Abraham Cruzvillegas was brought up in the self-built district of Mexico City, Colonia Ajusco. His parents built their own house (here), as did the rest of their community. Infrastructure and resources were all produced or sourced informally. Here's the DIY scene Cruzvillegas sets in his book,
Every weekend there was a festive air around the dusty activities of moving chalk, cement and sand; the women would cook and help to carry water, haul stones, bricks, bags of cement, buckets of sand or fizzy drinks, under a burning sun, in a challenging atmosphere moved by a spirit of busy and efficient collectivity. On what years later would become known as streets, the men and women of the community would stir the huge bowl of cement to the rhythm of cumbias, songs by José José, ranchera ballads, and there would be no shortage of beer, pulque or fruit juices to keep it all going.
Cruzvillegas has documented the evolution of his self-built barrio, producing photographs and a range of testimonies from the residents, recounting the relationship between the population & building materials — they often built from the natural volcanic rock on the site — as well as discussing the social, political & cultural formations that arose, imparting a great sense of what it must have been like to participate in the construction of what Mexicans call the ciudades perdidas (lost cities). His personal story is a kind of entry point for grappling with the roots, mechanics & repercussions of spontaneous organization in informal urban areas.
Between Friday and Sunday, while we were growing up, fragments of homes were built with a dynamic that some more than others joined in with. Water was brought in tins, buckets or tin cans originally used for vegetable fat, hung from a strong pole that bent in the middle - it was balanced across someone’s back so that it wouldn’t spill and he wouldn’t fall on the uneven ground. It was also brought on request in bins from Primera Parada (First Stop), so-called because at that time it was the only place where you could pick up public transport.
There were sometimes real conflicts over the monopolising of some specific service. Accidentally, the drinking water tap was in front of someone’s shabby little home; absurdly, they then became the ‘owners’ of the water. There was an owner of light, an owner of a telegraph pole, an owner of the street and even someone who owned the rubbish-always a source of excellent building materials.
Cruzvillegas has gone on to explore the aesthetics of this kind of construction, basing his art practice on notions of auto-construcción,
Windowless constructions, wooden shutters, tile and linoleum floors, walls with a plasterboard finish, plastic mouldings and aluminium windows, can be chosen on the spot, at a moment when the visual intention, the urgent need for comfort, functional ingenuity and lack of resources combine. That is why the lack of planning or the apparent stylistic incongruity of many self-built structures are also ideological, with a social and economic basis, even when apparently at their most frivolous. The formal configuration of the houses is first rooted in intuition, in the instinct for survival and the distant reference to what a decent life means, that is satisfying all vital needs, including the visual character of the day to day environment, its objects, its ornaments, and the physical relationship with things – ergonomics straight from the heart.
Century is almost definitely the best 'introduction' to the philosophy of Alain Badiou. Compiled from a set of lectures taking as their subject the 20th Century, it makes for some remarkable reading and gently introduces aspects of his wider philosophical vision. What I'm most struck by is the Lacanian influences and his ability to examine the Century in terms of what it says about itself. It's tantamount to the psychoanalysis of an epoch and illuminates his central thesis that the common thread behind the significant developments of the century is a passion for the real (where the 'real' takes a Lacanian meaning). His mathematically grounded ontology (based on Cantor-fuelled set theory), thoughts on multiplicity and Marxism are also subtly on display in these lectures.
Badiou is passionate, highly readable, succinct and immensely knowledgeable on the literature, visual art, poetry and politics of the Century. He makes seemingly simple, profound statements over and over again whilst examining Brecht, Breton, Mao, Mandelstam, Celan, Mallarme and others. If you've trawled through your fair share of Derrida and Foucault, Badiou is a refreshing, brilliant counterpoint with an astoundingly complete and mature ontology of his own.
I leave you with this drawing by Badiou himself, produced during a lecture entitled 'Truth procedure in politics':
Uncanny similarity in conduct between Microsoft, Scientology and Neo-con Republicans here, all going ahead and creating their own new realities. Conclusion: positions of such power allow organisations to disregard the actual state of the universe. By this logic, Microsoft is purely an ideology machine and no longer a technology company.
This illuminating 'architecture' drawing from Microsoft manages to pack six (awful) logos and two pieces of packaging onto one stupid schematic. If you're in Microsoft's marketing department, can you please do us all a favour and take extended leave? Please? And leave Visio alone. It's not for you.
1950 Encephaloscript EP 502 – 4 to 16 channel EEG, From the forthcoming 'Sleeping & Dreams' exhibition at the Wellcome Trust building
Henry Wellcome's esoteric personal collection of artefacts from the history of medicine is housed inside the renovated Wellcome Trust building on Euston Road (Euston Square station). The Trust has a huge public exhibition space alongside the permanent collection, currently exhibiting 'The Heart'. It's a great trawl through the history of medical science with outstanding exhibits displayed with care and attention. Included in the collection are objects as disparate as Ayurvedic anatomical drawings, centuries old Japanese dildos, collections of artifical eyes, a Bosch painting, 19th century medical chairs, a fully functioning modern heart/lung machine and a collection of prosthetic limbs through the ages. They have an exhibition on 'Sleeping & Dreams' coming up. Don't miss.
Listen to 14 Live Sets from Supersonic 2007 in their entirety. Supersonic was held in Birmingham in July and included folks such as Sunn O))), Jazkamer, Mogwai, Modified Toy Orchestra and Wolf Eyes.
Probably the most important British architectural undertaking of the post-war period, Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood's (never realised) Fun Palace would have changed the complexion of East London, at least for a decade (Price didn't believe in 'permanent' architecture) but I suspect far longer.
Essentially a re-programmable cultural space built on the principle of work as 'play', Fun Palace was 20-30 years ahead of its time, displaying an attitude towards technology that has since faded from a lot of architectural practice.
Fun Palace was composed essentially of a scaffolding housing massive rotatable walkways and movable wall components (two cranes presided over the building). Cybernetic regulation systems were planned (perhaps naively) to control everything from scheduling to programming to flow of people.
All images are from the Architecture Association.
Ironically, one of the sites earmarked for the Fun Palace in 1964 is now part of the Olympic Masterplan in the Lea Valley - an aquatic center will sit on the site. A plan whose 'cultural legacy' promises seem both vague and lacking in conviction.
Fun Palace, for all its utopian principles, was a project pursued with conviction and designed in detail. Its legacy lives on in various Fun Palaces since realized, including the Pompidou and Toyo Ito's Sendai Media Center (video torrent).
Now I know what Sontag was on about. I can't think of a better work of art that expresses what the dissolution of communism in Eastern Europe actually meant than this one. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Bela Tarr at senses of cinema:
FD & MLC: Do you use storyboards?
BT: No. Storyboards are stupid, stupid things... the story's only a part of the movie because the other things, time, rhythm, noises and...
FD & MLC: Music?
BT: Music, of course. And we are just trying to find something like a complex or total movie which isn't only the story...
FD & MLC: Thematically, your films' depiction of a world on the brink of catastrophe seems to link up with a lot of other films made lately, Pola X for example.
BT: I'm sorry, in the past four years I haven't seen anything.
We were joined by the lovely folks from MOO and Trampoline Systems for a BBQ on the Last.fm roof on Friday. I was particularly thrilled to meet Stefan, whose work on UpMyStreet, TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem has been inspirational to all those interested in social software on the web over the last decade. Thanks to everyone who came for what was a fun night.
Fatcat have recently released a compilation of Brighton-based Semiconductor's audiovisual work on DVD, and I must say it's great. I particularly like the 'Microclimates' piece, in which real landscapes are subtly altered. You may have seen a number of these pieces before, but it's well worth the compilation. More here.
Nestled deep in Jacques Attali's brilliant multi-disciplinary analysis of sound in human society, 'Noise - the political economy of music', i found this,
Inevitably, the statistical evaluation of the quantity of the representation will be adopted. The usage of music will be evaluated exclusively by polls determining the quantity of the music broadcast. Musicians will be renumerated according to statistical keys and treated as producers of a stockpile of undifferentiated raw material. This shift relates to a statistical reality: the disappearance of use-value in mass production and the final triumph of exchange-value.
Attali's fourth stage (after sacrifice, representation and repetition) is composition, in which he puts his money on technology liberating the music makers from the aforementioned scenario.
If you haven't been exposed to Attali's oft-quoted work, try this for a provocative hypothesis,
Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code.
For many years Dr.Rosenblueth and I had shared the conviction that the most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields. Since Leibniz, there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower.
- Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948
Bernd and Hilla Becher constructed a typology of industrial buildings in post-war Germany. It's an amazing body of work. They are the most productive collaborating couple i can think of. Lovegrove says, "industrial design is the art of the 21st Century", and the engineer in me, the one that correlates beauty and function, is tempted to agree. It's the same part of me, however, that fondly recalls the smell and thick layers of white powder inside ammonia chemical plants. Go figure.
The single most important piece of writing I read in 2006; Sennett's 1976 study of the public and private sphere through the ages (in particular through the last four centuries) is erudite, expansive, thought-provoking and profound. Defining the city as "the place where strangers meet", Sennett goes on to demonstrate the breakdown of the public sphere by the emergence of personality, the cult of the individual and the erosion of the boundary separating public from private. Sennett is a sociologist with the ability to study the bigger picture without getting lost in a statistical labyrinth. Here he takes a selection of detailed observations scattered through the centuries, probing deeply into the social relations of one particular era or location at a time (he dubs the technique "postholing"), and brings them into a wider ideological frame. It makes for highly interesting reading.
Sennett believes the public sphere has been in deep crisis for quite some time, that the public and private need be clearly distinguished for healthy social relations to exist, that personality is a narcissistic construct that threatens public discourse, that public space in our cities should be rich with interaction as it once was, that we endlessly seek the intimate in public interactions. The book includes an analysis on the social relations that brought about cosmopolitanism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, clothing and its evolving role in identity, myriad observations on the impact of urban planning on social interactions and a lot more.
I'm curious to know how Sennett views the hyperlinked 'social network' environment of the present day. He's talking in kensington next week at an RCA debate, so perhaps i'll have a chance to ask him myself at some point.
Anyway, essential reading for anyone with a commitment to social software (beyond the 2.0 hype machine).
This issue of Mono.Kultur is an interview with dance music icon Wolfgang Voigt (a man with too many pseudonyms to mention), with some really beautiful photography by Juergen Teller, designed by my friend Laurent, of Reala. It's a great little booklet. More here.
Those who've been following the story will know i had my last analogue camera stolen at gunpoint on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela. I've been digital ever since, but recently started hankering for printable media again. Should have snapped the Horizon Kompakt with a 120 degree lens but i want to blow these up, so opted for the medium format Holga. Both are from lomo.
On a photography tip, i recently picked up David Robinson's excellent series on themed landscapes (shot with a Horizon?), entitled Wonderland. Here's a shot from that collection:
For further reading on the subject try Baudrillard's America - in particular his fascination with Disneyworld.
Sometime between 3pm and 5pm every day, the Last.fm office celebrates Rittertime. We like everything about this chocolate, and more. Find out more here.
Why do we stop? The simple and honest truth is that we want to devote our time to other creative things. We still love music and we will still be active and supportive of the scene. We aren't in financial ruin, we don't think p2p networks have destroyed the music industry, we don't only want to listen to country western, we just want to take on other projects with as much love and intensity as we did this one.
- Joshua Kit Clayton, website announcement upon the closure of record label Orthlorng Musork.
All sorts of crazy good stuff going on at the Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park this weekend - like Cory Doctorow hanging out with Cecil Balmond and Rem Koolhaas chatting to Zaha Hadid and Ken Loach and Liam Gillick and a Thomas Demand show and open air screenings to cap it all off. More here.
Phew it's hot in London right now. Heatwave. So i came up with a sleeveless t-shirt design. You can catch me wearing this at Bash on Thursday (Plastic People, Curtain Rd, London) if it arrives on time. If you don't think the design sucks you can even get yourself one. Cafepress do direct printing now so the quality shouldn't be rock bottom. The line belongs to Anil Dash.
One of the few books on urbanism that's made a lasting impression on me. Ex-New Yorker and current LSE lecturer Richard Sennett on the design of social spaces. Mixing personal anecdote with broad observation, Sennett sketches out the history of the city, arguing for difference and exposure as fundamental elements of the urban experience. He seems to recognise in these elements the potential for social progress. I read this book about 5 years ago and found myself buying it just last month. Good ideas don't go away in a hurry. Also check the more popular book from this trilogy, The Fall of Public Man.
A weekend retreat for a classical musician in Japan. Girl plays the violin for Alain de Botton (a popular philosopher with a receding hairline) while he looks out on the forest. This is the scene.
De Botton's main observation in this TV program is that the trite aesthetic traditionalism of the British means most of us aren't living in homes that reflect the age we live in. We seem averse as a society to the idea of modern architecture, whereas the japanese effortlessly blend age-old religious values with modern materials and structures. For the Brits, when it comes to architecture, traditional is good and modern is ugly by default. Potential mass scale post-industrial fallout with design, subjugation to our nation's Most Great History or just plain apprehension. Not sure.
I made a noise video from my old handycam tapes. I've found myself coming back to it quite a lot over the past few days. Here's a low resolution excerpt(avi) captured on my digital camera (original still vhs right now).
Hard to think one company could come up with design excellence like my old handycam as well as design crimes such as the jewel case (what an environmentally damaging design, aside from its aesthetic and functional problems), all in one decade.
I have a phobia of jewel cases. I had to encode all my CD's to digital format just so i could throw them away.
This handycam features a single battery pack that plugs into the 8mm tape player, the camera and the battery charger as well. That's modular design. The whole kit comes in a metal handycam briefcase. Testament to what was arguably a golden age in technology product design.
Still works to this day (more than 20 years of use). Try saying that of your Sony Cybershot in 2026.
Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
If i'm going to buy a technology related product, then i'd prefer to buy it from a domain geek - someone with an almost obsessive knowledge of the technical details of said product. This works for me because i'm a particular kind of customer - one with an interest in tech. Generally, people like me want a domain geek because:
A domain geek does not want to sell you whatever 'specials' distributors are pushing on their franchised store in any particular month. He's in this for life.
A domain geek will call BS on anything that's technically mediocre.
A domain geek will teach you something about said domain.
A domain geek will give you an enthusiasts approach (cable? Here's a reel, cut it yourself!)
A domain geek will be keen for you to test out the technology in question before buying. After all, he would never buy anything without pulling it apart first.
Case in point: In search of a speaker system for my place I walked into a sevenoaks nearby and was met by an audiophile named Rob, with thick glasses and unhealthy looking skin.
The first thing Rob said was, "no we don't do computer audio, we do sound fields. You need to go somewhere else". You need to go somewhere else. There isn't a single better line in retail for boosting consumer confidence in you. He then proceeded to draw me two schematics on a piece of paper with an HB pencil. The first explained crossover (a simple concept, but i'm a bit of a novice when it comes to sound engineering). The second was a conceptual architecture sketch for a proposed system, based on 10 minutes requirements capture. During that time he had extracted a lot from me without my conscious knowledge; my usage patterns, the dimensions of the room, the issues i have with my current system, my budget and a number of other bits.
This weekend Rob set up the proposed system in their basement and i dropped by with a CD of anything i could think of that would call BS on a mediocre system:
We blasted these through it and it sounded ace. I walked out of there with some B&W components and an amp. Victory to the domain geek.
Not everything needs a software solution. Sometimes the human brain is the solution. I can capitalize my own words and decide when something is a bullet point.
I've been putting this one off too long. Finally time to see my folks. I'll be in india for two weeks (Mumbai - Delhi - Agra - Jaipur - Udaipur ++) with my favourite xxx physicist Alberto. Look out for pics on my flickr stream. I don't think i'll make it out to Bangalore or Kanpur, but i'll try to gauge the IT situation out there.
First off - if i was looking to hire, the answer would be
No. A brain and an attitude are the only pre-requisites.
About 18 months ago i decided to apply for an MSc in Computing at Imperial College, London. It's the best thing i've done in my short career programming.
I'd fought against the urge for post-graduate education for a couple of years because, well, i wasn't the academic sort. Not at this level at least. I didn't care for formal logic and proofs and such. I wanted to make things. I wanted real-world projects and constraints, because they were what made me tick. And anyway, if you're a good coder, you're a good coder, right? You teach yourself.
I'd taught myself upon leaving my bachelors degree (Chem Eng). I'd been freelancing on and off for about two years, but my formal programming concepts were messy, confused. I knew i could code, but i knew i was missing guidance - what technologies to pick up, which books even. So i thought - enough hacking, time for some proper stiff upper lip formal programming kicks.
I walked into Imperial 20 days before the term was supposed to start. They'd stopped taking applications 4 months ago. They were like, "you want to what?", and i was like "YES. LET ME IN.". I think i spooked the guy because after some mumbling he was all like "ok, see you in a couple of weeks" just to get me out of the office.
When I showed up I was afraid. Very afraid: I had a bunch of previous clients and a bunch of juicy contracts lined up. Now i had this full-time course on my plate and i'd only previously done web programming and matlab. We walk in and on the first day my tutor says,
don't work. if you work and study here you will fail. we are that hardcore. people think they are hardcore, but we are imperial. we are complete xxx.
Or words to that effect.
Gulp.
Imperial stuck true to their word. Some courses were taught at a frenetic pace (all fundamental SQL syntax taught in 2 hours - i mean pretty much everything) and pushed me to the limit, even with a couple of years of web development experience to lean on. But in the end i managed to pick up easily the best commercial work i'd ever done, whilst doing the whole academia thing. It was tiring. Nights were short (add to the commitments a 1+ hour commute to college). But in the end it was worth it.
There's some stuff you just won't force yourself to do. You won't force yourself to learn Prolog from strict first order logic fundamentals. You won't teach yourself finite state process models or assembler programming (probably. unless you're wozniak. or plain bored.). You sure as hell won't teach yourself to formally prove the logic of your code is correct, because you don't need to prove it to anyone. But doing all this informs you as a coder. I'm not saying i implement all the techniques i learnt - what i'm saying is i've got perspective on my code. For example, stack structures are fundamental at all levels of coding - but what better way of ramming home memory allocation concepts than the assembler stack pointer?
Our best tutor was Will Knottenbelt. He would belt out C code infront of us and debug live to reinforce concepts. I found out the practical approach is always the best to learn programming concepts. Darlington was also great - he's a long-standing contributor to the design of the Haskell language, which is what he taught us. He also has a 80 node fujitsu AP3000 super computer poking out of his office. Not many academics can say that.
OK so today i got my results through and it appears i did the near impossible - work commercially on a bunch of software projects whilst doing the full-time MSc thing. The nice folk at IC even let me do my dissertation in Ruby on Rails, which was great experience for me:
These results tell you that i make a pretty lousy sysadmin, but a pretty good high-level coder. And that i can code OK in real-time (labs). And that i can juggle. Juggling is pitching for projects 10 days before your finals and working off your tuition fees as they come in. Juggling is on all the job adverts so i guess juggling is in.
So that's it - MSc done and dusted and after all my apprehension to go strict on my code it was worth it.
Did it help me get my current job? The answer is no. Not one of the questions on the entry test would have been answered through knowledge picked up solely through the MSc. In other words, if i'd graduated fresh with a distinction but with no added personal experience, i would have flunked my interview completely and utterly.
Will give you the feaure-length version. It's more intuitive (natural language) than some of the queries you have to come up with on google search proper,
Showed up at a talk on DIY culture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts here in London, mainly to support a couple of good friends, Sheikh and Frances, who happened to be sitting on the panel. Aside from the irony of sitting around talking about DIY culture at an institution on the Mall (which is regal territory, in case you don't know London), it was worth the trip.
The panel consisted of,
A kid from Universal music who had a real guilt complex as to his role at a large media behemoth. He couldn't go two sentences without saying 'universal' and making self-deprecating jokes about being 'evil'. His name was Luke and he seemed nice enough.
A musician called Fink from the Ninja Tunes record label.
Nick Luscombe, a radio presenter (XFM) who's curating all the music events at the ICA right now. Very nice chap.
Frances, who edits a print magazine called Plan B.
Sheikh, who ran Absorb.org (an electronic music resource) for 10 years and now blogs about digital music
The concepts of a 'mainstream' and an 'underground' are laid to rest by networked culture. There are only open and closed networks. Everything is flat.
Top down control structures (like major labels) are unable to assure quality control in the same way bottom up structures can. In networked culture, quality bubbles up from the bottom, and the role of large entities (like major record labels) as arbiters of taste is undermined as a result.
Collaborative filtering in trust-based networks is the way in which networked culture will deal with information overload.
The printed press' hallowed notion of 'genre' is under threat through the processes of user-generated metadata that describe Folksonomy.
The concept of DIY is less relevant to networked youth culture today as it was when we grew up (with movements like Hardcore). DIT - Do It Together - which finds it's roots in the Open Source movement's model of production, is a far more relevant paradigm today.
Bit-torrent is currently the most powerful distribution technology thrown up by the web.
DIY culture was always about control, from production through distribution, performance and promotion of cultural product. It enabled people to have control over the end-to-end process of communicating through cultural products. A network of trusted people could be used to oversee all aspects of production/distribution/retail.
DRM - Digital Rights Management - is a survivalist legal attempt from a desperate culture industry to preserve a revenue model (content ownership) which is at odds with a new medium for culture (digital networks).
The new revenue model for cultural content in digital networks involves syndication of content with embedded, trackable advertising.
Update: OK so i turned off Trackbacks due to spam headaches, so here's me manually telling you that Sheikh posted some more on this over at failme.net.
It's sounding more and more like the role ascribed to the Philippines in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon - a pivotal technology hub of the new world with the required legal and tax framework to let real innovation take off.
The statement from the Mauritian government itself spells it out for you,
Mauritius is now poised to become a cyber island and to serve as an info-communications hub in the region. The vision of an information society dates back to the early 1990s. However, recent top level commitment coupled with the creation of an enabling environment has given Mauritius a new impetus. It is Government's declared policy to make ICT the fifth pillar of the economy alongside sugar, textiles, financial services and tourism.
So i'm having lunch with a friend - a technology consultant - who tells me he's working predominantly with Quangos right now. This prompts me to search the definition of the word immediately:
n. pl. quan·gos
An organization or agency that is financed by a government but that acts independently of it.
One of the projects this friend of mine is involved with is the regeneration of the Battersea Power Station site. Mammoth in scale, the new plans include a hi-tech Media Center he says might turn out like a Media Lab for London. Watch this space.
1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it.
3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it.
4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.
Mandays are pointless. Mandays are bad. Mandays don't exist.
Here is the dictionary definition of a manday:
An industrial unit of production equal to the work one person can produce in a day.
It's a poor way to quantify a programmer's output because it's a variable with a huge range. Time-based performance measures in software development are flawed and kind of old school. Same with Lines of Code (LOC). As Negroponte recently pointed out in his AIGA conference speech,
If programmers were paid by the amount of lines of code they removed as opposed to added to a piece of software, the world would be a better place.
The dissertation format in Computer Science completely ignores the nature of software development today.
The academic establishment needs to change this.
A dissertation comprises an individual piece of work, authored, documented and executed by an individual.
This scenario is neither a fruitful nor desirable one in software development today. The scenario, in short, does not exist outside the academic context.
Youth culture's DIY ethic evolves into an all inclusive DIT (Do It Together) mindset. Open source occupies an ideological void left by DC Hardcore, and the FSF adopts a stern straight-edge stance.
The Rebotcast Network get synths to read you RSS feeds. Great for the blind i guess, and just as handy for commuters with a blind hatred of public radio. I'm using it to catch up with BBC world news as i lunge to work with my mp3 player.
Lately i've been keeping an eye on the job market. I've got agencies ringing me up the whole time, asking me to quote buzzwords down the phone. I keep saying 'ruby' instead of Oracle/.NET/whatever they want to hear. The agency guys go quiet at the mention of ruby. Something like, 'hang on a second, let me jot that down - how do you spell that?'
I've got job alerts coming at me from all over, most targeting the keyword web. I did a quick and dirty text analysis of ten of these job alert mails, each one holding circa 100 IT jobs. Below are the results, with term frequencies expressed in font size. They give an interesting idea as to recruitment buzzwords right now.
Conclusions:
Time to learn some Java everyone :(
Intelligence was mentioned just once. No need for it. Same with 'nice'. No need for nice. Meanwhile degree, creative, experienced and corporate came up loads.
Yesterday afternoon i wrote to all my local MEP's (about 10) using the most excellent Write To Them (UK) site, which stefan over at whitelabel helped to put up a while back. It makes it easy to fax/email all your local representatives. On Mac OS X you can also fax any pdf out to whichever number you please (check 'Print' in any application).
What was i faxing all these people? My views on the European Software Directive which is up for the vote at the European Parliament this week. Tomorrow (Tuesday 5th July) to be precise. I had to cram it between a load of work so i only had to time to write this, but hopefully it will be read by my local reps, because i'm a member of their constituency (it's pretty pointless faxing/email any rep outside your constituency - you will largely be ignored):
I am writing to express my concern regarding the Software Patents
Directive, as approved by the European Council of Ministers, which is
up for a vote either on Tuesday 5th July, or the following day.
I believe the directive could have severe consequences for those
working in my field of software development.
It will particularly threaten the growth and existence of startups and
smaller software companies, which would otherwise see a very fruitful
period over the next ten years.
I am a young, self-employed software developer and British Citizen. I
have ambitions and goals whose very existence are threatened by this
directive, for needless and economically unsound reasons. I believe the
Directive could crush what may turn out to be a wave of entrepeneurial
activity in the field of European software.
I would urge you to consider the position of the foundation for a free
information infrastructure ( http://ffii.org/ ) on this issue, and take
a quick look at the history of Software licensing, where
straight-forward copyright has worked thoroughly well so far.
In particular, I am writing to voice my support, as a professional in
this field, to the proposed Buzek-Roccard-Duff amendments to the bill.
These are summarized at
http://wiki.ffii.org/AmPlenSummary05En
And can be seen in full on the European Parliament page
A call to bloggers. Start writing 'how to switch from MS ____ to ____' articles. Simple. Effective. Some ideas:
How to switch from Hotmail to Gmail
How to switch from MSN Messenger to a Jabber account
How to switch from Office to Open Office
How to switch from ie to Firefox/whatever.
How to switch from Entourage/Outlook to Mail/Thunderbird (ahem) *
How to switch from Frontpage to Notepad/BBEdit (um)
How to switch from Windows to Linux (uh, perhaps a list of links here will do)
How to switch from Intel to PowerPC (quick! in the next 12 months)
* I'm doing Entourage -> Mail.
They should cover data import/export and the enhancements that come as a result of the switch. They should cover both Mac/PC users if applicable. Screenshots would be nice.
This all sounds basic to developers, but the most important thing here is that MANY PEOPLE are still locked on MS software, mainly due to having an abundant amount of information zipped up in it. I'm amazed every time I see a perfectly smart person using Hotmail. They are often unaware that some software in the world is designed with the user's well-being, flexibility and freedom in mind. All they need is a little guidance and they'll happily switch. Tutorials exist, but this iniative could be useful if approached the right way.
It'll take a developer 30 minutes to knock up an article. It could switch dozens of people. You will sleep soundly for an entire week. Come on, don't tell me you're busier than me. I won't believe it.
The deal is to aim this at a completely non-tech audience without patronizing people.
Everyone can obviously post on their own blogs but I'll try to aggregate links here. The idea is to synchronize the posts to go up on an MS Reshuffle date. I'm suggesting an MS Reshuffle date of 15th July, 2005.
If you know anyone who might be interested in participating in this please direct them here.
