Google Pack is a suite of programs for
Windows XP users that bundles a number of useful applications and keeps
them updated — free of charge (the non-Google companies providing the
apps are paying Google for the free advertising). The pack
includes:
applications
Desktop
Pack Screensaver
Explorer
applications
Personal
Firefox
Edition
(I posted this to The Farm and Tucows Developer — I also thought I’d post the warning on this blog as well — Joey)
“Nazis.
I hate these guys.” — Indiana Jones
The
worm is a worm that runs on the Windows platform. It began
infecting computers worldwide back in November and goes by a number of
names:
The
source code for the Sober.Z worm suggests that it
will launch another
attack on January
5th and 6th to coincide with the 87th anniversary of the
founding of the Nazi Party. On these dates, PCs infected with the virus
will be instructed to connect to numerous servers to download malicious
code that will likely send out German and English language email hate
messages.
Tucows encourages network administrators to
protect themselves by blocking domains believed to host the malicious
code, which
are:
Be
sure to tell people you know — especially if they aren’t tech-savvy —
not to open suspicious email, even if it appears
to be from a sender they know.
For more details on
the Sober.Z worm, consult these
sites:
For the past couple of months, I’ve been engaged in the
annual Tucows tradition of drafting my portion of the strategic plan
for the department in which I work, Research and Innovation. This time,
we decided to go big and say that I’d make 2006 “The Year of the
Developer”. It may sound a little bit on the hokey side — perhaps it’s
a bit too much like those feel-good-but-do-nothing “mission statements”
that some companies are fond of posting in their waiting rooms — but I
think it’s a pretty good catch-all for all our plans for developers for
the coming year.
Resources
A development platform like ours is only
as good as the resources available for it. Without giving you what you
need to develop on our platform, it’s just a big lump of inert code.
Some of the new developer resources we’re working on
are:
Developer
: The go-to site fordevelopers who are writing code that either builds upon or integrates
with the Tucows platform. You’ll be able to get documentation, client
code, examples, how-tos, tips and tricks and news and announcements
from this site.
Tucows Developer is at developers.tucows.com.
wiki where developers can find and share information about developing
for the Tucows platform and development in general. It is meant to
supplement the documentation and allow people to share knowledge that
would otherwise be lost. All sorts of people will be contributing to
this wiki, from me to Tucows sales engineers to developers who build
upon or integrate with the Tucows platform.
Hacking is at hacking.developers.tucows.com.
resurrect the old “API Helpdesk” site, which allowed developers to test
calls to the Tucows API and see what the XML looked like. It was an
independent project of one of our former sales engineers, and it was a
useful tool for those trying to debug their client code or write new
clients from scratch. We’ve got the old code now and we’re putting
together an official version that we expect to have online in the next
few days.
We’ll also be making fixes to
current resources, including:
Documentation:
I’ll be working with thedocumentation department to ensure that documentation is easily
accessible, available in the formats that you want, complete and
useful. We’re also working on ways to make it easy for you to know when
the documentation has been updated.
Developer
documentation can be found at Tucows Developer’s
“Documentation”
page.
a number of improvement to the Tucows Discuss forums, including better
navigation, an improved RSS feed, a search function and keeping the
discussions going.
Tucows Discuss, our discussion forums site, is
discuss.tucows.com.
Farm
: The Farm is our blog devoted to softwaredevelopment in general. In addition to fixing up the layout, we’ll also
have more book reviews, interviews with developers, downloadable
goodies and new series on topics that you find interesting such as Ruby
and Rails, JavaScript and AJAX, security and using web
services.
The Farm is at farm.tucows.com.
Outreach
We’ll be doing a lot more outreach this
year too. Among our plans:
see me attending as many developer gathering as I can, such as the
monthly BarCamp meetings
in Toronto (where Tucows’ head office is). I’m also working on plans to
hold developer meetups from local ones such as last
year’s OPML meetup to out-of-town gatherings at various
conferences such as the ISPcons in Baltimore (May)
and Santa Clara (November), South by Southwest (March), the EDC Developer Relations
Conference (February) and at least one of the upcoming Ruby
on Rails conferences.
posting interviews with developers doing interesting work — whether
it’s on the Tucows platform, or something completely unrelated. Another
idea we’re working on is providing free banner ads on The Farm to developers with
weblogs or sites that link to us or who develop applications that build
on or integrate with the Tucows
platform.
started giving small gifts — not just Tucows merch, but Amazon.com
gift certificates and such — to developers who went “above and beyond
the call of duty” in developing applications or libraries or writing
documentation or tips for the Tucows platform. We’ll be doing more of
that this year, as well as sponsoring development contests with even
bigger prizes.
Place?
We’re going to borrow some tricks from the
Agile Development crowd and start right now, implementing “Year of the
Developer” as an ongoing initiative. Over the next few weeks, you
should see the start of this year-long process and we hope you’ll like
the results.
If you have any comments or suggestions
for “Year of the Developer”, we’d love to hear them. Leave a note in
the comments, or send me
e-mail!
Advent Calendar Day Seven: Even people who took some math in unversity
have a little trouble defining what “calculus” is in layperson’s
terminology. Ask a techie what calculus and s/he’ll probably tell you
something along the lines of “it’s the branch of mathematics that has
to do with derivatives and integrals”, an answer that is meaningless
unless you also cover the definition of derivative (rate of change of quantity in relation to the rate of change in another; for example, speed is a derivative of distance) and integral
(even tougher to define — “the inverse of a derivative” or “the study
of the accumulation of quantities” is the sort of answer that I fumble
for).
Even less inituitive is calculus itself. I have spent a good chunk of
school solving problems like what the water level in a conical tank filling
at a quarter-litre a second is after 15 seconds, and let me tell you,
that’s one of the easy ones. Calculus is so mind-bending that in most
cases, it often becomes an exercise in attempting to turn hard-to-solve
integrals into
simpler ones by memorizing or looking up substitution rules like
this one:
Worse still, we sort of take it on faith that the above identity is
true. Give me a pen and paper and I can quickly whip up an
layperson-friendly illustration that shows why 3 times six equals
eighteen. With a little more paper, I can draw a couple of diagrams
that show why the sine of 30 degrees is .5. But a layperson-friendly
explanation of the identity above? I’d have to look inside my old
calculus text in order to work out just the standard math proof from
first principles, never mind a layperson-friendly explanation.
That’s the problem that all calculus teachers face: it’s a tough branch
of math. It also gets pretty dry, especially when you hit that part of
integral calculus where you have to learn all kinds of substitutions
like that identity shown above. How can you keep students motivated?
Bikini Calculus represents one attempt to solve this problem. The
premise is simple: have women in skimpy clothes teach calculus, padding
the lesson material with cleavage shots and sexual innuendo.
(Okay, it’s not going to get heterosexual girls into calculus, but
what’s wrong with a little hot girl-on-girl action in mathematics? What
are you, some kind of homophobe?)
Here are a couple of screen captures of the video in which the
exponential rule is covered. Here’s Paige explaining the derivative of ax with respect to x:
…and here’s Jamie Lynn explaining the corresponding integral form. You have to credit them for being thorough.
And there you have it: today’s Advent Calendar goodie, from Newton
and Leibniz to Paige and Jamie Lynn’s to Accordion Guy to you: the gift of calculus.
I present two videos:
If you’d like more, there’s a DVD featuring more titillating calculus lessons and a bonus “jacuzzi and pizza interview”.
Yes, it’s quite obvious that neither Paige nor Jamie Lynn would know a Riemann Sum
if it bit either of them on the ass (I’ll let you enjoy the mental
image for a moment) and yes, their cue card reading skills could use a
little work. But these women have taken time from their presumably busy
schedules of waiting tables, shopping at H&M
(my wife likes to call that store “Target for whores”) and possibly
lapdancing to improve the general population’s knowledge of
mathematics. Even Stephen Freaking Wolfram himself couldn’t do what these ladies do (and even if he could, you couldn’t pay me to watch him flash his man-cleavage).
(Note: There’s probably a good “right-hand rule” joke in here somewhere, but that’s linear algebra, not calculus. We have standards here at Accordion Guy, you know.)
…I’m rockin’ it old school with some more Advent calendar action for you programmer types:
Okay, perhaps this isn’t the Chick tract parody that Cory Doctorow and the EFF would produce, but DRM Will Ruin Your Life and Kill Your Dog [133K GIF image; some swear words] is pretty amusing…
Accept copyfighting into your heart and you shall be saved! Click the image to read the whole comic.
[P.S. In case you’re not hip to the lingo, “DRM” is short for “Digital Rights Management“.]
There’s more to being a programmer than just programming: a lot of the job involves “managing up”. I do it with Boss Ross, Boss Ross does it with his Boss Noss,
and Boss Ross’ Boss Noss does it with the Illuminati/Mason/Alien
Conspiratorial Triumvirate, often with a suitable sacrificial goat and
a PowerPoint deck.
But seriously, folks — over at the blog I get paid to write, The Farm,
I’ve started posting articles that you, a techie, can take to
management. These articles are marked with this unmistakably suit-y icon:
The first of these articles is Ajax Linkdump,
a laundry list of some recent interesting articles covering the web
programming paradigm of the moment. The last item in the list points to
an Adaptive Path white paper which explains Ajax to management,
including some answers to the all-important question: how’s it going to affect the bottom line?
Feel free to use these “Suit-Friendly” to make your case, support your
arguments or just to make it look as if you don’t spend 30 minutes doing
actual work and rest of your day looking at pictures of women with no
pants on.
Don’t say I never did nuthin’ for ya!