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An interesting post from Juice Analytics on "Lightweight data exporation in Excel", which shows how to set up in-cell bar graphs using Excel's REPT function. A follow-up post has more examples and a spreadsheet you can download and play with. A must for data analysts and Excel power users.
New Equities is pleased to be sponsoring the CharJUG's August meetup, which will be held Monday, August 21st, 6:30 pm at our headquarters in downtown Charlotte. This month's guest speaker will be Dave Johnson from Sun:
Beyond blogging: Atom format and protocol
Like XML-RPC and SOAP before, feeds and publishing protocols were born in the blogopshere and quickly moved beyond blogging. Nowadays, web service providers are using RSS/Atom feeds and REST-based publishing protocols as lightweight alternatives to SOAP. And developers are finding new ways to combine web services from different sites into new applications, known as "mash-ups" in the lingo of Web 2.0. If you'd like to do the same, then attend this talk to learn about the new IETF Atom feed format (RFC-4287) and the soon-to-be-finalized Atom protocol, which together form a strong foundation for REST-based web services development.
More information at the CharJUG Meetup site.
Information Week reports that the job market is heating up for tech pros: "Tech Worker Survey Shows Happy Days are Here Again".
"It's hot out there right now for tech pros," says Kevin Knaul a Hudson VP. Fueling the confidence of tech pros is heavy demand by employers. "There is definitely more demand than supply right now," he says. "It's a struggle to keep up," he says.
Especially hot are those with skills in Web services, .Net, Java and ERP. "All the major ERP vendors are updating their products this year," driving the need for those pros, says Knaul.
Recall that only a short time ago, the IT industry was singing the blues. Now a new dynamic has taken over:
Boosting tech worker confidence was optimism about personal finances—despite rising summer fuel costs—as well as a high level of job satisfaction. The number of employees who rated their finances as excellent or good rose 4 points in July to 56%. There was also a 7 point increase to 49% in the number of workers who indicated their financial situation was improving. Seventy four percent of tech workers said they were happy with their jobs in July, up from 71% in June.
Of course, from the perspective of a hiring manager, this is yet another confirmation of the coming IT labor shortage that has been predicted since 2003, and that will only deepen as workforce undergoes major demographic shifts.
Comedian Stephen Colbert, who introduced the term "truthiness" into the collective vocabulary, pulls a stunt that demonstrates the perils of collaborative editing:
Stephen Colbert decided to take on Wikipedia tonight, and discuss his vision for a new "Wikiality," where the masses create the facts they want to believe in. And did they ever. At the conclusion of the amusing segment, Colbert instructs his audience to find the Wikipedia entry on elephants, and edit it to say that "the number of elephants has tripled in the last six months." Not surprisingly, plenty of people went to either make the edit, or to see if had been made.
Colbert's prank underscores the inherent risks in using collaborative environments for knowledge-sharing: accuracy can be easily subverted by authors intent on causing mischief. This is counterbalanced by the opportunity for multiple contributors to amplify a body of knowledge. It all comes down to the trustworhiness of the community providing that knowledge.
Update: According to Business 2.0, Wikipedia was quick to lock down the affected pages: "In this battle of truth vs. truthiness, truth ended up with the upper hand."
InfoWorld has one engineer's account of an IT job from hell.
Update: Infoworld has now pulled the story due to concerns that some of the writer's assertions could not be verified. If you're curious as to what was in the story, check out some of the related blog posts listed under "Who's blogging" at the bottom of the page.
