OSCON talk proposals

The deadline for proposing ideas for OSCON talks was Monday at 11:59 p.m. Naturally I clicked Submit for the final time not long before then, at 11:56 p.m. Note I said “final time,” implying more than one—I decided to go all-out and submit three ideas, in hopes that at least one will slip through. For the curious, they are

Design and publish beautifully and professionally: How to create a professional-looking document, using Scribus and Inkscape. Many people who read this probably don’t realize I spent four years working as a page designer and copy editor at newspapers. I continue that interest today as editor of a newsletter about open-source activity for the Open Source Educational Laboratory at Oregon State.
Community dynamics in a large open-source project: Problems, solutions and conundrums in Gentoo. The funniest (and saddest) part is when the same things begin to repeat themselves, and nobody else remembers last time it happened.
Open-source software in the biosciences: Where we are and what we learned on the voyage: The cruel joke of scientists as programmers. As a grad student in biochemistry at OSU, I’ve had to deal with more ugly software than many of you can imagine. But at least more of it is open source now, right?

Anyone else submit proposals? I’d be interested to hear what they’re about.

Learning PHP, Ajax, MySQL

I’m taking over a webapp at work written in PHP+MySQL. I’d like to add some Ajaxy goodness to it because the UI is an ugly POS with lots of pointless page loads for little things, etc. Funny thing is, I have basically no experience in any of these technologies.

Suggestions for the best way to learn them together or separately?

Thanks!

IQ tests, searching, intuition and patterns

I’ve been reading a series of posts about sensemaking on the Creating Passionate Users blog, and part of it (perhaps the part on intuition) reminded me of IQ tests. Why, you ask? Because every one of those quicky IQ tests I’ve taken that you can find online or at the bookstore has basically two components: a weird amount of trivia knowledge (vocabulary, etc) and pattern recognition. Is that really intelligence?

In my experience, a large part of being able to recognize a pattern is experience, or seeing something like it in the past. In the same way, past experience influences my searching strategy. I’m the guy people ask when they’re trying to find something online, because I do a better job of finding what they want than anyone else around. I think the only reason I do this is because of my experience—I recognize the kinds of phrases people would use, and I tie together fragments of remembered knowledge. For example, instead of searching for what people ask me about, I search for what I think they’re actually looking for. See any parallels to stuff like UI design? Jon Udell blogged about trying to teach people how to become a good finder by following his thought process. But I think that’s impossible, because nobody possesses the same skill set and the same knowledge.

In summary: past experience determines future success.

Old-fashioned names

I came across a fun link on a post from one of my regular feeds, which gives story ideas to journalists for the next day’s paper. The US Social Security Administration actually lets you look at the popularity of names over time, so I put mine in over the past 100 years.

The Y axis is popularity ranking, and the X axis is the year. I was #56 when I was born, already about 50 years past my name’s peak at #6 in 1934.

Why I don’t like podcasts

Podcasts initially seem like a great idea. But there are problems with them:

The speed at which you listen is limited to the speed at which people talk. I’m a very fast reader, and I do a lot of skimming. When I’m stuck at the pace at which people speak, not only do I get bored easily, but I also waste time.
Skimming, or skipping intelligently, is nearly impossible. With sound only, it just doesn’t work. If you’ve got video as well, you can at least provide captions or some sort of text on the screen to let people know generally what’s going on. Also, if you’re able to somehow index the sound and have a player that understands the indexing, that helps.

That’s my final thought before heading off to vacation.

Off to Minnesota

I’m heading home to Minnesota for the next week to spend Christmas with family. The laptop’s coming with, and I have high hopes of getting lots of work done. Friday will probably be my last day online until the 30th.

I will still read only non-list email on my BlackBerry (more because it can’t handle IMAP subfolders than anything else), and if I’m really bored, feeds via Google Reader Mobile. Happy holidays!

Migrated to overlays.gentoo.org

Thanks to genstef, I’ve finally moved my overlay hosting to overlays.gentoo.org. The new way to grab a copy is:

git clone http://overlays.gentoo.org/git/dev/dberkholz/

I’ll update the other READMEs and such floating around shortly, and attempt to set up a cron job to sync over to the old location daily or so. Flameeyes, you’re also a committer. Anyone else who would like commit access, let me know and give me a patch or two to stuff I care about.

Smartphone choice

I finally chose the smartphone I wanted. Turns out that I got the BlackBerry. The main problem with the BB was lack of IM, but Google Talk recently became available for it. Through Google’s Jabber server, I can connect to any IM transports on any other server.

Another driving force was cost of data service. With Cingular’s sky-high prices ($55 for unlimited PDA data + SMS, $10 cheaper for a BB), I ended up going with a pay-as-you-go SMS plan to drop my per-month costs to $35 for data. Through T-Mobile, unlimited data + SMS only costs $30, and the network’s just as good in Corvallis and Minneapolis.

I’m sort of looking into getting the BB unlocked, then using a small loophole to get out of my contract. Cingular’s raising SMS prices from $0.10 to $0.15 per message (sent or received) on January 1, which constitutes a material change to the contract. I have 30 days from then to drop it.

If money were no object, I probably would’ve gone with the Cingular 8525, which the local store just got in a few days earlier and sold for $450.

A revolution in music

The Pittsburgh library will now “check out” music over the Internet for free by streaming it. It handles the copyright issues by only allowing as many simultaneous streams of a song as they own copies. If a song on your playlist is checked out, it will just skip on to the next one until it finds an open song. Think for a minute about the implications of this.

What if places and people outside of libraries did it? Everyone could get the fullest use of music. Since it’s impossible to listen to all your music at once on your own, get a lot of other people to help you with it! You could store all your music on a server that keeps a record of how many copies of each song you own, and anyone could go in, set up a playlist and start listening. Take the idea even further. What if someone set up a legal, peer-to-peer network to stream music? You could create enough upstream bandwidth by streaming from multiple locations, and each network could keep a per-node (to avoid centralization) song database.

It’s unclear to me what effect this would have on record sales. Oddly, I have a feeling that sales of one-hit wonder albums would stay about the same, while sales of CDs with more good tracks would actually drop.

Thanks to Rick for the info.

Smart phone recommendations?

Anyone got recommendations for smart phones to choose or avoid? I’m looking into picking one up. The main requirements are solid Internet (thus, a nice screen) and typing that doesn’t suck.

My provider is Cingular, so my options are:

The BlackBerry is pretty much out because Cingular’s variant only has proprietary BlackBerry IM, no AIM, Yahoo, etc. I’d appreciate opinions on the rest. Looks like the Samsung and Treo are both around $199, but the 8525 is $399. So if that’s the way to go, make your argument very convincing.

Thanks!

Update: I got the BlackBerry.