The Dark Side of TiVo

You know, TiVo has a dark side.

When you stop watching the stuff TiVo has recorded for you, say for a little more than a week, perhaps because you're alternating between watching season 5 of Babylon 5 and working on a chapter of a book, you end up with a huge backlog of good TV that you really want to watch, but you can never find the time to get through it all.

Curse you TiVo!

Simon on Maypole

There's a pretty good article up on perl.com about Maypole, Simon Cozens' MVC web application framework for Perl.

All in all, Maypole looks pretty damn cool, and this seems like a nice intro.

It's good to see the money from the perl foundation is being put to good use.

Nice Use Of Plucene

So Casey seems to have a heck of an idea on his hands...

Perhaps I'll get motivated and try to put together such a thing myself. It doesn't seem all that difficult...

(If you haven't guessed from SVN::Log::Index, I'm a big fan of applying search technology to random stuff.)

I Want One

Apparently Brookstone sells Arcade Games.

Anyone got 3 thousand dollars?

I could really use some Ms. Pacman/Galaga Action right in the comfort of my own home...

Contractual Obligations

Well, since it's in the contract and all, I suppose I should link to OSCON's web page and encourage you all to register ;-)

(No seriously, it is in the contract, when you sign up as a speaker the contract includes a clause where you agree to 'Co-promote' the conference, which includes placing a link on your web page if you have one.)

Faith In Humanity

I like it when I go to see a movie that comes highly recommended by several friends and I actually like the movie. It gives me some faith in humanity (well, in my friends anyway, the most important part of humanity), to see that people's taste in movies make some kind of sense to me.

When I go to see a movie my friends liked and I end up hating it, it always leaves me wondering, just a little bit.

For the curious, this was prompted by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I liked, and Lost in Translation and Punch Drunk Love, which I did not enjoy at all.

Playing Catch Up

So I spent the last week working out of our San Mateo office, and I haven't had time to post anything.

Fortunately, due to the magic of Stickies.app I've got a collection of neat things I've been meaning to mention, and here they are.

• Apparently there's a port of Valgrind available for FreeBSD. Seems to work pretty well.
• It looks like things are progressing on libsvn_fs_fs, the first non-berkeley-db Subversion filesystem.
• I got my first set of changes back from my copy editor, and I must say I'm impressed. It's amazing what someone who knows what they're doing can do with my writing, cause I don't think it sounded this good when I wrote it.
• I miss Wonderfalls already. I mean I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that FOX decided to just axe it, rather than letting it have a chance to build an audience, but despite the almost forgone conclusion, I'm still a little surprised. I mean honestly, do networks ever intend to start pushing anything other than reality-tv crap? If I want reality I've got it right here, I don't need a TV for that...
• OSCON has their registration page up. Sign up now and you can go see me talk.
• Fray and Eastern Standard Tribe are both incredible. Go read them.

Anyway, that's about all I had saved up.

Outsourcing: It's not that simple.

Just ran across an interesting article about how outsourcing and overseas development, as it has affected CollabNet.

Interesting stuff.

I'm not sure what I think about it.

I know there are reasons to move some stuff overseas, and it may have saved the jobs of many developers here in the US, and I know from personal experience that they're a good group of people and are trying to do the right thing...

That said, I don't know what I think about the fact that they don't hire entry level people here in the US because it just doesn't make sense on a cost basis, and I'm interested in all the questions about the culture differences making it difficult for the overseas developers to come up to speed and contribute as equals. I mean if you can't hire local people right out of school, how will they ever become the senior developers you are willing to hire? And if the overseas talent you do hire right out of school can't ever overcome the cultural issues to the point where they aren't afraid to challenge their higher ups, something that's needed in any senior engineer, where exactly does the next generation of leaders come from?

It seems like if everyone did this we'd be setting ourselves up for a big problem ten years down the road.