Tribes...

Seth Godin got me to join triiibes- his amazing scheme to get people to pre-order his new book while simultaneously proving its premise. It didn't cost me that much, and it seems like a good experiment to be part of. It had gotten up to number #5 on the Amazon top sellers list when I added it to my cart. It's since dropped off now that the promotion is effectively over.

I have been interested in the tribal dimensions of human behavior for a while. Ray Immelman's Great Boss Dead Boss is a thorough examination of this in a business novel format. Still, Immelman's tribal attribute #1 is : "A strong tribe has a well defined common enemy". [I think there are probably a lot of people that laugh at business novels- people that like novels probably don't like business books, and people that like business books probably don't read as many novels, but it's something I seem to enjoy.]

Another book a long the same lines, but with a completely different approach, is Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. It really drives home how many of our actions are driven by how we relate in terms of status to others. Reading everything de Botton has ever written is not a bad idea, either.

I do have a slight anxiety of being part of the sucker tribe for joining up with this stuff...well, I guess the sucker tribe is not really a tribe as much as it is the people excluded from the non-sucker tribe. Anyway, the book's pretty cheap, so it looks like the cost of briefly suspending my natural cynicism won't exceed $15.

Job ad

We need a few more "can do it all" types at our company. I struggle with how to list these positions, because not all of the skills are required, but we need a few specializing generalists or generalizing specialists or what have you. I read "Hiring Technical People" (the book and the blog), but it's still not easy. Anyway- we are still making our stock plan available to people hired in 2008, so if you know anyone that is looking...we've got a smart team. If anyone wants to point out obvious errors or inconsistencies in the technology laundry list, it would be greatly appreciated, as I don't know all of this stuff.

GIS Integration Engineer

Duties to include: Integration and testing of a cutting edge commercial imagery / video storage product into various types of commercial tools and custom government software. This includes integrating an encoder for various data types and integration of the viewers also. The work will involve working with customer site representatives to analyze and product the solutions to interface the software together. This could involve using the products c API, Scripting languages, WMS, Java or .Net wrappers. If you are a hard core geospatial person with minimal programming experience or a expert generalist programmer with a little geospatial experience and/or a solid math background, please apply.

We are looking for people with some subset of these skills:
GIS, Imagery analysis, c and c integration, Java, .Net, SQL and database programming, Python, Perl, Unix Shell Scripting, Windows and Unix Installation packages
OGC standards (WMS, WCS, WFS), PCI Geomatica, ERDAS, ESRI, ITT, GDAL, OSSIM, RemoteView, Imagine, FalconView, SocetSet, Warp, Manipulation of commercial imagery, IKONOS, QuickBird, NTM, Aerial and Aerial Video feeds,file types such as GeoPDF, GeoTIFF, NITF, JPEG2000, pix, Shapefiles, MPEG and other video formats, NTM, Calculus or Trig, Orthorectification, Programmer on Unix variants and/or Windows

Clearance: US Security Clearance Required (i.e., US Citizen only)

Location: Sterling, VA, USA, 20164

Compensation: Substantial!

resumes to: jobs@lmnsolutions.com

JRuby- The Element of Surprise

JRuby...I used to think, "meh, who needs Java? I'll stick with the c implementation." Then I started working on a project investing millions of dollars in infrastructure to run Java web applications. Sadly, I initially agreed with the assessment that it was a bit of a hack to run the Ruby on the JVM. Thus I soldiered on, avoiding JSF and EJB, but getting sucked into many of the other indignities of the Java world.  The opportunity arose to build a quick prototype for a different system. The desire to go the Rails route proved successful with a quick delivery and excellent customer feedback- but how would we ever deploy it? How would the proprietary Sun Single Sign On service work? Could it possibly connect to Access Manager- a feat that had taken weeks of development time in Java? A couple of emails with Arun Gupta and Nick Sieger led me to some of the truly impressive work that has been going on. Warbler builds a war file out of your Rails app using jruby-rack. Drop your .jar libraries in the rails lib dir. Muck with your web.xml so you can make it use a filter. Drop the .war file on your server. Done. A little method called servlet_request is now magically available to you. Call servlet_request.getUserPrincipal : it's populated. It's not magic- it's JRuby!
  
It's really suprising how much faster things seem to get done. Now, I know that's sort of silly. People can work fast in any technology that they are good at. In fact, I think the source of most of the disagreement in technology and product selection (which is a plague in the Java world, the GIS world, the database world, etc.) is that people want to use what they are best at because it allows them to shine. I ultimately only care about the end result. I don't mind switching to some technology I know nothing about. It is harder for me to provide value, but I love nothing more than learning new things and evaluating them. 

Anyway, that's why JRuby is even more awesome. Let them write Java. The JVM is a environment where we can all get aong.