicroHDMI

My new laptop for work is great, with one significant exception: the only digital external display port is MicroHDMI.

While I'm sure that the engineers were well-intentioned, I can't believe that they used it much, as it's a pretty flaky connection. When you plug it in, it feels like it has made a secure connection, but nothing registers until you fiddle with it.

After a few minutes of frustrated fiddling, and 30 seconds rummaging through my desk, I found the perfect solution:





The humble binder-clip.

If it looks like it's pushing the cable at a severe angle, that's because it is. Move the clip so much as an eighth-inch away from the connection and it disconnects.

I intend to write more fully on my Samsung Series 9 (2012 model, NP900X3B) later, but I must say that I am reasonably happy with it. The trackpad is a bit touchy compared to Apple's, and the keyboard takes a little getting used to, but it performs solidly. I do with that Samsung had selected Mini-DisplayPort / Thunderbolt instead.

-Waldo

On Children's Toys

This weekend my Mother-in-Law was commenting on how her grandchildren don't care for their toys, because they have so many.

I replied "I know! All I had was a piece of string for 6 years! I loved that string..."

-Waldo