Mark Roseman's Blog

Hackers and Painters, the book.

This looks cool.. Paul Graham has put together a bunch of his essays into a book that O'Reilly is publishing. Just browsing through the table of contents, and looks like a great set of topics.

"There are now more fat people in the world than hungry people"

Yikes!

Must be Conference Season.

Drove out to London (Ontario that is) yesterday to meet up with Carl who was out there for a few days for a conference. Hadn't seen him for ages, so it was great to catch up and just shoot the shit about what we were both up to, what other people we knew were doing, the state of the universe in CSCW and academia, laughing at how pathetic some of our previous work was, etc. Don't think we managed to solve any of the world's major problems, but you know, that's okay too.

Exchanging Files in the Modern Age.

c/o Jean-Claude.

Software Methodologies.

Good Robert Glass article in the May CACM. Basic gist... stop trying to tell us that these wonderful methodologies (e.g. agile development) will solve all problems. Someone needs to do the research to say what different methodologies do well and what they do poorly, what characteristics different problem domains have, and how we can map from one to the other. In other words, what more can we learn about what methodologies are most suitable for what problem domains?

Software Pricing and Expectations.

New versions of the excellent Movable Type blogging (etc.) system have changed their licensing, unleashing the usual slew of whiners who refuse to pay for software. Check out the comments and talkbacks on this page. Ewww, nasty.

The pricing is I think more than fair, and probably should be higher. The reason its probably so low, and the cause of the furor, is that they made some mistakes in terms of setting expectations early on. Their original model attracted too many of the whiny types who refuse to pay for software on principle, and those are the ones whose voices are echoing around the net now.

This is a problem I luckily avoided; knowing full well that I wanted to build a sustainable software product/company (which means revenue), the pricing and free/pay tradeoff were setup in a way that was pretty unambiguous. So while we have some hangers-on who rely only on the free versions, they've got a pretty accurate perspective on how and why those are there, and how they fit into the bigger picture. By and large, we haven't attracted the rabid and vocal "software must be free" crowd (who are happy hacking open source Wikis), and I'm very happy about that. We communicated our audience pretty well, so there was no confusion.

Job Followup.

Last night we went to the annual dinner that the psychiatry department here puts on for the graduating residents, which was actually pretty good.

For a lot of people, it was the first they heard that Pauline accepted the job at K-W. Given how it had been billed as a "done deal" by many of the department insiders that she was going to stay at Mac, there were more than a few somewhat shocked people, as well as a number disappointed she wasn't going to be staying. People were pretty impressed though with what she'd been telling them about the job (the environment, resources and support).

Also a few people more than a bit pissed off at some of the department administrators, since they're known to do an incredibly bad job at recruiting (certainly the case this time) and they've let more than a few people "get away" that a lot of others were hoping would be enticed to come onboard. But anyway...

Raymond.

Met up with Raymond (one of the ex-TeamWave guys) for a bit yesterday, as he was in Toronto for a conference. Nice opportunity to catch up on what he's been up to. Glad to see he's trying some new things and still learning... but yikes, I'm glad that I'm not that overextended! I hope that one day he'll catch a few more lucky breaks and have a bit more breathing room.

Blog Comments.

As most people know by now, the Blogger folks have released a major new revision. On the authorship side, its a bit nicer to use. But it also makes it easier to use some features in blogs like comments, which I've turned on. Expect more playing around in the next little bit, and let me know if anything weird happens.

Finally!

After way too much time getting things sorted out, Pauline signed a contract with the Grand River Cancer Centre in Kitchener-Waterloo a few days ago. She's set to start there at the beginning of September, and so will be the psychiatrist for their supportive care area.

She managed to negotiate a really sweet deal, and pretty much was able to design exactly the job that she wanted, well supported by the admin people there. It'll be a great opportunity for her, and looks to be a great environment, quite aligned with her goals and interests.

It'll be a nice change from Hamilton, and will definitely be nice to be in a community that's got such a thriving and entrepreneurial high tech industry.