(Cross-posted from perlbuzz.com)

Selena Deckelmann has come back from BarCampPortland with copies of every Post-It on the topic selection board. The topic selection board at an unconference like a BarCamp is where people write on a Post-It a topic they’d like to see presented, and put it on a board for all to see. Whichever topics people vote for are the topics that are presented.

Scanning through the photoset on Flickr is fascinating, as these often are. Topics range from Pirates Paying Artists to WordPress as CMS to How to lie with statistics to Should we replace Congress with a wiki?

Also fascinating to see how widespread Twitter has become, with half the Post-Its leaving @usernames as contact information.

Makes me want to start up a Bar Camp Chicago. And move to Portland.

I’ve been asked to put together an article for someone on the most inappropriate (and appropriate) uses of Perl. My editor would like some real-life “Oh my god, you wrote WHAT in Perl” annecdotes. So if you’ve ever run across a use of Perl that made your skin crawl (in terms of just being totally the wrong language for the job), drop a line here or send me an email at turner@blackbear.biz

James

News of University of California Santa Cruz computer scientist Luca de Alfaro’s Wikipedia trust-coloring system revived - and improved - an idea I’ve been playing with: automated reputation-management for politicians. The idea is to make the concept of honor meaningful again, by creating new social rewards and penalties for behavior that affects the rest of us. (It could, of course, also be applied to journalists, corporate leaders or other public figures.)

Dear Technical Writer:

If you need a job, then you might look for companies that have never had a professional technical writer working for them. It may require making calls or networking with friends or former co-workers. Most companies have a ton of writing to do. Usually they put off their documentation requirements and their needs have piled up. You may also find that someone such as a regulator has confronted management about insufficient documentation and they have to put a writer to work immediately.

I have found companies with serious documentation needs. Many of these firms have never put a technical writer on staff or perhaps failed to even think about such a possibility. They often think they can meet their writing needs with their own internal people. That strategy rarely, if ever, works.

It seems a bit ridiculous when a manager in a company with a billion dollars in sales says that he needs to write several white papers but hasn’t found the time. If he doesn’t have time now, when will he? Then you’ll find the development manager that never formally wrote requirements, specifications, business rules and so forth for an application already in production. Upper management wants to know why they’re getting customer complaints and their customer service team doesn’t know how to support their product. Upper management decides to have a quality control audit and when the auditors ask for development documentation, none exists.

Then you find companies that haven’t updated their user manuals for four versions for a product they sell. That causes user calls, heavy customer service demands and probably lost sales.

You can often find significant work when a company has not bothered to document their business processes and without warning get a request for some type of due diligence. Perhaps a company’s customer needs to perform a vendor audit because of a Statement on Auditing Standards, to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, a bank loan requirement or something else.

Set yourself up for a successful project

I have run into opportunities such as those mentioned above and within a few weeks wind up in writer’s hell. My client’s management hasn’t had one of me before and they don’t know how to work with me. More likely than not, key personnel have their business processes in their heads and don’t want anyone to write them down. They believe keeping everything in their head gives them job security.

I’ve run into such situations as those described above more than once. I finally concluded that I have the responsibility for setting the expectations for the client. People rarely remember to what they agree and if you don’t write it down, you’ll usually wind up in an uncomfortable disagreement.

So, I developed a checklist to help me and my client understand how to make things work for both of us. If you start out with the checklist you can discover quickly if a project fits both parties. It’s better to go somewhere else when management won’t help you succeed.

You might find this check list useful. If you don’t, I’m sure many potential employers will.

Technical Writer Qualification Questionnaire

1. Has the client given the technical writer requirements and stated his or her expectations clearly?
2. Will you ( the client) provide a corporate style guide?
3. Will the writer have access to subject matter experts regularly?
4. If subject matter experts are unavailable to meet with the writer will the writer have access to
knowledgeable subordinates?
5. Will you include you tech writer in staff meetings related to his requirements?
6. If the writer does not have information required to adequately work on the contracted projected will you
expect and pay for down time?
7. How will you on-board the technical writer so he or she can complete the contract in the expected time
frame?
8. What tools will you provide the candidate:
a. Microsoft office - version number
b. Visio
c. Adobe Photoshop
d. Adobe FrameMaker
e. Adobe RoboHelp
f. Doc-to-Help
g. Alternatives to RoboHelp such as MadCap Flare
h. Document management tools

9. Are you committed to making the writing project successful and do you have consensus among staff to that end?

I’m sure you can think of additional questions to ask. These are simply the ones with which I start. I wrote this to make sure I don’t get caught in another winless tech writing project again.

Tom Adelstein currently works as a contract technical writer in the Information Technology Field. In March 2007, his latest O’Reilly Book, Linux System Administration was released. Tom’s home web site Open Source Today has tips and techniques for system administrators and Open Source VARs.

OK. I’m in the job market again. Andy Oram finally cut me some slack. Tuesday, I received my first legitimate call for a pure-blooded Linux administrator job. No Server 2003 R2 or mixed environments came with the offer. The company wanted someone to manage 30 Fedora boxes running Asterisk as the primary application. The position existed in Dallas and close to the commuter train station. I fell out of my chair.

Back on October 15, 2006, I enrolled in my first MSCE 2003 server class at the community college in Dallas. Why? I surveyed the market and found some Linux positions. They read something like this: Wanted Linux System Administrator. Experience required: Server 2000 and 2003, Active Directory Guru, VB Shell scripting, IPSec and Cisco VPN experience, A+ and N+ Certifications, Microsoft Exchange experience desirable but not necessary. Some SuSE experience for small Novell workgroup. We have 250 mobile users and require management of off-line data synchronization.

Let’s see. In my home town - the seventh largest city in the US - I don’t see or hear much about Linux administrators. So, re-certifying from NT 4.0 to server 2003 looked like one of the only ways to land a job. And as you know: Gotta eat.

I did get a call from another semi-Linux shop. They posted the job description for a desktop support technician with some Linux experience. Then I had an interview and the requirements changed. The help desk part of the job involved managing a MS Active Directory Forest and support of XP desktops. Then they disclosed the other 2/3ths of the job, which involved heavy PHP development and 24/7 administration of a large server farm of mission critical VoIP servers. OH, you probably guessed it. The servers all ran Asterisk. They made a generous compensation offer though and that involved going temp to perm for six months at $25 an hour. You might not believe it, but they wanted someone to start in four days and they actually found a candidate and hired him.

Oh, well. Don’t forget that you need DNS experience when you implement AD and learn those SRV record types. This could come in handy.

The marketing people at O’Reilly seem to get right to the point when they describe their books. On the catalog page of Linux System Administration you will find this quote:

The ingredients for this book had been scattered throughout mailing lists, forums, and discussion groups, as well as books, periodicals, and the experiences of colleagues. Everything is now in one handy guide. In the course of their research, the authors also solved many problems whose solutions were completely undocumented. They now pass their lessons on to you.

As the primary author, I can explain the inspiration and some of the issues involved. When we started the project, I didn’t expect it to take two years of concentrated effort to get the result. But, like the copy states the answers to many OSS application issues required much research. If I wanted to see this book come to fruition, then I had to persist and that meant late nights and long days searching for hints on the Internet as the starting point.

So, Why MCPs?

Aside from my life as an Open Source practitioner, I’m also a MCP going through recertification on the Server 2003 track. Integrating Linux application servers into domains and forests seemed easy to me, but getting the applications installed on Linux proved challenging far too often. As the paragraph above says, many solutions were undocumented. So, we had to document them.

I had an inspiration on how to put the book together, but when writing a proposal you need prove a market exists. So, I went looking for the market. In an interview with Mike Webber at Spidertools I recognized the need for a definitive Linux administrator’s book unlike any I saw in the market. When I interviewed Mike, he called from his headquarters in Trout Creek, Montana. His business model involves putting a customer on a box and training him or her one specific technology at a time such as building a Sendmail server, etc.

Then I ran across Falko Timme, a German fellow who started publishing comprehensive, step-by-step guides to building Linux servers. I built a Debian server from scratch using his “Perfect Setup”. His approach of building a application servers one at a time proved a smart way to put material together.

Some of the work at the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft involves research to help Microsoft practitioners work with Linux- or perhaps stated differently - help them integrate technologies. I understand the problems the Lab faces as I faced them eight years ago. As a Solution Provider, I needed to integrate a Linux box running an Apache Server into an ecommerce solution. The first step in that process required learning how to use Linux, which provided quite a challenge.

Now, imagine this type of scenario. An enterprise system admin at contoso.com gets a call from the CIO who wants a load balanced High-Availability Apache Cluster on Novell SLES 10 running Heartbeat setup for a demonstration in a week. OK, the admin says, I’ll just head on over to a search engine and run a few searches. As bits and pieces of information comes forward, panic starts to emerge. That’s how I felt eight years ago.

Today, he can sit down and open a chapter in a book and build the server in a couple of days. That’s why I wrote Linux System Administration. You won’t find much discussion about Linux this and Linux that, but you will learn to build a server, get the components together to create a load balanced Apache cluster and other applications box by box.

I’m recertifying on Server 2003 and some of the best material I found sits on the Technet site in Step-by-Step guides. So, this isn’t a new concept, I just never saw the approach taken at the system admin level in the OSS community until I ran into Falko’s web site. And, by the way, I don’t discriminate when I say system administrator or system engineer. It’s all technology to me and I want to learn as much as I can as quickly as I can.

Does this Benefit the Open Source Community?

It does in several ways and O’Reilly’s marketing people once again articulate the points:

Linux is now a standard corporate platform … and there is a definite shortage of talented administrators. Linux System Administration is ideal as an introduction to Linux for Unix veterans, MCSEs, and mainframe administrators, and as an advanced (and refresher) guide for existing Linux administrators who will want to jump into the middle of the book.

In the early days of Linux almost everyone contributed code. The community started off small and grew to around 30,000 users by the release date of Windows 95. By 1998, the Linux community reached around 2 million and only a small percentage of those folks contributed code or could administer even a web server.

I saw this book as a way to go beyond the standard Linux Bibles and power user orientation. I knew many people who wanted to deploy stand alone servers running Apache, DNS, Mail, Blogs, etc. I also saw experienced administrators wanting to learn how to put together high performance clusters, virtual machines and servers running multiple silos on the same box or blades and to incorporate single sign-on directory services into their infrastructures.

Technology moves quickly and if you have to find answers from mailing lists, forums, and discussion groups the time to find out how to do something takes longer than doing it. From my perspective, it takes significant resources to put together the documentation to allow people to quickly deploy the solutions they need. Those resources should come from major players such as the consortium at OSDL and the troopers at the Open Source Software Lab.

I came to recognize the massive proliferation of NT infrastructures when I started up my first Linux company. The first task required someone to build a UNIX client for Exchange. With pockets of Solaris and Linux users in companies like Ericsson, Boeing and Intel to mention a few, a need existed to join the two communities. We call that interoperability.

I see more acceptance today on both sides of aisle - a bi-partisan effort so to speak in the fields of technology. So, as the days pass, I expect everyone to begin working together to create a world that works for everyone. Only time will tell if it comes together in pristine form.

David A. Wheeler released yesterday an article entitled “Commercial” is not the opposite of Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) (thanks to LWN for the pointer). As is typical of David’s writing, it’s full of insight and information about why these terms are not in opposition and why the confusion of the terms is dangerous.

In Can’t Someone Else Write/Deploy It?, I pointed to Tony Stubblebine’s first exploration of Salesforce.com’s new API. He’s updated his series with a second article, Using the Salesforce.com API.

Don’t fret; there’s more Perl this time. In particular, it takes only a little bit of glue to connect the comment engine of your weblog software to your database of prospective contacts. I can think of several interesting projects from there, starting with graphing your range of influence….

Do you know Josh McAdams ?? Surely you do, he’s the talented brain behind the Perl Podcasts (http://www.perlcast.com/) and one of a kind, who clearly has a special tactile sense about people communications, behavior and the community itself.

And remember, he’s the one that said :

… Perl is definitely not the next big thing. It already is a big thing.

Enjoy !

Leopold Toetsch : prolific Perl and Parrot contributor, Parrot patchmonster pumpking, “Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials” book co-author and long term almost-anything-related-to-computers hacker.

Now he’s here committed to answer our questions and let us know a bit more about his thoughts, feelings and Parrot (of course)

Enjoy the interview !

This is a final blog in a series that began with Part 1
and Part 2. In this series I’m presenting the results
of a research project to measure the effectiveness of two mailing
lists, which will be the start of what I hope to be a larger study.

This is a continuation of a study I introduced in Part 1. In this series of blogs I’m presenting the results of a
research project to measure the effectiveness of two mailing lists.

Mailing list membership is a must for anyone who works with
complicated computer technology, such as a programming language, a
server, or a professional software package. On popular mailing lists
for difficult topics, such as Linux distributions, messages stream in
at every hour of the day and night.

How many messages on these lists get satisfactory answers? How long
does it take to resolve the questions? These are just two of the
simpler ways to measure a mailing list’s effectiveness (we will
encounter others as we proceed).

In a series of blogs I’ll present the results of a modest research
project of mine to measure the effectiveness of two mailing lists,
which will be the start of what I hope to be a larger study.

Shlomi Fish’s Which Open Source Wiki Works For You? is a popular guide to selecting a wiki. Of course, it’s two years old and not getting any fresher. Shlomi just let me know that he’s written a followup: July 2006 Update to “Which Wiki”.

Ovid, a well known one to the Perl community for his modules on CPAN shows us his beginnings, history, Perl 6, the Perl Hacks book more of its genius and commitment to the Perl community.

Both I and the heads of Jitterbit battled torrential rains and the maze of Cambridge streets to make it to an early morning
meeting. It was well worth it. From this young company I learned a new way consultants and businesses might be able to make a living from open source. Furthermore, I saw an interesting play on the Web 2.0 concept–not for the customary mash-ups between different organizations’ offerings, but to integrate different backends within a single enterprise.

With all of the recent hoopla surrounding other languages, it sometimes seems as if Perl is being left behind. When will Perl 6 be mainstream, where are the frameworks to provide ease-of-use like other languages, and will Perl stay ahead of the curve into Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications? More importantly, to me, is the question of when Perl will make it as an enterprise-class language? Sure, Perl is widely used in large systems, but usually for testing, systems administration, CGI, and “glue.” What about large, critical applications, however? How many architects and managers have considered Perl lately when it came time to look at an alternative to Java or C++? Moreover, if they aren’t considering Perl, what are the reasons - what are the areas that need to be addressed in order to turn Perl into a respectable corporate contender?

This isn’t the first time the question has come up, but why are people frothing over Python or Ruby when Perl still has so much to offer? What can Perl do? How about a catchy name? Joking aside, there was a fair amount of marketing that made Java so popular (at least with management) and more people probably know the phrase ‘Ruby on Rails’ than could tell you anything about it. Perhaps, like Java, Perl could have its own ‘enterprise’ version. This isn’t a new thought, others have brought it up in the past, including P5EE and Enterprise Perl. Personally, I think that it should be called Perl In the Enterprise (PIE), but that is mostly because I think that, like sex, food is a good selling point.

A catchy name might turn the head of a non-technical manager, but what goodies would an Enterprise level Perl need to have under the hood to keep the attention of a serious Enterprise developer? This is perhaps the point where opinions will diverge, but I think that I am fairly safe in listing better error handling, logging, and threading as top priorities for a bigger, better Perl. Adding assertions, native compilation, and a snazzy IDE would sweeten the pot even further. Finally, some nice frameworks for web, CORBA, and SOA would be nice.

At this point, several members of the Perl community (if not CPAN contributors) are probably saying to themselves, “Wait, most, if not all, of these things are available in one form or another already.” For the most part, they would be correct. However, adoption of some of these technologies hasn’t been what it should, particularly in that Perl hasn’t taken over the Enterprise on its way to world domination. Over the next few months, I’d like to look at what choices the Enterprise developer has for addressing these needs.

Moreover, I would like to stress that the term Enterprise isn’t just a way to calm hyperactive management in large organizations, but that it can reflect an attention to detail and the notion of “failsafe” that allows other, more interesting languages to displace that spinster Ada as what people would rather have running the navigation systems of the submarine they are on when exploring underwater Arctic caves. That said, I think it goes without saying that features such as error handling and excellent logging facilities are equally attractive to companies spanning the range from startup to blue chip.

We may have the seductiveness of the amazon.com shopping cart to thank for CivicSpace, an enhanced content management system (CMS) that has spawned many of the leading political web sites, starting with that of the Howard Dean for President campaign.

As an impoverished University of Illinois computer science student, Zack Rosen browsed his way across titles such as Emergence, Smart Mobs and Linked - and then accidentally bought them all. When the expensive pile arrived, he figured he might as well read it, and he quickly found himself absorbed in ideas of connection via networks. At the same time, he began hearing more and more about longshot presidential candidate Howard Dean, and how his campaign was using the web to find supporters and raise money. Things clicked. Rosen entered his zip code for a Dean meetup, and soon he found himself working with a team of like-minded technologists, adapting the Drupal CMS to build Deanspace, which would eventually evolve into CivicSpace, a robust and growing platform for grassroots online political organizing (aka netroots), especially in its pairing with CiviCRM, a politically-oriented Customer Relationship Management system.

I came across CivicSpace while researching open source technologies for montereycountydemocrats.org. Our team elected to custom code the main public site, while also using or experimenting with pre-built solutions such as Wordpress for our blog, and CivicSpace, Advokit and dotproject, among others, for our internal needs. CivicSpace has proven to be one of the most robust and usable of them all.

I interviewed Zack recently via email.

Frozen Bubble is a recreation of an ancient DOS game, played so many times by Guillaume Cottenceau who could use it in his favorite Linux box … so inspired by it he took the challenge and the tools at hand. And guess what : one of these tools is Perl !!!

Several weeks ago there was a notable bit of controversy over some comments made by James Gosling, father of the Java programming language. He has since addressed the flame war that erupted, but the whole ordeal got me thinking seriously about PHP and its scalability and performance abilities compared to Java. I knew that several hugely popular Web 2.0 applications were written in scripting languages like PHP, so I contacted Owen Byrne - Senior Software Engineer at digg.com to learn how he addressed any problems they encountered during their meteoric growth. This article addresses the all-to-common false assumptions about the cost of scalability and performance in PHP applications.

Nicholas Clark is the pumpking for the stable branch of Perl. In the past few years, he’s released Perl versions 5.8.2 through 5.8.8. He was also the pumpking for Ponie until recently. He recently answered @questions[0 .. 10].