(Dieser Artikel steht auch auf Deutsch zur Verfügung). As I wrote a bit more than a week ago, I am giving out a few tips how you can improve your chances in the tech job market. This is mostly targeted to people who are currently in their apprenticeship or maybe at university. I’m far too young an inexperience to know a lot about such things. But I have a few ideas and those I’ll voice. Also I have dealt quite a bit with interns and know which ones I would employe and which ones I wouldn’t. So my first tip: Learn English. A lot of technical documentation is only available in English, especially for new technologies. Books are a case in point. Just look at the books available from O’Reilly in English and in German. Most German ones come out in English first and are only translated to Germany months later - if at all. So, learn to read English. If you want to participate on some software or technology, you will probably subscribe to a mailing list or newsgroup. Again, most of those are in English and where German and English are available, the English list is usually of better quality. So, also learn to write English. And last but not least, you may have to communicate to people over the phone or may want to participate at a conference. For example the Caron Workshops are easily accessible from Switzerland. So, learn to understand and speak English. But how do you start improving your English? Most Swiss my age already studied English at school. So the basic knowledge is in place. To improve reading, just start to read English. Pick up some book that you already have read in German. I started to read John Grisham’s books a few years ago for exactly that reason. You may also want to follow some English weblogs or mailing lists. To improve your understanding, you may subscribe to some English podcasts.

After my State of the Swiss blogosphere article, Antonio contacted me about his blog platform monblog.ch which is popular in the French part of Switzerland. Basically none of the monblog.ch blog was represented in the feed directory. I suggested he provide an OPML feed that I can import and so he did. So starting today, monblog.ch weblogs are automatically added if they have at least ten articles, are older than three days and have published an article within the last month. I don’t check those conditions myself, but Antonio only corresponding publishes weblogs in the OPML feed. If you are a blog provider in Switzerland or have an easy way to extract only Swiss weblogs, feel free to publish your active weblogs as an OPML feed. It’s probably best to follow the format I use for the feed directory OPML. Once you have done that, send me a mail with the feed’s URL.

Well, look at what we’ve got here. Because of this this subversion checkin I saw that Skolelinux 2 is now live. And indeed, on the English download page you are now presented with the option of downloading Skolelinux 2.0r0. Great! This version brings a ton of improvements. First and foremost, this is based on the Sarge release of Debian and therefore includes a lot more recent software and an improved installer. Second it includes very good Spanish translation. And it generally just works very nicely. This new release is a major step and am I very glad for the Skolelinux/Debian-Edu project that they (or rather we, as I also helped my little bit) got it out.

I love The Economist. In the new Technology Quarterly they dedicate an article to hacking, the real definition: THE word “hacker” is widely misused. Among hackers themselves, it refers to someone who enjoys tinkering with technology, exploring its boundaries and getting it to do unexpected or unintended tricks, though in general use the word refers to individuals who break into computers for nefarious ends (for whom hackers prefer the terms “malicious hacker” or “cracker”). But a hacker is not necessarily bad and is not necessarily just someone who messes around with computers. Thomas Edison was arguably a hacker, back in the 19th century. I liked the example of the iRobot vacuum-cleaner. Where can I order such a fine piece of hardware? But some companies, at least, have chosen to embrace hackers. iRobot, the company behind the Roomba robot vacuum-cleaner, includes an external data connector in the device and has even documented how to use it.

Na dann helft mal mit, dass nicht wieder dem Informatiker die Schuld gegeben wird.

It appears that the Swiss job market in the tech sector is not as bad as I thought for some time. If you are a well-qualified individual you should have no problem finding a job - at least in the Web sector. Why do I say this? Well, recently Bitflux had a job opening (now filled), local.ch has also been looking, as is now search.ch. namics has a few job openings as I’m sure have other agencies. All of them have one thing in common which was not always true for our sector: they look for highly skilled workers (though namics also has internships in Baar/Zug and in St. Gallen). A few years ago, companies in our sector were adding people to their workforce like wild and thus had to sacrifice on quality. Now it’s the opposite. I for one believe that is a very welcome change and so do many of my friends. But I also know a few people who profited from the “more liberal” practices during the dot-com boom. Anyway, I’ll add a few articles in the following weeks on how to improve your chances for getting an employment in this area. It won’t be rocket science but I hope I have a few tips to share. Those articles will be available in English and in German. And I suggest you tag job openings on your weblogs with the “jobs” tag. That will allow job seekers to watch the tag (or subscribe to it). Update 1: Forgot, that KAYWA also is looking for talent. Update 2: And Google also is looking. (Via relab.ch).

Ich bin schon seit einiger Zeit kein Fan der SP mehr. Vor allem ihre konstante Meinung, die Schweiz müsse der EU beitreten misfällt mir. Gibt auch noch anderes. Aber was ich da heute bei Swissinfo lese, zeigt, dass die SP mittlerweile sogar eine populistische Partei ist, welche offenbar noch vor hat ihr Wahlvolk anzulügen: Die Delegierten folgten der Position der SP-Geschäftsleitung, den Euro vorläufig nicht zu übernehmen. Es sei schwieriger, eine Mehrheit zu erhalten, sagte Fehr, wenn die Schweiz gleichzeitig mit dem EU-Beitritt auch den Franken aufgeben solle. Sprich, die SP wird in der nahen Zukunft behaupten, nicht für den Euro zu sein. Sobald die Schweiz aber mal in der EU ist (wäre), soll dann da der Kurs gewechselt werden. Oder wie habe ich diese Aussage von Fehr zu verstehen?

According to SF Tagesschau Turkey is going to abolish death penalty as of June 1, 2006. Since August 2002 death penalty has only been allowed at war times and even before that no one was sentenced to death in Turkey since 1984. Great news, now if only the US of A, Japan and China would follow. Though there are many other countries who still allow death penalty those three are the ones I care most about (all are big countries and all are important in today’s industry).

Heise reports in it’s article Google wechselt von Intel zu AMD, that Google now purchases it’s processors from AMD instead of Intel. Great stuff.

There is a write-up on Ain’t It Cool News about a visit at Pixar. Obviously they have a lot of creative talent and it’s interesting how they give them the freedom. For example the designers all design their office themselves. Also interesting the center atrium: The mailboxes, the employee café, and the common room where all the games are all open into that atrium, and people lingered, talking, exchanging ideas and discussing the various projects they’re working on. It seemed like a fertile, creative environment, and I felt like Charlie Bucket holding a golden ticket as I examined the larger-than-life INCREDIBLES statues in the center of the atrium and the concept paintings hung on the walls. But just go and read the article.