David Johnson's Blog

It has certainly been a while since I’ve posted here, since I’ve been incredibly busy. The next person who tells me how easy students have it is going to regret it.

Anyhow, there’s been loads I’ve wanted to post about over the last few months that I haven’t got around to doing, so here’s one of those really long posts where I blog about many seemingly random and unrelated things. If you really want to read it all, I’d suggest you grab a coffee (preferably a cappuccino) and a comfortable seat

Way back in Februrary, the day before I flew out to FOSDEM in fact, I went to see Goldie Lookin Chain at the Manchester Academy. They were great as expected, the beer was warm as expected and the atmosphere in the venue was unpleasant as expected. That night of passive smoking (of various substances) no doubt contributed to the rather nasty cold I woke up with the next morning and which stayed with me all through FOSDEM, completely ruining it for me. It’ll certainly be much better once the smoking ban comes in. Oh and while I’m on the topic, Mr. Blair (or should I say Brown): can we have a ban on smoking in non-enclosed public places next please?

There was an article at the BBC way back in February entitled Copyright sings to a different tune which is essentially editorial making the case for not allowing the record companies to have our copyright terms extended. I’ve blogged about this before, but the message is still the same: the public domain used to be a very valuable resource, from which creators could take work which was no longer of commercial value and make something new out of it. Nowadays copyright terms are so long that little is entering it, meaning everything is protected by an aggressive copyright police. Big business must not be allowed to dictate our copyright policy like they do so easily in the US.

Also in February the US Patent Office granted a ridiculously broad and obviously-invalid-to-any-sane-person patent covering things like Flash (not that I care about Flash, since it’s proprietary) and the technology frequently touted as being the next big thing on the web, AJAX. The fact that such a patent could be granted in the face of clear and obvious prior art is beyond words. This is why we must fight to make sure we don’t get this kind of nonsense in Europe.

At the beginning of March was the barely-touched-on-by-the-media national strike of university lecturers. I was out and about on the day and took a few photos. They were striking over pay, since they were promised more and didn’t get it (whereas management did get it). Such strikes are a pain, but if that’s the only way lecturers can get the powers-that-be to pay attention then so be it. The strike isn’t however the end of it and they’re also refusing to mark coursework, publish marks for already marked coursework or invigilate exams until they agree a pay deal. What this means to me, since I graduate this year, is that I may not know my final grade for some months which will make it very difficult to get a job. It’s about time this whole mess was sorted out and lecturers were given the pay to which they are entitled.

During the past six months or so I’ve been trying to get a graduate job, so far with no success. It seems that graduate employers aren’t actually interested in graduates at all: they just want decent staff they can get away with paying very little. Basically if you don’t have a significant amount of work experience (which many graduates won’t have – I certainly don’t) you can’t get a graduate job, which kind of defeats the whole point of graduate jobs in my opinion. What is also very worrying, especially given the state of corporate IT in this country, is the fact that many employers are recruiting for technical jobs without assessing the technical ability of candidates at all – they seem to think soft-skills are more important and that they can teach technical skills, even to non-technical people….. somebody should break it to them that the real world doesn’t quite work like that. I’ll resist the temptation to rant about this too much, but I can’t resist the temptation to shamelessly ask that anyone reading this who knows of a Linux/networking/web dev/FPGA engineer job going gets in touch.

I’ve been following the Sun UltraSPARC T1 developments for a while now, so I should mention that Sun have finally made their processor available on opensparc.net under the GPL. I’ve grabbed myself a copy and taken a brief look and it looks pretty useful. My course pretty much winds up over the next few months so after that I should have some spare time to get it running in a simulator and see what I can do with it.

A few weeks ago I saw a story which really made me laugh: ‘Sandal and ponytail set’ cramping Linux adoption?. Apparently the relaxed approach to clothing taken by Linux/FLOSS hackers is harming the uptake of Linux. What a load of old nonsense. Firstly, technical people are most often not customer facing, so nobody cares how they dress since they’re typically damm good behind-the-scenes technical people. I myself am not a stereotypical geek with a ponytail, sandals and long beard (maybe in twenty-or-so years) but like most geeks I do take a relaxed attitude to clothing (i.e. it’s purely functional – geeks don’t do fashion) and have never found it to be a problem. After all, decent clothes would certainly be ruined by all the ferreting around under desks and in comms cabinets. In any case, any business or government who wants to use Linux isn’t going to go to a Linux hacker for advice, they’re going to go to a suit-wearing consultancy filled with the kind of people geeks try to avoid at all costs. One quote really summarises the whole article:

This guy seems to be living in a dream-world: the community doesn’t care about business. The community cares about producing good software and having fun doing it.

That’s all for now; I should get back to posting more frequently from now onwards.