The apogee - or zenith - of LinTraining - So with the approval the
other day of a training center in Hong Kong,
LinTraining hit a total of 700 training centers. That's the highest it
has ever been. (Thus making it the apogee of its
history, which interestingly could also be refered to as it's
zenith!)
The problem, of course, is that of those 700 listed training centers,
probably a good 200... heck, maybe even 300 or more are probably gone as a
result of the tech bust. Especially the ones in North America. Training
centers also are in such a competitive business that they are always trying to
get an edge over some other training centers... so they are trying out new
material and topics. Many of the listed centers no doubt tried offering Linux
training for a bit, found it didn't make money for them... and then went on to
other subject matter.
So the database needs a major cleaning. It hit 700... that's
cool... but now we need to bring it back down to show the centers that are
really in there. (I just deleted two today to bring it to 698.) Problem
is, of course, that LinTraining is essentially maintained only by me,
with occasional help from Dave Whitinger, who actually runs the servers on
which the site sites (and, with a couple of other folks, was the original
author of the code, database, etc., when it was to be part of the Linsight
project that was sponsored by Atipa. (Anyone remember them?))
So here's my proposal for...
The Great LinTraining Cleanout - Next Wednesday, January 29th,
starting at 8pm Eastern US/Canada time, I'll get on a IRC channel #lintraining
on irc.freenode.net with as many other folks as can help. What we will do is
simply this:
- Starting at the top of the country listing of training centers on
the front page of
LinTraining each person will take a country or state and just start going through
the listings. (reporting that they are taking that country to the channel)
- For each listing, the test will be really simple - can we get to the URL
listed?
- If yes, then is there any mention of Linux training on the page
referenced or easily found? If not, it gets reported to the IRC channel
as 'web up, but no mention of Linux'
- If no, it gets reported to the IRC channel as 'dead URL'
- Once a person has completed a country/state/province, they go on to the
next one that no one else is doing and repeat the step above.
Meanwhile, I'm logging all of the channel traffic and can then go
back in the day or days afterward and delete the ones identified - or
at least "unpost" their submission until it can be checked out further.
I think with a good number of folks we could clean up the database (or
at least identify the potential problems) within a short amount of time.
It could be a good bit of fun, too. So the only question is whether or
not folks can be found to assist...
Anyone interested in helping? Please
drop me a note if you are. (Since I get so much spam, and haven't yet set
up spam-filtering, please put "LinTraining Cleanout" in the subject line.
Thanks.)
Now the only detail is that because training centers will have web
sites in their native language, you need someone who speaks the language to
really look at the web site to see if Linux training is offered there. I
mean, an English-speaker could go through the list of Chinese sites and
perform the "is the URL live?" test - and that would be a help because a good
number of sites are probably dead... but he or she couldn't really do anything
further to investigate. So I guess my algorithm of just starting at the top
probably breaks down... it's more of "anyone speak Spanish? Okay, you start
with Argentina... " and so on.
The other detail is that because my own personal time when I can do this is
a Wednesday night at 8pm, some of my European friends will no doubt not be
able to participate, as that is quite late for many of them.
Ah, well, I'll put the word out on a couple of mailing lists and here and
see what response comes back.
Programming Challenge - So if I were to do the next OCLUG
programming wars, here is a problem I might post. Using online queries (to
where, exactly, I don't know) determine all words beginning with "a" that have
as synonyms words beginning with "z". Could be an interesting challenge. (The
language geek in me is actually interested in knowing the answer!)
Cold - zeevon: Didn't realize it was -39 with the
wind... I won't mind if we don't have many more of those days!
Hockey insanity, part 347 - And of course, in that -30ish
temperatures last night, what was our neighbor's teenage son doing? Thwack!
Thwack! Thwack! Yes, indeed, he was out skating on their backyard skating
rink taking shots at his hockey net. I did notice, though, that he wasn't out
there for all that long. :-)
Curling - We lost last night. By quite a great margin. Not one of
our better games. The curling club
to which belong now has a brand new web site. Quite nicely done!
U.S. and North Korea - zeevon: Yes, I do
understand why the U.S. doesn't go after North Korea. As you mentioned, their
neighbors to the North might not take too kindly to any aggressive actions.
But the question I have received is more about the hypocrisy around attacking
a country that complies (or at least seems to) with U.N. mandates on
the one hand and then on the other hand giving aid (potentially) to a country
that flagrantly flouts U.N. mandates.
And the answer has a lot to do with the fact that, as you mentioned, the
U.S. has a lot of friends in the Middle East - and Iraq pretty much has no
friends at all at this point.... anywhere. We'll see what happens.
Plans, roadmaps - Gave a presentation to staff about our upcoming
6.0 release... many of them were not aware of what the content would be. Also
shared our current roadmap. It's darn nice to have a long-range plan going
about a year out of what we intend to work on. Good stuff.
The Chloe Journals - Lori picked me up at the office today and
brought Chloe in... she had a fantastic time playing with the Slinky on my
desk... all smiles and giggles... it was fun to show her off to everyone there
as she continues to keep on getting bigger!
