Free as in Time

In a recent post, DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals, creator of Rails) voiced his opinion on asking for years of experience in job postings for programmers:

Requiring X years of experience on platform Y in your job posting is, well, ignorant. As long as applicants have 6 months to a year of experience, consider it a moot point for comparison. Focus on other things instead that’ll make much more of a difference. Platform experience is merely a baseline, not a differentiator of real importance.

I’m very excited about the release of Drupal 6.0. Read all about it here:

• Drupal.org: Drupal 6.0 released
• Dries’ blog: Drupal 6.0 released
• Raincity: Drupal 6 Released and Ready to Manage your Content
• Mashable.com: Acquia Releases Drupal Version Six

New to Twitter? Just mildly curious? Never even heard of it? All you need to know about Twitter is for you.

I’m not a Twitter user myself. Yet. Until I read this, I thought it was mostly for SMS kiddies and Crackberry addicts. Guess I was wrong. There seem to be (good; business) uses for the service, and even fire departments are getting on board.

Recommended. Good, quick read.

Here’s useful little utility program for making those little changes to your Ubuntu system that really make it your own, like changing your splash screen. It’s called Ubuntu Tweak, and it exposes hidden or hard to find settings in the Ubuntu desktop.

Ubuntu Tweak is a tool that lets you change hidden Ubuntu settings, for example: hide or change the splash screen, show or hide the Computer, Home, Trash, and Network icons, change Metacity, Nautilus, power management, and security settings, etc.

Being able to make little changes like these to [...]

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (a long-term support version) as made it to alpha 4 status. Things are trucking along, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a stable version.

Here are 3 press articles talking about the release:

• http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/162105/ubuntus-hardy-heron-flies-to-alpha-4.html
• http://www.techzine.nl/downloads/16055/Ubuntu-8.04-alpha-4.html
• http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12554_22-186570-1.html

Dreamhost (at least the server we use) has upgraded to Rails 2.0.2, and I’ve also done so in my local development environment.

Next up, upgrading some sites/projects, both for us and clients.

To see what’s new in this release, check out the Rails blog.

Yesterday I mentioned Eyler’s prediction that Merb will come forward as a serious Rails alternative.

A second prediction from Eyler that caught my eye was that he expects “to see JRuby put Ruby’s speed issues put to bed in 2008. The JRuby team is making great progress in their work, and have shown that they’re not afraid to try new things. JRuby is going to continue to gain users this year, and may become the most widely deployed version of Ruby as Java shops pick it up.”

I’ve been thinking that for [...]