Slashdot reports on a USA Today article saying that there fewer Computer Science Majors. They cite a 23% decline in enrollment in North America. Here’s one comment about the article:

Most engineering schools are reporting declines in enrollment. This is hardly surprising since most engineering curriculums, including CS, are difficult compared to other fields of study. Without the prospect of a good job waiting for them, many college students are veering away from these majors.

Update: Yuhong correctly points out that this is mostly at the undegraduate level. Graduate schools are finding enough students, at least according to Yuhong. I think this is expected: if job prospects are bad, people won’t enter the system but once they’ve entered it, they will stay in it longer if jobs are scarse.

RDF is everywhere it seems: from Dublin Core to RSS, all to way to FOAF… However, it can be quite painful to parse. Cool tools are starting to emerge however, but google is not yet very good at finding them.

Suppose you have a RDF/XML representation and you want the triples… go to W3C RDF Validation Service and it will do it nicely for you.

On the other hand, the form on this page allows you to go from N3 (the user friendly RDF syntax) to RDF/XML.

Through Downes’, I found this great post about how to be creative. HOWTOs are always interesting and sell magazines, but they are somewhat more interesting in blogosphere because someone you can get to know put his heart into it.

• Ignore everybody
• Creativity is its own reward
• Put the hours in
• If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail
• You are responsible for your own experience
• everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten
• Keep your day job
• Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity
• Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb
• The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props
• Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether
• If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you
• Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside

One of the most interesting one is number 5: Nobody can tell you if what you’re doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is.

Of course, I don’t buy all of it. Being extremely lonely is no way to be creative I think. Nobody gets awfully creative at the bottom of a cave. I do think you have to look for others. The strength of your network is key because it multiplies your own brain power. I guess we go back to Emerson’s independence of solitude. Be in a network, be in a crowd, but do not be a mere node in the crowd, be your own node. It does require courage though, and you have to expect to fail, fail badly even.

Paul Graham wrote an essay called ‘Great Hackers‘. I’m pretentious enough to call myself a hacker (though I do not claim to be great), so I had to jump on it!

Here are some juicy quotes…

Good hackers find it unbearable to use bad tools. They’ll simply refuse to work on projects with the wrong infrastructure.

Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software. Not just because it’s better, but because it gives them more control.

They [great hackers] work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around and somewhere to walk when they need to mull something over, instead of in glass boxes set in acres of parking lots.

There’s no way around it: you can’t manage a process intended to produce beautiful things without knowing what beautiful is.

And this is the reason that high-tech areas only happen around universities. The active ingredient here is not so much the professors as the students. Startups grow up around universities because universities bring together promising young people and make them work on the same projects. The smart ones learn who the other smart ones are, and together they cook up new projects of their own.

If you’re worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably is.