InfoWorld is hiring a developer

InfoWorld (an IDG company) is looking for a software developer to join our development team at our headquarters in San Francisco (South of Market near South Park). This is a 6-month assignment, on regular payroll.

We do most of our coding in Java with some Perl thrown in, and are the type of shop where vi and emacs are generally used. Our backend is nearly 100% Linux-based.

We're looking for someone with 3-5 years actively developing with most or all of the following technologies:

• Java
• MySQL
• Oracle
• Linux
• Apache
• XSLT
• Resin app server
• Javascript/HTML
• Verity Ultraseek
• Movable Type / RSS / weblogs

Nice to have skills:

• Salesforce.com sforce API experience (API)
• Percussion Rhythmyx

As you might expect, the folks who work at InfoWorld are exposed to new technologies on a daily basis, so it's an exciting and fun place for developers to work. We have quite a bit of interaction with the folks in our Test Center, as well as our IT colleagues at other IDG companies in our building like PC World and MacWorld, so it's all tech, all the time. Please send resume and cover letter to Derek Butcher (our director of engineering) at derek_butcher (at) infoworld.com. Please put “Weblog” in subject line if responding from this post -- I'm curious to see how well weblogs can attract qualified candidates versus other methods.

Ecto / Hotel@MIT / Treo travel tips

Since I'm going to be spending a lot of time on planes over the next week and a half, I finally decided to give ecto a try for offline posting to this Movable Type weblog. So far, so good. I've been using it for all of ten minutes, and while I was originally just looking for a solution to do offline posting, ecto already seems like a nice frontend for online posting as well.

Right now, I'm actually in Boston at the Hotel@MIT. Of course they have both wireless and wired connections in every room, but the decor is more interesting. This is a hotel with a serious techie aesthetic (I would say "geek aesthetic," but this is broader). Above the work desk in the room there is a large black and white photo from the MIT Museum's Historical Collections with this caption: "Physics students working on a study of the efficiency of ventilating fans by the electrical method, circa 1893." The two men in the photo are hacking their then-analog world with a vengeance -- lots of belts, wires, pulleys, and various instrumentation. Then there's the blanket on the bed, a photo of which you see on this page. On the far wall is an architectural drawing of a County Depot, a student thesis drawing by William Baldwin Dowse from 1874. Finally, there's a silly New Yorker-style cartoon in the bathroom in which a man in a lab jacket (with a giant telescope behind him, so this is clearly some kind of observatory) speaks to his boss and says: "It's always the same thing -- the sun, a few clouds, and that's it. I'd like a transfer to the night shift." Hardy har har.

This is my first trip with my new Treo, and I'm liking it more and more. I more or less settled on Basejet as my e-mail client. While I don't see Basejet mentioned very often, I've found its IMAP client to be rock-solid and the interface is very intuitive. I also found a fabulous alarm clock program called Bob's Alarm (only $5). I tested it at home for a couple of days before leaving on this trip, and you could use it as your regular alarm clock if you wanted. No more worry about misconfiguring an unfamiliar hotel alarm clock when you're jetlagged (and alarm clock misconfigurations are widespread enough to have inspired a story line in a Seinfeld episode). Not to mention that a Treo is a lot more fun to carry around than a boring old travel clock.

Quark and QPS

A couple of weeks ago, David Minehart sent me a link to a very helpful article about the supposed new attitude at Quark. Craig Cline of creativepro.com describes Quark's old attitude very well in the opening of the piece, but ultimately offers some hope for content publishers:

Quark's fall from grace was largely of its own making - a combination of contradictory and some would say punitive policies, customer service and tech support horror stories, and a perceived arrogance that just rubbed people - particularly egalitarian Mac users - the wrong way. And last but not least, Quark absolutely dominated the professional publishing market, and we all know how well people like near monopolists (can you spell M-i-c-r-o-s-o-f-t?). No matter that behind the scenes Quark has listened to the marketplace, has seen that the future lies with workflow solutions and not just point shrink-wrapped products, and has quietly put together an impressive suite of multi-channel publishing system products that appear to deliver what the market has been asking for. There are just a lot of people out there who are pissed off at the company.

It's no surprise, then, that the company has taken this as a wake up call and is moving into overdrive to rectify the problems of its recent past -- and to get a jump start on inventing its future - with one of the most complete implementations of a multi-channel workflow publishing system that I've yet to see. (read the rest here).

I really hope this is true and Quark delivers for the sanity of publishers everywhere. As it stands right now, our use of QPS 2.1 (Quark Publishing System) creates a really aggravating problem for our Art department: QPS 2.1 only runs under OS 9, and because QPS integrates with software like Adobe Photoshop to provide QPS check-in/checkout functionality within Photoshop's menus, our Art folks have to run a version of Photoshop that runs under OS 9, meaning they can't take advantage of the latest version of Photoshop. Theoretically, we could run OS X on their desktops and run QPS and Photoshop in OS 9 under Classic mode, but we would still be stuck running OS 9 versions of Adobe software to preserve the QPS integration (and running lots of RAM-hungry apps in Classic mode just doesn't work well). Even worse, Apple stopped shipping systems that would natively boot into OS 9 a while back, which means not only are we stuck with using earlier versions of software like Adobe Photoshop, we're stuck with older machines that boot into OS 9. This is a silly and frustrating place to be. (If I'm missing something and we could be handling this differently, I would love to hear from you.)

I met with folks from Quark a couple of weeks ago and they seem very well aware of this conundrum. Here's hoping that a year from now, the old Quark will be a distant memory.

Getting into the Treo

I just got a Treo last week. Originally, I was concerned about the size of the thing, but after Kevin McKean (our CEO / Editorial Director) got one, I decided to give it a try.

As I adjust to this new device, tips from any Treo users out there are welcomed, particularly advice on:

• a solid IMAP mail client
• the best hands-free device

Tabbed browsing in Safari

Oops. The Apple community has spoken, and I realize the error of my last post in not recognizing that Safari has tabbed browsing (right there on the page I linked to in my last post). Duh. Kevin Railsback, our IT manager and principal Mac advocate, delicately informed me over IM that I was overlooking this key feature of Safari.

I had never delved into the recesses of the Safari menus, and tabbed browsing is a clear option. RTFM, I guess.

I still couldn't order Giants tickets with Safari, which is reason enough to switch (and I still love the search plug-ins on Firefox). This could be the rush of software first love, though, and maybe I'll be back in Safari's arms next week.

Colin Scroggins also made some important points in an e-mail response to my post:

I understand your appreciation for Firefox; however, I would like to point out that Safari has tabbed browsing as well! As a web developer, I have found that Firefox does not work very well in cooperation with development tools such as DreamweaverMX 2004 or TopStyle Pro. Firefox's tab behavior does not work as well as Safari (which opens each new window on its own tab rather than replacing the previous site selections) when used on a Mac with NetNewsWire. Mozilla seems to play better with others than does Firefox when used in conjunction with apps such as FeedDemon. I am sure these are things that will be worked out eventually; however, for a developer, these are a deal-breaker and are why I still prefer the Mozilla Suite over what is otherwise a nice browser.

Firefox rox

After reading Jon Udell's column about Firefox a few weeks ago, my interest was piqued, but I kept using Safari. Then over the weekend I tried to order tickets for an SF Giants game and when I tried to select "CA" in the State box on the e-commerce form, the drop-down box was all blank. I abandoned my shopping cart and downloaded Firefox to redo my transaction -- the experience was so compelling that I've switched (to switch your default browser in OS X, go to the Preferences menu in Safari and look under the General tab).

The tabbed browsing is a revelation. I had experienced tab browsing with Opera a while back, but it didn't seem particularly compelling back then, probably because I wasn't blogging at the time. Now it makes a huge difference -- all the context-switching that takes place when doing a blog post is not much of a barrier in the tabbed environment. Being able to add search plug-ins in the upper right corner is really nice, too. Google search is the default, but I also added AllMusic.com to my search box. Hundreds more plug-ins are available. Very nice.

More on server-side aggregators

Jon Udell points to the Rocketinfo RSS Reader, another web-based RSS aggregator, noting:

Doubtless there are others too. An implementation of one of these licensed for behind-the-firewall use, as Chad suggests, would be handy.

And there are. Chris Chen wrote to me via e-mail:

Read with interest your blog post on Bloglines. I work from multiple sites as well, so I'm interested in server-side RSS aggregation. I tried Bloglines, but it just doesn't seem to work as well for me as what I'm currently using: Feed on Feeds, by Steve Minutillo. Check it out at http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/. Works great for me, and it might solve your problem with subscribing to internal RSS feeds.

Feed on Feeds requires PHP and MySQL.

I particularly like Steve Minutillo's straightforwardness about his motivations in developing Feed on Feeds (though I suspect he's being modest since he has at least one happy user other than himself):

It is classic "itch-scratch-ware", I worked on it just long enough for it to be usable for my purposes, and then stopped. There are rough edges, and the code is awful. This is my first project in PHP. However, now that it's out there, if anybody else finds it useful, I'm willing to improve it, and learn in the process.

That's better than most of us do, Steve.

Kurt Cobain

Paul Beard reminded me that yesterday was the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death, which also reminded me that Cobain's death was the first time in my life that I got breaking news first from "amateur" journalists via the Internet. Back then, I wasn't reading a blog, I was reading alt.music.nirvana on Usenet. I can't find the original post, but I recall it saying something about a body being found at Kurt Cobain's house in Seattle, and the author suggested that it might be Cobain. This was hours before I heard the news from any major media outlet. At the time, Usenet functioned much like the blogosphere does now, but without the conveniences of RSS and HTTP (and despite the usability issues in various RSS aggregators, we've come a long way from trn).

Through the magic of Google, I found a post of mine to alt.society.generation-x about Cobain's death. Ah, youth.

More Bloglines feedback

Overall, Jeremy Zawodny feels positively about Bloglines (as do I), but points out some of the annoyances he finds with Bloglines. I would add one serious annoyance from where I sit: you can't subscribe to internal RSS feeds behind your firewall. Right now, InfoWorld has three internal weblogs that we don't want to publish to the outside world:

• Online strategy
  
• Technical documentation for InfoWorld systems
  
• Internal IT updates
  

To keep up with these, I have to either run a client-side aggregator inside my firewall (not a huge deal, but it's better to have all of your RSS feeds in one place) or periodically check the internal sites for updates (defeating the purpose of RSS). Perhaps Bloglines should license their software for use on the intranet? Then I could VPN in and pick up all of my RSS feeds from a web-based aggregator inside our firewall.

Linux on the desktop

Apparently the folks at Xandros are doing a good job of getting the word out about their Linux desktop distribution, with two near-simultaneous mentions this week. Dan Gillmor's experience with Xandros was similar to the my own experience as described in my weekly InfoWorld column.