Contributing

 Family, General, Rants  1 Response »
Oct 292008
 

Tim has a post where he advises developers to con­trib­ute to open source pro­jects so that hir­ing man­agers will look favour­ably on them. I have some prob­lems with this, as do many of the com­menters on his post. 

First off, I agree that con­trib­ut­ing to open source pro­jects is admir­able and to be encour­aged. There are, how­ever, a num­ber of developers who work for com­pan­ies with employ­ment con­tracts that say, more or less, any­thing vaguely code-related that you come up with while employed by us is ours, not yours. Which means con­trib­ut­ing any code to any out­side pro­ject is liable to cause prob­lems, or at least a cer­tain num­ber of hurdles. There are oth­er ways of con­trib­ut­ing to any com­munity that are argu­ably just as valu­able, such as tak­ing part in organ­ising events such as loc­al con­fer­ences, volun­teer­ing at loc­al centres that teach people how to use com­puters, assist­ing users on web for­ums, or teach­ing at loc­al com­munity col­leges. Con­cen­trat­ing on writ­ing code for open source pro­jects seems restricting.

The second issue is that it’s dis­crim­in­at­ory against those who simply don’t have the time. Work­ing single par­ents suf­fer par­tic­u­larly from this issue, but any work­ing par­ents of school-age or young­er chil­dren have the prob­lem to some extent. By the time you’ve picked the chil­dren up from school or day care, fed them and the rest of the fam­ily, cleaned up, taken them off to sports/music/whatever, helped with home­work, and done the laun­dry or whatever oth­er chores are neces­sary for that day, all you really have energy for is to unwind and relax. Espe­cially if you sus­pect that the tod­dler will sleep as badly as pre­vi­ous nights this week, wak­ing you up at mid­night, 4 am, and 6 am. When you have to be awake for the day job, as that’s the one that’s cur­rently pay­ing the bills, stay­ing awake into the wee hours isn’t an option for those who need more than just a few hours sleep a night to func­tion prop­erly. No mat­ter how pas­sion­ate they are about coding.

In my case, the pro­ject I’m work­ing on for my day job is the one I think about in spare hours at night and at week­ends. If I were writ­ing code, I’d be writ­ing code for that pro­ject in pref­er­ence to an unre­lated open source pro­ject. I don’t think that atti­tude should be pen­al­ised by hir­ing man­agers either. 

Copyright for Canada

 Family, Vancouver  No Responses »
Jun 192008
 

There’s been a lot of dis­cus­sion in the papers about the newly-tabled Bill on Cana­dian Copy­right; suf­fice to say there are lots of issues with it and it needs to be sent back and turned into some­thing that meets the needs of the cit­izens and res­id­ents of this coun­try. If you’re liv­ing in Canada, I’d recom­mend you read some of Michael Geist’s blog, par­tic­u­larly the sum­mary of last week, and then email your MP about the issues that con­cern you the most. For me, it’s the poten­tial that play­ing DVDs from a region oth­er than Canada could viol­ate the law. If I’ve bought the DVDs leg­ally, or had them giv­en to me, why should play­ing them viol­ate the law? Why should get­ting a cell phone unlocked viol­ate the law? Why should back­ing up my CDs viol­ate the law? This is one of the few issues I can remem­ber where it seems that every news­pa­per has the same tone to the edit­or­i­al — and it isn’t com­pli­ment­ary to the government.

Mind you, my loc­al MP isn’t exactly known for listen­ing to his con­stitu­ents (there’s still a lot of loc­al anger at his cross­ing the floor after being elec­ted), so who knows how much good my email (a heav­ily edited ver­sion of the one at that used to be found at http://www.copyrightforcanadians.ca/action/firstlook) will do.

Update: it looks like the Min­is­ter sup­posedly in charge, isn’t — Cana­dian Industry Min­is­ter lies about his Cana­dian DMCA on nation­al radio, then hangs up — Boing Boing.

Toddler Books

 Books, Family  3 Responses »
Jun 122008
 

My daugh­ter is now two, and likes some dif­fer­ent books to the set I reviewed six months ago, although she still likes the Boyn­ton books and Moth­er, May I? by Grace Mac­car­one (I sus­pect because it has a pic­ture of a truck in it, and fea­tures a hug at the end). 

In no par­tic­u­lar order, we have Hand, Hand, Fin­gers, Thumb by Al Per­kins and Eric Gurney, There’s a Night­mare in My Closet by Mer­cer May­er, Dog In, Cat Out by Gil­lian Rubin­stein and Ann James (lots of scope for mak­ing up stor­ies about what’s hap­pen­ing in the pic­tures), Waves in the Bathtub by Eugenie Fernandes (make up your own music for the song, it will sound much bet­ter than the tune in the book), and Where’s My Teddy? by Jez Albor­ough (ours is bundled with It’s the Bear!, which gets nearly equal billing in the tod­dler appre­ci­ation list). These are all books my son liked as well, so chances are good that oth­er tod­dlers will enjoy them just as much. My son did­n’t have Mon­key and Me by Emily Gravett, but my daugh­ter likes it.

And, of course, she also likes any­thing with a pic­ture of a truck in it.

Girls and Trucks

 Family  10 Responses »
Jun 092008
 

My tod­dler daugh­ter loves trucks; she’ll glee­fully point them out on the street and in books until you’re sick of the word. So just before her birth­day, there was me in the toy store look­ing at truck-related toys for her (trucks, trains, cars, oth­er assor­ted toy vehicles) try­ing to pick out some­thing that did­n’t entirely duplic­ate what she already has. Behind me, I heard a cus­tom­er ask the clerk for help. The con­ver­sa­tion ran along these lines:

Cus­tom­er: Hi, I’m look­ing for a toy for a two-year-old.
Clerk: boy or girl? Not that it should mat­ter, of course.
Cus­tom­er: it’s a girl.

At which the cus­tom­er was taken over to some oth­er aisle, far away from the trucks and trains and related toys, des­pite the claim that “it should­n’t mat­ter”. I was in the toy store for a while, and she nev­er did make it over to what I guess was con­sidered the “boy” side of the store. My daugh­ter loved the trucks we got her, and likes hav­ing the truck book that her grand­moth­er gave her for her birth­day read to her (to cries of “truck! truck!”). I just hope she does­n’t notice that every driver of every truck in the book is a man. 

BPA — Who’s Prepared?

 Family  9 Responses »
Apr 182008
 

Bisphenol‑A, a chem­ic­al found in many of those hard plastic water bottles (look for polycar­bon­ates with the recyc­ling num­ber 7, although not all of those have BPA in them) has been in the news recently, cul­min­at­ing in today’s announce­ment of a ban of baby bottles con­tain­ing BPA by Health Canada. This con­tin­ues a trend from a US Nation­al Tox­ic­o­logy Pro­gram report that expressed con­cern, although it stopped short of call­ing BPA dan­ger­ous. Since, like many house­holds, we have quite a few of these bottles around, and since the chem­ic­al is sup­posed to be par­tic­u­larly dan­ger­ous to infants, I figured I should see which of the many plastic bottles and baby bottles we have might be safe. The polycar­bon­ate bottles are deservedly pop­u­lar; they don’t have the “plastic” taste that bottles made of #5 plastics do (although those are said to be com­pletely safe since they don’t leach), and they are unbreak­able, unlike glass.

Look­ing at vari­ous man­u­fac­turer­’s web sites shows you who’s pre­pared and who’s stick­ing their heads in the sand hop­ing it will all blow over. In the pre­pared cat­egory, Rub­ber­maid gets full marks for hav­ing a clear page list­ing all the products with and without BPA. Nal­gene (made fam­ous in Van­couver when MEC, a major loc­al store took all the bottles off its shelves because of BPA) states they’re phas­ing out BPA and prom­ises to have new non-BPA products using trit­an instead of polycar­bon­ate in the stores start­ing next month. I don’t have any of their bottles, but I know a lot of people do. Camel­bak points out on their web site’s front page that not all #7 plastics con­tain BPA (true), but ignores the fact that there’s no way a con­sumer can tell which ones do. They’re also intro­du­cing a line that uses non-BPA trit­an. I gave a friend one of the Camel­bak bottles for Christ­mas and will replace it once the trit­an ver­sions come out.

In the middle, since they don’t use BPA, but don’t tell people that on the web site are Medela, who make vari­ous breast­feed­ing pumps and accessor­ies, includ­ing bottles. The Brita water fil­ter com­pany has a hor­rible flash web site with no search but­ton any­where. The pitch­er does­n’t look to me like it’s made out of polycar­bon­ate and that was con­firmed from this post. It would make sense for Brita to add that inform­a­tion to their FAQ.

On the unpre­pared side, Ger­ber loses points for not even men­tion­ing the issue any­where on their site; the baby bottles I have from them are num­ber 7 and oth­er sources say they have BPA, so out they go. Tom­mee Tip­pee (a U.K. brand for baby bottles ad sipyy cups) has a page from Janu­ary 2007 in which they say BPA is per­fectly safe and that they use it in some products, without men­tion­ing which, so I’m not sure what to do about the ages-old hard plastic sippy cup I have from them. It isn’t polycar­bon­ate, but does it have BPA in it? No idea. Avent is anoth­er baby bottle man­u­fac­turer that admits they use BPA and say it’s safe. Tom­mee Tip­pee isn’t avail­able in Canada any­way, but I guess the oth­er two are going to have some prob­lems in the next little while, as are the retail­ers that stock them.

There are lots of blogs out there with list­ings of products that have or do not have BPA (e.g., this one). As with many health issues it’s hard to know how to far to go without going over­board, par­tic­u­larly with vari­ous health admin­is­tra­tions seem­ingly dif­fer­ing in their views of what the risk really is. I find it iron­ic, how­ever, that the man­u­fac­tur­ers of products mostly used by adults, where the risk is smal­ler, seem to be more respons­ive than those of products used by the infants who are most susceptible. 

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