Who cares about Fermilab?

Who cares about Fermilab? Well, more accurately, "Why should I care?" I'm asked this quite frequently by my Wall Street colleagues, knowing that I had worked at Fermilab (for most of the 1990s). "Why should I care if some scientist loses his job?", they ask. "Can't they just go back and teach at a university?" or "What does it mean to me if the Higgs boson is discovered?" These questions may best be answered by going back about three generations.

In the late 1890s the British scientist Joseph John "J J" Thomson conducted a series of tests on the then mysterious cathode rays (e.g. electrons). His apparatus consisted of two charged plates inside an evacuated glass tube, a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). A generation after JJ Thomson, in the 1920s, the concepts of the CRT were applied to produce oscilloscopes. Twenty years later the Allied forces in World War II used CRTs, along w/ radar, to detect enemy airplanes. The television, medical imaging and computer industries, just a single generation later, would never have flourished without the ground breaking work of JJ Thomson. You would not be reading this article now without the efforts of the early pioneers in high energy physics (HEP).

Who cares about Fermilab? Perhaps the question should be "Why don't we care more?" Will the discovery of the Higgs boson have a direct and life changing effect on us now? Many doubt it will, but then again could anyone, in JJ Thomson's time, have predicted the life changing technologies that emerged just a few generations later?

Open Source Dreamweaver?

Here is an open source Dreamweaver type application I ran across this week: http://www.aptana.com/

Its designed to do HTML, Javascript, and AJAX development. Haven't tried this yet either, but it too looks quite promising.

Webex Alternative - Vyew

Interested in an inexpensive alternative to Webex for offering on line conferencing? Check out this site: http://vyew.com/content/

Haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising.

NetBeans 6.0 Saves Time

First a quick disclosure. I work full time for Sun Microsystems in Sun Learning doing writing, development, and instructional design work. So this may or may not influence my opinion of Netbeans, but it definitely needs to be out in the open.

I have been working a short project that will hopefully provide developer with a quick intro the Java Persistence API. My work at the start of a project like this consists mainly of me writing the solutions for the labs. Then I write the labs, then the content to support the labs. So right now, I'm doing a little EJB, a little JPA, a little JSP, and a little servlet coding. Been doing this all in NetBeans 6.0, and I gotta say, Netbeans 6.0 has saved me a ton of time.

I have always been a text editor guy myself. I feel most IDEs (not just for Java, for anything, HTML, Javascript, Perl, whatever) just get in the way and waste a lot of your time. And not only that, they tend to write poor code (just look at about any HTML gui editor). But NetBeans does some really handy things: good syntax checking, making sure you reference declared variables, checking return types to make sure they match with the receiving variable, nice code templates for common components. Little things, but really useful, cool stuff.

So if you are planning to do some J2EE coding, and you haven't given an IDE a try, take a look a NetBeans 6.0. You might like it.

What makes a good Programmer?

Found this article on referenced on Slashdot about what makes a good programmer. This is a great article. But the basic concepts in here are limited to programming. They could apply to any IT job or almost any job. You definitely want people who are passionate and willing to learn.

A couple things I would add.

#7 Fit

Will you get along with the person you are looking to hire? The person could be the best programmer in the world, but if they won't fit into your group, it won't work out.

#8 Exact Experience is Not Important

Some of the best programmers or writers I have run into/hired often didn't have a lot of experience or any experience in the technology area they were going to work in. But because of their passion and other attributes mentioned in the article, they picked up the new technology quickly and excelled.

In my last job hunt, I talked to a number of employers that wanted to know if I had worked with X technology. (Insert whatever you want to for X.) If I hadn't done exactly X, you could tell they lost interest very quickly. In fact, employers like this generally are not interested in you (fit, passion, ability to learn) at all. They just want a body that can do X. So if you flip this around, lack of passion from an employer may be an indicator to you that this is not a place you want to work.

Forget Eee PC check out the Everex Cloudbook

Thanks to Digg for the pointer to this story on the Everex Cloudbook laptop which is a 7 inch ultra portable just like the Eee. Coming soon to a Walmart near you January 20. They will also have a $399 regular 15.4 inch laptop running the gOS Linux.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention this CNet story on Shuttle offering a $199 Linux PC.

All our office apps are moving to the Web. As the first story points out, one wonders how long people will overpay for Vista PCs when they really only need one of these Linux solutions. A couple of years methinks, but it will happen.

Eee PC

If you haven't heard about the Eee PC from Asus, here is a good review from Yahoo News. I'm tempted to get one, but I would like to see it in person before buying one. Which might be hard to do.

At this point I really only use Windows to play games or if I have to use it for work. If I want to get thinks done, I much prefer OS/X or Linux. So I find this little guy very intriguing.