On Saturday, September 30th between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., Tucows will be hosting an open house/job fair. We have a number of job openings for:

• Developers (Junior/Intermediate App Developers, a Senior App Developer and a Contract Web Developer)
  
• Quality Assurance Analysts (QA Analysts and Senior QA Analysts)
• a Usability Architect

Bring your resume to our offices, located at 96 Mowat Avenue, just east of King and Dufferin. You'll have a chance to meet with Executives & Managers of our Product Development, QA and Usability team, and talk about yourself and the exciting careers here.

I've been keeping a dirty little secret: in spite of all the fuss about web applications that can do what only desktop apps could, "Web 2.0" and Ajax, I have until recently been pretty ignorant of JavaScript, DHTML, the DOM and even CSS (I was using tables for layout until this year!). The shame isn't just mine; a lot of programmers to whom I've spoken have said "Yeah, me too."

Steve Yegge was in the same situation and he's been doing what I've been doing: self-training in JavaScript, Ajax and DHTML. He's written some notes and based on this experience in a blog entry titled Dreaming in Browser Swamp. He makes some interesting observations, my favourite of which is:

JavaScript is probably the most important language in the world today. Funny, huh? You'd think it would be Java or C++ or something. But I think it just might be JavaScript.

In a study of British businesses conducted by the enterprise content management association AIIM Europe, more than a third of the respondents said that their email systems were in "complete chaos" and had no policy or procedures for compliance issues and archiving. A mere 27% of the respondents archived their mail outside of Outlook in some kind of searchable repositiory, 16% kept printouts of important emails in files and 60% had "no widespread understanding of exactly what electronic records are and how they should be retained".

Here's some food for thought for warriors on either side of the Ruby/Python language war: the c2 wiki entry titled Python and Ruby and Converging and Wheel of Ezekiel's Ruby vs. Python - why no-one should care.

The New York Times has published an article about how the travel industry is being affected by the persistent and globally-amplified word-of-mouth provided by blogs. Given that business travellers are knowledge workers who often travel with their laptops, and constantly try to maximize their travel dollar and deal with the stress of being on the road, it's not surprising that they would turn to the internet -- and especially blogs -- to find and share travel information and tips.