Programmer Hierarchy PDF

Update:
Most traffic to this page is from reddit
It also made the frontpage on digg

measuring open source popularity.pdf

Of course, in time honoured Web 2.0 style, viral marketing is a big part of the plan. Their hordes of office slackers are, as we speak, supposed to be emailing each other to say “Have you seen the Girls in Bras video? It is hilarious.”

There are a few small problems with the plan though, the video is not hilarious, and the people behind it seem to have only passing familiarity with some standard internet practices. For example, the comment field in their blog looks like this whenever I look at it:

Did you used to think the internet operated 24 hours a day? So did I. I am not even sure what time zone that 9-6 is in, but apparently there is only one.

Some of their stuff is quite good. I liked Half day man, and they have money and a marketing budget behind them so being initially a bit thin on content will presumably be easy to solve, but it is hard to run a major website when you don’t seem to understand the genre conventions and when parts of your technology suck. I hate the Flash video player they are using. It does not cache content, so if your connection struggles you can’t pause and wait for the download to catch up. You just have to watch it stutter.

I also keep seeing [an error occurred while processing this directive]. What is that? A server side include error message, or an early version of ASP error message? How very Web 1.0.

* and I am not only saying that because I own lots of their stock on Alexadex, or because they have a really cool logo

Update: OfficePirates.com was shut down on September 1 after failing to find an audience. Personally, I only noticed six months later because I had a broken link.

From time to time, somebody suggests that filtering internet content at various points would be a good idea. Invariably, the argument behind it is “Think of the Children. Who is looking out for our children?”

There are all sorts of reasons why the concept is flawed, but one big gaping problem that most people seem to ignore is that filtering software is dumb. Human classifiers would make errors, but manual classification cannot possibly cope with the volume of existing and new content, so filtering software has to try to classify material based on a set of rules. This is always going to fail, both passing content that will offend and blocking inoffensive, important content.

This is not a very sharp photo, but it is the screen of a public internet terminal. The site I am attempting to view in my own twisted, lascivious way is http://tickets.amtrak.com/. Now instead of the pictures of train timetables without any clothes on that I was expecting to see, instead I get, “This page has been blocked by the Content Filter because it may contain adult content not suitable for a public environment”.

Who is looking out for our adults? Whether they are (relatively) clean living tourists trying to buy a train ticket from Portland to Seattle, or whether they are anorak wearing, trainspotting weirdos who get a perverse kick from looking at Amtrak fare information does not really matter. Adults should be free to look at this and similar transport related “adult content” without having to apply for permission.

On a related note, because filtering software is so dumb, parents should not allow themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security thinking that a machine is doing their job for them. Do you know where your teenager is now? At this very minute, they could be perusing a hard core bus timetable, or even scouring the net for uncensored videos of 747s taking off.

It was only from hearing the ads in Ricky Gervais Show recently that I realised it is pronounced “The It Crowd”, rather than “The I.T. Crowd”. Oh well.

The trigger for the event was Marc telling an anecdote to analysts, that because somebody came to visit once, Ning took their sign off the door. In his opinion, one of the great things about internet businesses is that you never need to meet your customers. It is always good to see the nerd ethos of shunning human contact thrives at all levels of the Internet community.

Update: the “unannounced visit” is on the official Ning Blog. In the same blog, there is a Ning Magic 8 Ball. I am not sure if it is a one off in-joke, or a really cool piece of conference schwag.

You seem to be allowed to download this episode from outside the UK again.

Thanks to AtariBoy for the heads up.

Stranger episode than previous ones. Probably compulsory viewing for all goths.

Tagged: IT Crowd TV comedy

Strangely, although the official website still quaintly tells you to “CTRL+ALT+DELETE your TV and watch the IT Crowd online!” the downloads seem to have disappeared.

Atariboy has a list of Torrents.

Update 8/2: Episode 3 is out and pretty good, but it is not available from channel four unless you are in the UK.

In this case, the paper beat them by about 14 hours.

I don’t know if this is a coincidence, or if it is a sign that online news sources are forcing old media to become more responsive. Factors in Slashdot’s defence include timezone and the fact that it happened on Superbowl weekend. (Do nerds watch the Superbowl now the ad breaks are not full of dot-coms).