I had a bad day on Thursday. Generally, this is not a noteworthy thing, but this time the bad day happened to fall on the same day as a phone interview with a company I want to work for.

My brain was refusing to work on some things that I don’t generally have a problem with. Despite that, I still managed to answer a fair number of questions correctly.

Then came the fun part – I was given a small programming task to complete after the phone call. He gave me an hour with instructions to email him if I needed more time. (It’s at this point when a friend of mine and I both have the reaction of “an hour? This should not be about an arbitrary time limit, but rather about whether or not the code works.” Oh well. It’s their world.)

So I start by coming up with an algorithm to take care of the problem and then start to write the code. My old friend Murphy decides to stop by – the noise level rises, people start vying for my attention, and best of all, Eclipse grinds to a halt. We’re not talking about the IDE slowing down for a completion list. No, it just randomly started grinding to a halt while I was typing, stayed that way for several seconds and then the characters that I typed would finally appear.

I had never had this problem with an IDE on this machine before. Fine, I’m going to cheat – time to restart the laptop. A reboot later and it’s still doing the same thing.

Arg.

I email that I’m going to need more time and get back to fighting with my IDE. Fast forward a bit. Okay, now the code’s finished. Run it to test. Aaaaaaand there’s a bug.

No big deal. Let’s just run the debugger.

Eclipse hangs again.

Bugger.

That’s it. I need a break. Email and say I’m grabbing dinner before finishing because I ran into a problem. Come back afterward to find a response saying that was okay, but he wanted to see what I had already. Oops. Too late for that now.

Okay, so I can’t use the debugger because my laptop is being a pain. I’ll be silly and use printline statements since I don’t have much of a choice.

Five minutes later, the problem is found (infinite loop due to my accidentally skipping something), fixed, the code is cleaned up, and it’s emailed off.

Somehow, though, I still think the time thing is going to work against me because I didn’t get the email message. Oh well. If it does, it does. If it doesn’t, we’ll see what happens.

The next day I found out why I was having a bad day – I woke up sick, and I was sick all weekend.

Figures.

Current mood: tired
Current music: Collapsis – October

Some of us are far too spoiled for our own good. We don’t generally have to worry about things like where we’re going to find money to pay our bills or to buy groceries so we can eat. Let’s face it. A lot of the people who read this can probably even do something like buy a new computer every year just to get a faster model without really worrying about the dent it makes in your wallet.

It’s a nothing to us – just a little bit higher on the ladder of self-indulgence than, say, stopping by the local coffee shop every morning for a late`.

This isn’t the problem. The problem comes when we think that the rest of the world is the same way just because we have never seen actual want.

Here’s a newsflash for you – not everyone is that well off.

I’ve only been around for about 26 years, but in that time, I’ve traveled within the United States a fair amount and met a whole lot of people from a great deal of different backgrounds. Some of them made six figure salaries and some others consistently wondered where their next meal was going to come from.

That’s right, folks, some people don’t even know if they are going to be able to afford to eat that day. Suffice it to say that a new computer is just a little bit out of the question, and before you say something stupid, they deserve the same access to things which could help them better their situations that everyone else does. I’d even go so far to say that they may need it a little more precisely because of their dire situation.

Yes, some of them got themselves in that situation. However, a lot of them arrived there either from birth or because of circumstances beyond their control. You’d be amazed at how much of life is out of your hands (as well as just how “economically depressed” a region in this country can be. Economically depressed? Forget the political talk. Let’s call it like it is – some areas in this country, and in almost every other country on the face of this ball of rock, are downright POOR). They deserve a shot to get themselves into a better situation. If it was you in that position, you’d want the same. Some of you would even try demanding it.

I admit that I sometimes have an entitlement moment. They aren’t frequent, but they do happen, and I feel bad about them later. On the whole, most of the things that matter to me are friends and the things in life that you can’t necessarily hold in your hands. As long as I have my friends, the money to pay my bills, decent food to eat, maybe a little extra money to play with, and people aren’t trying to kill or maim me (don’t laugh. It’s happened.), I tend to view life as being pretty good.

Do us all a favor. Try not to take what you have for granted. Even more importantly, don’t look down on people that are less fortunate than you are. They’re people too. Be a decent person and try to even help out a little if you can.

The thing that spurred on this little diatribe? Slashdot, as usual. One of the people there made the rather asinine comment questioning why the Linux community would want to have people in it who still use hardware that runs Windows98 and said that such people were technologically backwards and should simply upgrade to newer equipment.

He even got moderated up until I commented and he started getting marked as a troll.

Current mood: annoyed
Current music: Ivy – Undertow

While looking at Coding Horror this evening, I ran across his latest article in which he outlines the requirements for Windows Vista RC1.

This is probably the first time to date that I have ever uttered this on my blog (and only one of about a half dozen times at all) – OMGWTFBBQ??!!

(The really weird this is that spell check does not object to that… it red flags “blog” but OMGWTFBBQ is, apparently, alright. That’s just funny.)

15 gigs of hard drive space??? MINIMUM??!!!

512 RAM just to boot it up with 1GB recommended?

Good grief.

I’d never be able to run it on the laptop that I use for day to day tasks (2.4Ghz processor, 512ram, 40GB HD split 30/10 between Windows and Linux). That’s just sad.

I have a fully functioning Linux environment (including network, coding, and office utilities) running in less than 8GB of hard drive space (part of the 10 is taken up with swap and profiles) and my Windows install with all of the tools that I use on a regular basis (compilers, office programs, email, etc etc etc. Even a few games) only takes up about 15GB total.

That’s windows, 3rd party programs, and everything (not including the portion of my CD collection that I keep ripped on my computer). For Vista, that would just cover Windows and then I’d have to add in everything else.

That’s just excessive. I mean, I realize that Windows Vista is going to be a little more resource intense – XP was designed for systems that were made six years ago, but still. That’s one heck of a jump.

From what I’ve been reading so far, Vista isn’t really even that much of a step up from XP. It’s mostly just eye candy and yet more applications that I probably won’t use. They started carving off the really interesting parts of the package as they slipped further and further behind.

I just can’t see myself using Vista unless it comes on a new computer that I buy and even then, I might just end up getting another license for XP because of the resource requirements.

I’ve been hearing similar things from a lot of people.

Current mood: tired
Current music: Echo and the Bunnymen – All in your Mind

I’ve had a nearly incurable wanderlust since I’ve been a kid.

I’ve literally grabbed a couple of day’s worth of clothing, a few hundred dollars, and driven off with no more of a plan than to see the sunrise over the mountains or run off to the beach (about 10 hours away) for seafood and to spend some time around the ocean.

I could even comment about having jambalaya for breakfast in New Orleans. (now that was a nice trip.)

It’s always just been a part of who I am. I have this love of new places and faces. It’s lead to meeting a lot of interesting people and being in some great (and some not-so-great) situations.

Thankfully, I’ve always managed to get through the rough spots with a little help from random people.

I wouldn’t give up those experiences for the world. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to do anything like that for a couple of years. It’s something I really miss.

One of the reasons I really look forward to having a new full time job again is being able to travel on my off time because I never get to anymore. I miss the ocean, the mountains, sunrise and sunset in interesting places, and getting to meet new and different people.

I admit it. In some ways I am a romantic. It’s just part of the strange package that is me.

Current mood: thoughtful
Current music: Collapsis – October

Well, the toy project I was talking about before has been posted.

I’m not completely happy with the GUI, but it was just for the heck of it so I didn’t want to spend *too* much time working on it. It was basically just an excuse to code and do something that was at least sort of novel and fun.

If you’d like to play with it, it’s posted here.

I may clean it up more in the future, and I will likely add new stories, but it’s nothing that’s really going to be aggressively added onto.

What did we learn from this, boys and girls? A trivial program which has a multi-screen GUI is no longer a trivial program =]

Current mood: calm
Current music: Professional Murder Music – A Night Like This

And now for a pointless, silly semi-rant that nobody should take too seriously:

Pardon me while I put my sarcasm hat on.

I love working with Swing.

Okay, I can take my hat off now.

Went to add some of the last functionality to the toy program today (the rest of the work needed is basically UI tweaks), and ran into a problem.

The frame was showing two copies of what I wanted to display.

Okay, let’s make sure that I told it to remove everything from the panel in question. Indeed I am. Let’s invalidate it and revalidate it. Still having the problem.

That’s weird. Time to reach for the nutshell book.

No, I’m not missing anything that could possibly help remedy the problem as things are set up now. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I decided to try something stupid.

I added the pane that I wanted to erase the contents of as the only component of another pane and then just told the program to erase that pane instead.

It worked. It’s stupid but it worked. I am rapidly learning that so much of dealing with Swing is nesting things in one container after another. It’s kind of silly, frustrating, and amusing all at the same time.

Oh well. It’s not like it’s a big deal, and it works now.

Current mood: amused
Current music: Garbage – Fix me Now

Ever have one of those days were it seems like simple tasks become major undertakings?

Yesterday was one of those.

In an effort to actually do something coding-oriented, I decided to make a fun little program. It should have taken an afternoon to get most of the functionality working (polishing the GUI is another matter). Instead, it ended up taking all day and just would not work.

I ended up stepping back for a moment and decided to start out again, this time with a simpler version of the project and then abstract away the needed parts to expand it to what I wanted in the first place. Doing that, I found my problem (and it was a fairly silly one, but I’ve been distracted and a bit stressed lately, so I can understand how I missed it).

It’s now roughly to the point where I wanted it before I start polishing the user interface and it only ended up taking me a couple of hours.

While it’s not a professional project, I will be posting it on my site when I finish tweaking the GUI so people can play with it. I figure that it should be up by the end of the week.

It’s not that it needs *that* much polish. It’s just that I have a lot of other things that I need to take care of as well.

Current mood: happy
Current music: Anggun – Snow on the Sahara

It’s been an interesting last few days.

My email address seems to have gotten listed as being that of a spammer. Again. On a good day, I might send out about 24 emails. A spammer I am not.

Thankfully, that’s been cleared up now.

I got contacted by two companies this week that I actually responded to (read that they were for full time positions and weren’t looking for things that were blatantly not me. Though I have to admit that more places seem to actually be looking at my website before they contact me).

One’s a company about an hour or so from here, and the other one is Amazon.

I’m interested in interviewing with both of them, but I’m also a bit nervous about the Amazon interview since the position includes, among other things, something I haven’t really done in two years (and that’s explicitly stated on the profile they used to find me, so I’m hoping that it won’t be that much of an issue).

The phone interview with Amazon is supposed to be a technical one, so I’m basically expecting to get hammered to the wall with it. The other one I don’t know much about yet.

I find it amusing that I get so nervous before some interviews. I know that if it goes well, it goes well and if it doesn’t then it doesn’t, but there’s just something nerve wracking about them for me. I think it’s the fact that so many of them try to grill you on things you did ages ago, trip you up just to see if they can, or ask you impossible questions (yes, some people like to ask impossible questions to “see how you will react. I consider this to be BS) so I end up sitting there trying not only to give the correct answers but to feel out the people who are interviewing me and their intentions.

I have largely become of the opinion that interviews aren’t much fun for the people on either side of the table, and there is something wrong with the people who actually enjoy them. =]

It’s funny. Interviews make me nervous, but being thrown into the sparing ring with someone doesn’t at all. I also don’t tend to get nervous when working on actual problems unless I’m running up against a hard time limit or someone is badgering me. It’s the whole “put him in a maze like a lab rat while we act smug, superior, and all knowing” thing that gets me.

Unfortunately, I’m not kidding about the acting smug, superior, and all-knowing part. I once interviewed with a company that gave me a test they had supposedly just re-written, labeled it as a C++ test and it was really just a straight C test. I got it and noticed printf statements (among other things) everywhere. I later asked the dev manager about it and basically got yelled at, stonewalled, and then told that it didn’t really matter anyway because they were porting everything to C#.

If it didn’t matter, why re-write the test? If you’re migrating from one language to another, would it not be a bit important to know the difference between the language that you say you are migrating from and the language you use as a test for prospective employees? Furthermore, why jump down a candidate’s throat who asked a rather pertinent question?

I wasn’t smug or snotty when I asked. I genuinely wanted to know. But the whole interview ended up being pretty bad, so I doubt that I would have accepted their offer if they had made one.

Hopefully neither of those interviews end up being like that one or worse. Please let me meet an at least somewhat sane company that wants to hire me. =]

Current mood: tired
Current music: Deadsy – Brand New Love

I do so love the “experts” that insist on showing their faces on Slashdot. They amuse me at times.

In case you didn’t know, Sun is open sourcing Java. I have mixed feelings about this. I hope it works out well, because I like the language, but I just can’t shake this nagging feeling that people are going to try to do lots of stupid things to the language (add things to the language that don’t belong there, break up the libraries into separate downloads, etc).

Call me paranoid, but Microsoft already tried it once. I don’t put it past other groups to try again.

The greatest suggestion I’ve heard yet? That the deprecated methods should be removed.

Pardon me while I repeat myself – someone suggested that parts of the language that have been deprecated (don’t use these, there’s a better way now) should be removed from the language outright, and people were AGREEING with him!

This is such a bad idea that it’s not even funny.

There’s a lot of old production code out there and a lot of it uses methods that are now deprecated. The same is true of almost any language that has been around long enough to have parts of it deprecated.

The only thing that I can figure is that the people spewing this crap are either just hobbyists or students who have never actually had to maintain anything. It just hurts my head.

Updating production code is NOT cheap. It takes a lot of time, can introduce a whole lot of problems, and it’s not something that you usually want to approach lightly (and some of us hate approaching it at all). You have to know the system really well to even try, or you could cause a lot of unseen problems.

If they want to remove those parts from Java, let’s see them suggest the same thing for their darling C and C++. Watch how fast that blows up in their face.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, but your account shows a balance of $0.”

“Mr. Jones, the insurance company says you do not have an auto insurance policy with them. Yes, I know that you have a piece of paper that says otherwise, but the computer never lies. You are under arrest.”

Etc etc etc. The examples could go on and on.

Deprecated methods are left in there for a reason. They are tagged as Deprecated and generally throw compiler warnings, but they are left in. I don’t care if *you* don’t understand why. Just realize that they are. In time you might learn why they are for yourself. In the meantime, stop biting at our ankles. We’re trying to get things done.

Current mood: my head hurts
Current music: Savage Garden - Violet

Checking my email, I got an email from a company in Louisiana. This one was rather neat, because the person who wrote me said that he “spent waaaay too long down in the rabbit hole that is your website.”

Apparently he found me fascinating.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t an opportunity that I was interested in, but that’s okay. I hope they find someone good to fill their position.

Other than that, I felt moderately unproductive today. Returned a few calls (I’ve been screening the heck out of my calls this past few weeks. Otherwise, I’d run out of minutes.), did a little planning for a couple of programs that I’m going to start working on, and then wandered around the local shops for a while.

I got things done, but it just doesn’t feel like I actually accomplished much. It’s just sort of been an off day.

I’ve decided to start doing some light training again (if the neighborhood kids will leave me the heck alone. I’m sorry, I don’t want to show them “something cool” and I most certainly don’t want to teach them – they don’t have anything even resembling discipline), and have learned the joys of not being able to see because of sweat running in my eyes. However, in my idle wanderings this afternoon, I found something that I had been looking for since I started playing with the OU fencing team back in 2001 – plain, solid-color bandanna sized handkerchiefs.

Nobody carries the bloody things. You can find print ones all over the place, but never the plain ones. I found them in the local hobby store of all places, so I picked up a couple. I’m semi-ashamed to say that I also picked up some junk food while I was out, but at least it was fairly healthy junk food (sunflower seeds and oatmeal cookies).

Hey, I can’t be completely healthy. =]

At least I’m starting to get back on the right track.

Current mood: calm
Current music: Smashing Pumpkins - Perfect

James the Grumpy Software Developer
Or
Why my Resume no Longer Lists my Home Number

Yesterday, I updated all of my posted resumes on the normal job boards. Since then, my phone has been ringing off the hook. Normally this would be a good thing. In the case of most of these calls, however, it’s a pain in the rear.

I plainly stated that I am only interested in full time, permanent positions. Most of the calls I have gotten so far are for short term contract positions, and most of those are located across the country.

(As an aside, it seems that my complaint that companies are hiring, or contracting out to, foreign HR people with *really* thick accents isn’t just isolated to the one company. I got several voicemails from different numbers that were absolutely unintelligible. If, on the other hand, they are having these people call me because they think the accent would be closer to my own, they should realize that my surname comes from the British Isles and not from more Asian locales despite my martial training.)

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

Previously, I had listed my cell phone as my preferred means of contact though I listed my home number just in case. That changed today. Most of the callers today decided that calling the home line would be a much better idea despite my wishes. One of them (who also failed to read the full time, perm portion of my posting) was so rude as to call my cell, leave a voice mail and then immediately call the home line.

There is now basically no mention of the fact that I even have a home number. It’s even been removed from my website. Now the only methods of contact listed are my cell, email, and snail mail. All of this trouble is because people don’t have the decency to use my preferred method of communication.

However, the fun and games did not just stop there. I got one person who called four times in about five or six hours, leaving the same voicemail message every time. I admit that, after about the first hour of being hammered by calls (I was literally getting a call about every 10 minutes or less), I decided to screen everyone that wasn’t in my address book. Otherwise, I would have burned up all of my minutes for the month on the second day of said month just so I could tell people I wasn’t interested in a six month opportunity in Texas.

Top it off with the fact that, when I informed the people I did not screen today that I was not interested in a short term contract halfway across the country, they didn’t listen and simply kept trying to talk me into the position.

I said no thank you. That should be enough.

Then again, so should calling and leaving a message once.

Have some tact and decency, people.

Current mood: annoyed
Current music: Tinnfed - Immune

It’s official. I’ve started to turn into an organization freak again.

For the longest time, I just kind of kept things in a loose “sort of together” way. Projects had their own folders, but that was about it. The important ones were in version control, but my own stuff was just kind of there.

Last week, I finally kicked myself into “cleanup” mode and started making subversion repositories for basically all of my projects. Everything from individual pieces of software to my website. I even made a repository for my scripts and a repository for my samples CD that I take to interviews.

About the only important thing that isn’t in subversion at this point is my cat. Somehow, I don’t think that he’d enjoy it. =]

While I was at it, I cleaned up the directory structure for my website to make it easier to grow. I hate to say it, but before I did the overhaul of the backend, almost everything was just in one directory. It was a huge mess to keep track of. Now it’s much nicer.

The next step for it at some point is moving it all to PHP, but I’m not going to do that just yet. There are other things that I have to work on first.

The important thing is that I’m organized again. It makes me amazed that I ever stopped having things arranged in an orderly manner.

Current mood: tired
Current music: London After Midnight - Kiss

Month in Review

Since I’ve been a bit quiet of late, I thought I should do an overview of the assorted miscellany that’s been going on. So, in no particular order, I present to you the month in review.

Since I got my laptop a couple of years ago, one thing has never worked. I could never get wireless to work properly in Linux. This was due largely to the fact that the card which came with it was a Broadcom. We tried everything including ndiswrapper. Not even my friends who write kernel modules were able to get it to work.

A couple of months ago, I finally broke down and got a new wireless card from Netgear. Within 30 minutes, it was up and running. The drivers aren’t native, but I had zero problems with the ones from MadWifi, so now I can start using Linux more regularly again.

Ironically, I read that the next kernel is supposed to have built in support for Broadcom wireless cards. Go figure.

I had a meeting with some headhunters last week, so I have more eyes out there looking to place me in a F/T position since I am tired of contracting. It ended up being a longer meeting than I was expecting because I ended up talking to several of them. Hopefully something positive comes out of this especially since I had to wear long sleeves and a tie in 95 degree weather. =]

The above is also what caused me to miss the TIGAR awards. However, I consider that a legitimate reason. Sorry, John.

I am, however, pre-registered for Ohio Linux Fest. If you’re in the area and are free that day, register and attend. It’s a decent conference.

I was without power one day and without cable and telephone the next because we were having a tree removed from the back yard since it would have fallen over before too many more seasons had passed. You never realize how much you need email until you can’t use it.

As some of you have noticed, I added RSS to the website and blog a couple of weeks ago. It surprises me the number of hits that it gets per day. I honestly didn’t think there were that many people who read this.

Also, in order to make the growth of the site a bit more orderly, I rearranged some things on the back end. It shouldn’t impact anything you see, but it will make my life easier as I continue to add things to the site. If you find anything broken, please let me know.

The last bit of news is that the weird referrals to the site continue. At one point last year, for some odd reason, I was getting referrals from a German porn site. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to know.

This month, the #2 referrer (just behind Google) is a site called dvd4arab. Apparently there is a link to me in one of their threads. I don’t know why they’re linking to me, just that they are. I can just see me having made some DHS list now because of the people visiting my site. Now all I need is some religious fundamentalist site linking to me, and I could have a great trifecta of weird referrers.

Well, that just about covers everything that has been of moderate interest for the month but has gotten lost in the shuffle. This month has just been kind of busy in a grind way instead of lots of exciting things.

Current mood: neutral
Current music: American Express – Find a New Way

You know, with all of the things going on both where I am and around the world, there are any number of things that I could rant on or discuss or give my opinion on.

I’m not going to do that tonight.

Instead, I think I’ll just say something that (I hope) is a lot more positive.

Last week, I got a card in the mail from a good friend of mine that I don’t get to talk to much anymore. It was a wedding invitation.

I’d just like to say congratulations and that I wish him well even though I won’t be able to make it to the ceremony. I hope it works out well, Tony. You deserve it.

Current mood – not bad
Current music – The Wreckers – Leave the Pieces

Interesting news… and a rant.

I realize that I don’t rant here much. Generally most of the “negative” things I have to say are said in a joking manner. There are, of course, exceptions, but the vast majority are said tongue in cheek. This one, however, is completely serious and something that I view as a real, honest problem.

I would also like to apologize in advance for being a little long-winded on this post.

Before we get to that, though, let’s do the news part. There will be plenty of time for the rant afterward.

The news is that the people who thought that Ken Lay, the one responsible for the Enron debacle, would get away without any jail time were absolutely right. He has died of a coronary before his sentencing could take place.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. Part of me is surprised. Part of me isn’t. Part wanted to see him face sentencing and part of me just kind of shrugs at the way it turned out. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll figure it out before too long. It just seems kind of ironic to go through the whole trial and have him die basically right before sentencing.

I think part of me feels like they should pass sentence anyway just so we can draw this to a close. Not that it really matters. It’s just that it seems like the ultimate loose end.

In other, probably less interesting news, I have added an RSS feed to the blog and website. I figure that I update often enough that it is warranted.

Now, on to the rant.

I have maintained that I have almost no problem in dealing with accents. I’ve worked with, been friends with, and known people from all over the world. As long as we can both speak English (or enough of another language that I understand), I can communicate with said person without a whole lot of trouble.

There is, however, a certain company that is making me seriously reconsider this position. I think it’s the same company, anyway. If it isn’t, then it’s a really disturbing trend.

About every two weeks, I’ll get a call from a recruiting firm that says they saw my resume online. This in itself is nothing abnormal, and I have no problem with it. In fact, I am looking for a new full time position now that I am finished with the magazine and the fact is that I am kind of tired of contracting because constantly looking for new clients gets old after a while.

The problem is that first, it sounds like they’re using voip (judging from the delay and static) and second, that the person on the other end of the line is Indian with an accent so thick that even *I* have trouble with it.

They start out by asking me inane questions like do I have any experience in an IT setting which can be answered by simply *glancing* at my resume. Of course I have no experience. My resume just has software developer and network analyst/system administrator positions on it for no reason. Please take the time to at least look at what you’re calling me about first.

Next, in the midst of trying to answer their questions, I will tell them that I can’t understand them (which is true) and ask if they could contact me via email instead. Instead of doing so, the person on the other end just keeps on with their script.

This annoys me. I restate my request and they keep going, so I inform them that since they do not listen, I have no desire to do business with them and hang up.

A couple of weeks later, it all happens again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Now, this is bad for a few reasons – first, communication is important in any relationship (business, friendship, romantic, etc). In a business setting, the person you have dealing with the general public should be able to speak in a manner which will be easily understood *by* the general public. This means that they speak the same language (in this case English), they speak at an understandable speed, and with an appropriate (or a “generic”) accent.

Doing this cuts down on a great deal of communications overhead and is a lesson that has been learned by everyone from the phone company and telemarketers to brick and mortar stores. Unfortunately, however, it does not seem to have been learned by a lot of technical companies. Here’s a hint – the same rules apply to you too.

Second, placing someone whom you know will not be understood by your target audience in a position which deals with them extensively shows an extreme lack of respect for your intended audience. In this case, if a company does this while they are trying to recruit me, they are not going to be able to do so. At all.

Third, the chances are that, if you continue to act in this manner, word will get around and it will be very difficult to connect with more customers (in this case, potential employees).

Like I said before, I think that this is the same company that has contacted me in the past. If that is the case, then they really need to get their act together. If not, then this is a disturbing trend.

Having said that, if anyone is interested in hiring me to work at a (mostly) sane company where the employees are treated with some measure of respect and not like instantly replaceable cogs in a machine, feel free to contact me. I am more than willing to listen and will relocate for the right opportunity.

I just saw an article in The Register about a poll of developers about the quality of various IDEs. Their conclusion? That Eclipse and NetBeans come in dead last.

This survey made me shake my head. It was an extremely poor excuse for a “study”. Why, you ask? First, they polled a whopping 1,200 people (that’s like asking 5 people on the street what they think of a local issue and calling it an official poll). Second, there is almost no way at all that the people they asked had experience in all of the IDEs that they listed. There were eleven IDEs listed covering a pretty wide variety of languages.

Here’s a hint, people. Looking at a pretty screen for five minutes is no way to say one IDE is better than another. You need to have actual experience in using them.

It really looked like a high school popularity contest. I just wondered who funded Evans Data Corp’s little “study”.

Do I think everything about Eclipse is perfect? No. My main complaint is that the Auto-Complete list takes too long to appear a fair amount of the time whereas on Visual Studio, it appears by about the second character of a member function/variable that you type. Is this a huge problem? Not really. I just hate digging through docs to get the proper order of arguments.

This sort of thing really makes me wonder who actually takes these “studies” seriously. They really aren’t worth the time it took to do them (though I am sure that the groups that do them are compensated *quite* well for their trouble).

Current mood: annoyed
Current music: Deadsy – The Key to Gramercy Park

Well, this evening was certainly interesting. I went over to the neighbor’s house to watch the fireworks. There were many pretty lights (many of which hurt my eyes – being photosensitive can be a real bear at times), lots of whizzing sounds, and a lot of smoke.

I even managed to get hit squarely in the chin by a falling ember. That’s always fun.

Then came the last firework of the evening. The roman candle was lit. It then proceeded to fall over and orient itself toward the crowd of us. Nine screaming balls of colored fire rocketed toward us (and their house, and the cars, and my house, and the other neighbors’ cars…).

People scattered. It was nuts. Several of us almost got hit, and a few of us changed direction only to have the pyrotechnic pursuer curve along the same basic path. Talk about a great close to the evening. heh

Their daughter wanted to set off fireworks last night, but now that she’s been chased by the last firework of the evening, she has declared that she doesn’t want anything to do with them anymore. I’m sure she’ll be ready again by next year =]

Current mood: amused
Current music: Roxette – The Look

I have met yet another example of a company that I have no desire to work for in the last week.

I was told by a consulting company that part of the requirements before I even got an interview was to turn over my client list. I spent the next 5 minutes telling her that there was no way that was going to happen and she spent it trying to convince me that it was a standard and acceptable practice.

Sorry, people, but that’s not the mark of a company looking for new employees. That’s the mark of a company looking for new clients and wanting to weasel them out of other people.

My FAQ just got a new entry.

Current mood: amused
Current music: INXS & Jimmy Barnes - Good Times

I’ve said it before – I like Perl. It’s a useful language for doing some things. I think it’s used by too many people for things that it shouldn’t be, but then most languages are. It’s not my choice for a main language, but it does some things pretty well.

That being said, I have to say that I’ve been playing around with Ruby a bit more lately, and I’m starting to like it better than Perl. There are two main reasons for this – the first is that it’s a lot more cross platform than Perl is. You can actually use it on Windows without fear of strange quirks (O’Reilly makes Perl on Win32 for a reason). Second, the syntax is a whole heck of a lot more readable.

Okay, so regular expressions still look like my cat ran across the keyboard, but they always have and probably always will. For the rest of it though, Ruby’s object oriented nature makes the code look a whole lot less complicated, and the less time I have to spend trying to figure out what an app does, the more time I have for solving problems. I like being able to do things like call somearray.length to get the length instead of trying to assign the array to a scalar in order to get how long it is. It just makes a heck of a lot more sense.

Let’s face it, Perl is probably the only language in the world in which you can roll your head across the keyboard and then watch the resulting script compile. There’s no guarantee as to what it will do – for all you know before you run it, the script may end up causing a rift to open at your feet from which emerges Huang Ti along with a standing field army of terra cotta golems animated by the spirits of the soldiers that were under his command when he was alive (if this confuses you, don’t worry. It’s sort of an inside joke. Though if you’re just wondering who Huang Ti is, he was the first emperor of China). Then again, it may do no more than the program I wrote once when I was 21 after I had been out with some friends for the weekend (it compiled, but I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote it), but the chances are that it will compile.

In all honesty, I believe that there is a reason Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, has won the International Obfuscated C Contest twice.

Perl, you have been useful, and I may still end up using you on occasion, but I think that, for the time being at any rate, Ruby is going to become my choice as far as scripting languages go.

Current mood: neutral
Current music: Michael Hutchence – Slide Away

It’s official – I have relinquished all of my final responsibilities at o3 Magazine.

Since stepping down as executive editor in February, I stayed on board as an editorial advisor for the last several months, but the time has come to pass the reins to someone else.

It was an interesting trip, and I wish them the best in the future. As for me, my own path lies in a different direction.

(I should also point out that this has nothing to do with the previous post. That situation arose because of some things from the past in my personal life coming to my attention. It happens to the best of us.)

Current mood: calm
Current music: Shades Apart – Beat by Beat