The Crack Team » 2004 » February

Weather Closings

archangel — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 02:50:58 +0000

News 14 Carolina had a brilliant idea: let businesses notify them of snow storm closings via a web form, and they’d display them over the air in a bar at the bottom of the screen. Fully automated, very efficient. No human supervision whatsoever. Click here to see how it turned out.

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Peak Oil, or We’re All Gonna Die

archangel — Sun, 22 Feb 2004 23:36:56 +0000

I’ve recently been made aware of the concept of “peak oil”, which says that since there is a finite amount of oil on earth, we’re eventually going to reach the top of the bell-shaped production curve. After that, prices increase dramatically, and since so much of what we need to exist is tied to oil, we return to pre-oil population levels. In other words, about 4 billion of us die off.

I learned of this through a somewhat alarmist web site called Life After The Oil Crash. It’s basically a scare-the-bejesus-out-of-you piece, but does seem to cover most of the arguments against it. If you check the breaking news section, there are a couple articles by respected news organizations that support it.
The controversy isn’t whether oil will run out, but when. A new study reported by CNN states that oil reserves are overestimated, and we’ll see peak oil about 2010. Even if it’s 2035, as some think, it’s one of those things we have to start worrying about now. Clean forms of energy, like wind and solar energy, just won’t cut it. Even if we cut back, there are too many of us, and we use oil way too much (it’s critical for agriculture, plastics, etc.). Dirty forms of energy, like coal, do too much environmental damage. Our best bet is helium-3 fusion reactors, which don’t exist.
Ok, here comes my conspiracy theory. Bush’s top energy guy is aware and concerned about peak oil. If he’s convinced Bush of this, it explains:

Invading Iraq, which allows them to renegotiate oil contracts, now with American companies.
Ignoring the Kyoto Accord, which allows us to utilize coal more. That’s more harmful to the environment, but delays peak oil.
Increasing spending on research for alternative energy.
Creating a base on the moon, which is chock-a-block with helium-3.

There are several reasons he wouldn’t admit all this:

Avoid panic.
Avoid an oil stock crash (Shell downwardly revised their reserve estimates, and several oil stocks went lower).
It makes America look selfish and imperialistic.
Incumbent politicians don’t like to be the bearer of bad news.

Like I said, it’s a conspiracy theory, and perhaps the hardest thing to believe is that the Bush administration (or any presidential administration) would be so forward-thinking.

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Every Geek Has His Day

archangel — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 06:19:21 +0000

The technical Oscars took place on Valentine’s Day, and Jennifer Garner made a lot of new friends. She now has the undying love of Hollywood’s best and brightest, in addition to the CIA [USAToday.com]. My favorite quote from the CNN story:

“The audience cheered loudly whenever she pronounced a particularly daunting technical term properly.”

Are we party animals or what?

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Bombay Companies

archangel — Sun, 08 Feb 2004 22:39:16 +0000

Wired has an excellent, very thorough article on the outsourcing of computer jobs to India. It’s required reading for all current and future techies. And accountants. And financial analysts. And every professional who could work from home. The bottom line? It’s time to become a higher evolutionary.

The loss of jobs isn’t going to happen overnight, but it’s going to feel that way. Now I find myself dispelling beliefs I once held:

Myth #1: Government workers and defense contractors are safe.
I think if you find someone who has worked in the aerospace/defense sector long enough, they can tell you that wasn’t true before India’s tech boom (remember Falling Down?). The problem is that the government changes both the amount they spend on defense and where they spend it. 9/11 was a good example of this. Those programs that could show they improved homeland security received the lion’s share of funding.
Typically, you’d enter the commercial sector during the lean times, but that will be increasingly difficult, especially if you’ve been working with obscure or nonstandard technologies. The same goes with switching to another aero/defense project. As the competition heats up, and DSS gets its act together, your clearance won’t matter as much as your expertise. During the boom times, any programming experience would do; now they’re thinking, “I can get him 6 months earlier than the uncleared guy, but he can’t obtain 5 years of J2EE experience in that time.”

Myth #2: System administrators need to stay here.
Some do. However, that argument misses the big picture. For example, at my last job, we had a few sysadmins. Care to guess what their purpose was? If you said, “Support the software engineers (who will be outsourced)”, bully for you! As the software development jobs leave, they’ll take the supporting admin jobs with them. Yes, there are a lot of admins who support servers more than people, but I think this will just open up a market for intelligent remote system monitors. I predict we’ll be hearing this conversation repeatedly:

Manager: $40K for a remote admin package? Are you nuts???
Vendor: It will allow you to replace your $80K admin with a $12K one.
Manager: Will you take a check?

If you combine this with server collocation and platinum support from your hardware vendor, it’s still not as good as what you had before… but it’s probably good enough.

Great. I’m depressed. Now what do I do?
Raise your game. While grad school has been a virtual career requirement for most of the science and engineering fields, computer science has been spared for some time. Now, as specialization becomes a critical employment factor, it will be much harder to substitute experience for education.
     Now, I really feel for those with a family and mortgage to support, it’s going to be hard for them to switch careers or take the time needed to improve their skills. They’ll have to make some sacrifices, including saving enough to cover extended unemployment.
     For the rest of us, I think this is the best part. It gives many of us the perfect excuse to do what we love, guilt free. If you’re already doing that, I think that’s the best sign that you’re going to make it through this industry shift just fine. You’re already in a state of continuous improvement, so this won’t require a lifestyle change. This will merely weed out all those who don’t truly love their chosen field. A lot of folks jumped on the comp-sci bandwagon during the Internet boom, looking for cash instead of a career. They’re not going to make it. But I have a lot of hope for the Class of ’06 computer science graduates who stayed the course because that was what they were meant to do.
     If, like me, you really don’t love what you’re doing, I have faith that you’ll excel once you start. Go for it. Finally realize that dream of becoming a poetry professor at an all-girls school.

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First Post

archangel — Sun, 08 Feb 2004 19:29:53 +0000

After much struggling with the misnamed eZpublish, I’ve decided to switch to Movable Type. Maybe now I’ll get some writing done.

eZpublish has the most non-intuitive template language I’ve come across (this coming from an OO Perl programmer), and has no formal documentation – only what users feel like contributing. My guess is that they hope you’ll buy their consulting services.

It’s a shame, because it’s quite powerful, and allows you to set the visibility of every site object based on users/groups/roles, which is perfect for members-only content. I could have probably gotten by with one of their pre-built example sites, but even that would have taken a while to configure, and it’d look like, well, an example site. My sense of aesthetics and individuality (read: elitism) wouldn’t allow it.

Hopefully people will visit the site, even without the nude horse galleries.

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