We’re having a great time putting together our Creative/Tech Career Jam, scheduled for January 26th in Burlington Vermont. This is a project that the Vermont Software Developers’ Alliance was especially interested in pursuing when we realized that we had a profound difference in perception about the whole job market in our local area.

On the one hand we heard from our vtSDA member companies, all of whom want to double their headcount in the next three-five years that there were no local employees available. On the other hand, we kept hearing from kids, colleges, and high-school guidance counselors that there were no local jobs available; once students received their training they needed to go to Boston, or Montreal, or Silicon Valley to get a decent-paying job as a software developer.

Turns out it isn’t just software companies confronting these issues, so we have teamed up with fifty companies, the colleges and high schools, for this event in January 2008.

There will be “green-technology” companies, including solar, wind and alternative energy companies, software and IT companies, high-tech manufacturing companies, computer game developers, musicians and ad agencies. Media coverage in print and VLOG will be provided by Seven Days, our local arts weekly, and we have support from several government and community development groups including Burlington’s CEDO and the State of Vermont.

If Robert Frost was a programmer/analyst…

Microsoft has published a Community Technology Preview of the next version of the PowerShell (aka Monad). The big news is the inclusion of remoting…the ability to execute scripts on remote machines.

…five minutes later….

Already I’m in trouble; even though I an execute an old script from the command line, I’ve already gotten an error, myscriptname cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on the this system. See get-help about_signing for more details

OK….so I get the following:

PowerShell execution policies provide security for the scripting environment by determining the conditions under which PowerShell loads configuration files and runs scripts. “Restricted” is the most secure policy and is the default. It permits individual commands, but does not permit scripts to run.

There is a rudimentary GUI editor too.

This is what DOS batch files have become now that they are all grown up.

The excellent webworker daily, posted a link to an online-project management system called Wrike.
Here is the story and review.

Over at CRN, they have an interview with Bill Gates on Microsoft’s sally into VoIP. Ok, I can’t exactly imagine my phone system running on Windows, but Microsoft Office Communicator and the Office Communications Server are the latest and greatest entries from Microsoft. Predictably, Gates isn’t enamored about open source solutions for VoIP. This is one of those things…you think that Microsoft is really late to a particular party, and then after five years of chipping away at it, they flatten the competion. (c.f. Novell and Netscape).

There’s a growing open-source community around VoIP right now. Do you expect that open-source will take on as big a role in voice as it has in some of the other technology areas you’re playing in?

Gates: Well it hasn’t taken on a big role in most areas. Take a look at virtual machines or databases or things like that. Go back and look at the prognostication about the role they would play. The value of support and having the relationship and the way that packaged software certainly from us and some others is sold in a very high-volume, low-priced way. There’s always an interest in open-source. Open-source will always be there. I’m not saying it’s going away, but in terms of what’s actually used in many of these categories, it’s actually proven to be very, very small.

And you’re expecting to see the same in VoIP?

Gates: Well in consumer voice, Messenger is free, Skype is free, so at the consumer level, it doesn’t have to be open-source but you’ve got a lot of free options. But as you move up and you want the encryption, manageability, connection to the directory and just that incredible relationship … I think this would be a category that’s particularly difficult for open-source software to have an impact on. You never know.

The Oil Drum is considered one of the best chronicles of our current energy and global warming dilemma. They posted a scenario today about what life might be like in 2034.

Oil has gone up $92.00 today. A new high.

So, what does the price of oil have to do with non-profit technology? Well, we’re going to have to reduce our energy consumption along with everyone else. Fewer desktop computers and more laptops. Fewer servers humming away 24×7. More efficient screens.

This will only be generally available for seven days, after that it disappears behind the paid firewall at the WSJ. Their tech columnist, Walter Mossberg has a nice written review and video of the changes that Apple has incorporated into their new OS…”Leopard”. The OS is due to be released on Friday evening.

I’m wavering.

Lunch reading today.

Although this is mixed up considerably with Bill Clinton, an article in the October Atlantic describes a new paradigm for philanthropy, using “business models”. Interesting. The full article is behind a subscription firewall…but there is an excerpt and interview with Clinton online. They describe how their organization changes the market for things like AIDS drugs and florescent bulbs.

From the article:

The modern era’s predominant model for philanthropy, the grant-making foundation, is a century old. When the Rockefeller Foundation created the template, Woodrow Wilson was a new president and World War I was still a year away. Since then, the world has changed more than foundations have. In recent years, new generations have come to see the traditional approach as hidebound. ‘Everyone’s searching for new models and new ways of doing things,’ Peter Frumkin, the author of the recent book Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy, told me. ‘There is an urge for something other than the standard model of the grant-making foundation that dutifully delivers funds to nonprofit organizations that dutifully deliver the services.’