And that is no joke. The good news is that Apple never questioned why any of my iPods (seven dead ipods as of March 2006, number eight has a near dead click wheel and is going to the shop this week) and always replaced them on the spot. Once the Apple Care coverage kicked in, I did not even need to take them to the store, Apple simply sent me a padded box to ship it to them. To me Apple Care for the iPod is the same as a subscription.
Is this bad? I don't know. I am not a typical iPod user, my iPod usually runs nostop for many hours and I use it seven days a week. so I am probably killing it simply by overusing it. Also most of my problems have been with the drives crashing.
Would I pick any other MP3 player? Hell no. $300 and a $60 warranty bought me two years of non stop hard duty service. I got about two months left on my Apple Care, and the wheel is sticking, so I'll be able to do at least one more exchange before the warranty is over.
BTW, while I was killing all those iPods, I have had friends that have owned theirs for over two years and no incidents. Why? Because their usage is nowhere as bad as mine.
It is the norm. Your Gmail space is increased little by little in real time. Log out of gmail and go to the front page, see that the number goes up in real time. Right now it says:
"Over 2770.008107 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message."
I spent over three months playing it pretty much daily and yeah, I beat it, but I had only explored about 25% of the total surface of the mainland. I am buying a 360 next week specifically to play Oblivion, which is a hell of a lot bigger.
I bought this book years ago and still can't STFU about it, sorry.
At my previous job (web-based custom market research) we did hundreds of web surveys which had on the average some 400 data points per survey. These had distinct variable names, etc. and were built 100% by hand when I was hired in the company some time in 2002. My first survey project was a disaster, it took me about 20 hours from the final approved survey document to the dynamic version. The process was riddled with manual steps that created an infinite amount of room for errors.
Enter regular expressions.
While fiddling with BBEdit Pro I finally decided to take a shot at regular expressions. After an hour or so of experimenting I started writing a few filters that allowed me to cut down the turnaround from 20 hours per survey to a little over 10 hours. When I got to the point in which I wasn't able to figure things out from the BBEdit documentation and he web, I convinced the boss to buy me Mastering Regular Expressions.
Within the first 50 pages, I had picked up on additional regular expressions concepts that allowed me to eventually cut down the turnaround per survey to less than 8 hours. That's not 8 hours programming, that's 8 hours from the moment the approved survey is handed over to programming to the moment it passes QA checks and is considered ready to go live.
This was a $50 or so book, and it saved us thousands of dollars over the four years I worked at that company. Of course, my reward for saving the company all that money was to lay me off, and I "forgot" to leave instructions on how to use the text filters, so I imagine my replacement is right now writing surveys by hand.
Some of the things that proved to be killer uses for regular expressions within that context:
1. The approved survey would have specific variables that the analysts would need to keep for importing into SPSS later down the process. A text filter picks up those variables and generates a unique list of every variable needed for he survey. The variables are named with specific patterns, so you know which ones are strings, integers, etc.
2. Now that we have a list of variables, it means we can quickly generate the CREATE TABLE statement for the survey data. What used to be done by copying and pasting 400 times is (was?) now done by highlighting the text and running a macro. The output is the SQL command you need.
3. Since you already have the list of variables, you can generate the 400 statements needed to read each form variable into its proper variable in the asp code.
4. The same way you can generate the hidden form fields that you need.
5. The same way you can generate the INSERT statement to send your data to he database.
Little things like that. Eliminating all that copying and pasting really cut down on the QA overhead per project.
It is not just banking. Any time you have workers in direct contact with financial data you may held liable if you did not exercise due diligence.
You are a hiring manager for Pay Pal, and you are recruiting for a web/db programmer that will have full access to the system. You need to make sure the guy you just hired is not on his second chapter 13 bankruptcy or that he is moving cash advances off half his credit cards to pay the minimum on the other half, or other crazy indicator of unstable finances. These are risk factors.
Defense jobs have had financial disclosure rules for many years, they are at least as strict as those for banking.
Now, this doesn't mean you need to do this for every stupid job.
What TFA describes is the current state of general software development for hire, which has changed very little in the 18 years I have been programming.
It doesn't matter how well planned the project is, or how well educated the customer is, or the proper allocation of project champions on the client side, we all end up getting hit with b.s. look-and-feel complaints that end up taking higher priority than fixing bugs.
If you give the client the option between tweaking a template to a report, and tweaking the queries that feed the damn report so it runs 10% faster, the client will ask you to first make it pretty, then worry about the queries. If you dare ask them why, they will give you a b.s. explanation that it is all about perception. That the pretty page looks more "professional" and it looks like more work and care was put into it.
A word of warning to those of you that are new to for-profit programming: whenever somebody uses the "it looks more professional" gambit, it usually means he has no excuse and is hoping you will drop it. He asked you to do it simply to please himself. HE wants the damn color of the page changed, or that heading two pixels taller, etc.
Every couple of years we get hit with new programming methodology fads, but those don't help us with dealing with difficult customers. When you are pulling millions every year from the same two or three government contracts, the last thing your project manager wants is to piss off any of the primaries for the contracts. Extreme programming won't suddenly make your client listen to you.
Why the hell do you think that programmers are so rabidly enthusiastic about working for free for a specific open source project? These same programmers will drag their feet and hate life in general when working at their salaried jobs. At the free project a hell of a lot of the people involved in running the project will actually have a clue, while at the projects at the salaried job the norm is a lot of the people in charge won't have a clue.
It's going to be literally impossible to enforce. All it is going to take is for somebody within a special scope project to get ahold of this, implement it, and mark it as a classified document. The developers may never know this happened, and the people that violated the license will be under clearance restrictions so they can't talk about it. Even if they figure out it is being used, it will take months or maybe even years of FOIA requests to get the offending agency to even acknowledge the project exists.
That's one of the reasons I did not break them more often.
After the third adapter (and the second time I got stranded with no power on my work laptop) I made sure I always had at least two adapters per laptop.
The other thing is I kept an adapter exclusively at the office and one at my desk at home, a third one in my bag. The third one was my roaming adapter for whenever I went to work at a wifi cafe, or I had to travel.
None of these three ever wore out.
I am positive that you will find more failures in people that are (a) very mobile and (b) have only one adapter.
Anyone that has owned powerbooks or ibooks knows about the crappy power adapters. I have personally lost three, of which only one was covered under warranty. The two biggest weak points:
1. the connector that plugs into the laptop did not have enough ribbing material, so it frayed easily. 2. the thin cable that runs from the laptop into the brick had zero ribbing, it just simply ran into a hole. Frayed easily, I even had one catch fire.
After three Apple laptops I even started noticing how Apple tried to attack these problems. If you look at the last power supply shipped before the magnetic connectors came out, you will see that the "thin" cable is almost twice as thick as the one that shipped with iBook G3s and Titanium Powerbooks. You will also notice much thicker ribbing at both ends of that cable.
The worst of this is that the apple branded adapters were $79 apiece, while a perfectly working replacement, with much sturdier cables, could be had for $35.
1. An ex-coworker purchased a pair of swimming googles with a built-in mp3 player that used bone conduction instead of earplugs. This was at least one year ago.
2. Why not put bandpass filters that cut off outside of the dynamic range that can be generated by a human voice? This should cut a hell of a lot of the background noise.
A year later and I still think those googles were dorky as hell.
I have been programming for about 18 years, so I had my fair share of plain text editor v. IDE.
If the IDE allows turning on and off enhanced features, then disable:
1. Intellisense or anything similar that suggests code for you. 2. Code generation wizards. 3. Anything that will rewrite whatever you just wrote. 4. Magic database tools from within the IDE that will "design" your database for you.
I find the following features helpful in quickly teaching a new language, so these should not be disabled:
1. Context-sensitive help 2. Pop-up method lists that work on hovering, not as you type. 3. Pop-up argument hint lists, to show you the arguments and data types the specific function wants. 4. Hooks to online version of docs.
The biggest trap in the IDE world is the tool v. language argument. Your students need to learn the language, not the damn tool. You are not an Eclipse or VS.net programmer, you are a Java, C# or whatever programmer.
The two worst things for a n00b (that really needs or wants to learn, not for the casual geek that is just screwing around) is that the intellisense-type auto completes and the wizards will not teach them why they are doing what they are doing. Once they know how the damn thing works, then it is OK because the tool helps them write faster code with less errors.
I spent the past four years or so sharing my time between classic ASP in a legacy app, and building its replacement app in PHP. Both through BBEdit. It was not a lot of fun. I am at a new job and we use asp.net here, a platform I had not used for the four years I worked at my previous job. It took me two days to get back up to speed.
Why?
Because I already knew asp.net programming, so all I had to do was to get re-familiarized with Visual Studio, which had gone up three versions since last I had used it. To make things interesting, my previous experience was with c#, and this shop uses mostly vb.net. It did not slow me down a bit.
We need to teach new programmers the old and sacred ways we used to be able to pick up arbitrary languages with nothing more than a good reference and a decent text editor. Or Emacs. I know plenty of people of reasonable intelligence, and not even driven psycho geeks, just your average slackers, that have picked up php, perl, ruby and python without much drama. Why? Because long ago somebody bothered to teach them how to program.
There are of course languages that are close to impossible to deal with without the proper IDE, but most these lessons still apply:
1. Make them write their own code. 2. Give them as much context-sensitive help as possible. 3. Make them write their own code.
I got advance notice in late January that I would be laid off 3/31. Went into panic mode, started looking and all I could find was.net, which was a problem since I had switched the company from classic asp to PHP over the past 3 years or so.
For every call I got about php I got 20 for asp.net. I even learned that one of the biggest recruiting companies in the Washington DC Metro now recruits for.net exclusively.
After two months, my number came up and I got laid off effectively 3/31. I got two offers on 3/31, one to work like an animal in a php/Oracle shop for a huge company, one to work like an animal in a tiny shop that only does.net and is tired of turning down php work because all of the programmers are overbooked. I was able to jump in and do both kinds of work, so I took the job at the tiny shop.
Apart from the near saturation of.net jobs here in DC Metro, there is a lot of Java, but I am very worried about the morons that are doing the recruiting. I actually had a recruiter hand me a job description that had three bold bullets with mandatory Java skills, and he was still trying to con me into applying for the job.
Another problem I saw with the very limited supply of php jobs is that the people that are hiring are absolutely disconnected from the salary curves for this market. They want you to have 10 years of experience in C, C++, PHP, Ansi SQL, JSP, HTML, CSS, XML, etc. then they want to hire you for $50K or less. And they get offended when you laugh in their faces. I noticed this is only a problem with the open source type jobs, the.net people were advertising pretty much right on the median for the salary surveys for the area.
I was a very good freehand artist until I took my first technical drafting course in junior high school. Took another one in high school, plus 6 credits of what used to be called "mechanical drafting." The icing in the cake was that we were the transition class for the switchover to AutoCAD (this was back in 1987 or so).
By the time I finished the transition to AutoCAD I could barely draw freehand anymore. I don't know if it was the tedious and repetitive drafting, or the detached way in which we embraced AutoCAD. What I do now is I can't draw 1/10th as good as I was able to when I was 12-13 years old.
"sequel" is old skool but accurate. The only reason we call it sql and not sequel (Structured English QUEry Language) is because of a trademark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql) issue.
That's how mine was setup, all mail routed to my gmail, then using the automated settings so my replies would always show the proper "From:" address. Yes, this rocks if you are trying to service a small organization, but if you are just dealing with your own domains, then it is probably easier to just route everything into one Gmail account.
I force them to dowload to their mail clients. If your mailbox grows too much, and you are not either the president or the ceo (small shop, the ceo and president are a married couple) then your old mail will start disappearing.
The best part is when I don't tell them, and months pass with no complaints, which means that once the mail is downloaded to their client they never bother to check their web mail.
1. No more cold calls 2. No more cold calls 3. No more emails that serve the same purpose as a cold call
Why?
I have been in the workforce since 1992. After serving in the US Army from 1992-1997, I have found every job I have held through an online job service. My first civilian job was thru OCC, which eventually became part of monster.com. After four jobs I have learned a lot about the most common abuse of the job sites: cold calling. These do a search for.net or java and get a bunch of names, phones and emails, nothing more. No address, no resume, zilch. That means they have to call you and use social engineering to extract that information from you.
How can you tell? Because the "recruiter" will open by saying he ran into your resume online, then goes to explain about the "opportunities" and finally asks for a fresh copy of your resume in word format. That's your cold caller right there.
Another way to tell is because they are not buzzword compliant. There are tons of good recruiters out there, and they go through the trouble to learn the jargon of their market. When a recruiter calls you for a J2EE spot when your resume has ASP written all over it, that's a problem. When even after you explain it to him he still tells you he can't grasp how it is possible that a guy could spent 7 years programming for the web without using J2EE, there's something really wrong.
I think it is time that the job boards stop offering this kind of information for free, because all they are doing is driving us all crazy.
I carry one of those microcameras, mine is the Sony DSC-T1. It is smaller than my clickwheel iPod and it is pretty light. The problem is that it is too light and too small, so it is much more prone to shaking.
Because of this, there are two different use styles for this camera:
1. You take it out, turn it on (instant) and start shooting in auto, no need to worry about keeping the camera still or whatever. 2. You take it out, fiddle with the settings, then shoot and shoot until you get the shot that you want.
It is frustrating because you know you can make it take great shots, but only if you go through a lot of hassle. It will take very good shots on its own but only in auto mode, the second you move out of auto you need to start to worry about shake, etc.
The DSC-T* line was upgraded a half dozen times since I bought mine, but as far as I can tell these changes were to the chassis, the underpinnings are mostly the same.
We have zero history of autism in either mine or my wife's family, my son is the only autistic kid in any of the two families as far as we know. We are also two of the very few in all of the family that work in scientific fields. The interesting thing is that he is showing the exact tendencies to destroy toys (to see how they work) that I exhibited as a kid. And now as a grownup I wonder if some of my socialization issues in high school were on par with other nerds or I was showing some mild signs of autism.
My brother on the other hand was my complete opposite, he is the kind of guy that got bad grades mostly because he did not give a crap, not because of intelligence. His daughter was very precocious, learned to talk very early, and my mom (a teacher) had her reading before she was 5.
My dad was not a scientist, he was a policeman for 32 years but he was sort of a wizard when it came to fixing machinery with no formal training, and I also remember he was really good at running long calculations in his head. Could all this be related?
In 14 years in the workforce, the only employer that has ever trained me on the clock was the US Army. Not just the MOS and ASI, which added up to over 14 months worth of classroom time. It was also week or month long courses in specific topics. They had contractors that flew from base to base just to teach that one class.
Everywhere else I have worked at, training was on me. Zero OJT, and probably less than 12 hours worth of seminars, conferences and demos over the past 9 years or so since I turned civilian.
At my previous job I actually trained some of my programmers, but I was never offered training. Whatever I have picked up has been on my own. My budget includes buying a few programming books per month, so my only investment is the personal time I spend learning new stuff.
Would I let my employer pay for training? Hell yeah.
1.Walk it into any Apple store or Apple authorized repair shop. 2. Tell them your mac stopped working. 3. When they ask you for the symptoms, tell them it showed a spining ball in many colors, like a rainbow. Then it beeped. Then it told you to reboot in many languages. 4. When you rebooted it, it refused to power up. 5. The proper answer to any probing questions is "uh, I don't know."
Under any circumstances are you to give the impression that you know more about macs than the guy taking your repair order. If the contents of the drive are an issue, take the drive out, connect it to another machine and delete the partitions. Check out the "user installable parts" document for your mac, it will tell you the exact procedure for pulling a drive without voiding the warranty. For the first generation iMac G5 it even tells you the color of the 3 screws that you need to remove, I bet that has not changed with the Intel version.
Notice how right as Nikon announced they would stop most of their film cameras, Zeiss recovered from the Contax failure by offering their glass for the Nikon F-mount.
Film photography is far from dead, but we are past the point in which you can wrap a business around expensive film-based gear and exotic film types. Kodak killed their B&W paper products, but it was not the end. Ilford is still around.
The same will happen with film. Now it would be nice if we can get Nikon out of the 35mm frame mindset when designing future SLR gear.
Slashdot Mirror
And that is no joke. The good news is that Apple never questioned why any of my iPods (seven dead ipods as of March 2006, number eight has a near dead click wheel and is going to the shop this week) and always replaced them on the spot. Once the Apple Care coverage kicked in, I did not even need to take them to the store, Apple simply sent me a padded box to ship it to them. To me Apple Care for the iPod is the same as a subscription.
Is this bad? I don't know. I am not a typical iPod user, my iPod usually runs nostop for many hours and I use it seven days a week. so I am probably killing it simply by overusing it. Also most of my problems have been with the drives crashing.
Would I pick any other MP3 player? Hell no. $300 and a $60 warranty bought me two years of non stop hard duty service. I got about two months left on my Apple Care, and the wheel is sticking, so I'll be able to do at least one more exchange before the warranty is over.
BTW, while I was killing all those iPods, I have had friends that have owned theirs for over two years and no incidents. Why? Because their usage is nowhere as bad as mine.
It is the norm. Your Gmail space is increased little by little in real time. Log out of gmail and go to the front page, see that the number goes up in real time. Right now it says:
"Over 2770.008107 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message."
I spent over three months playing it pretty much daily and yeah, I beat it, but I had only explored about 25% of the total surface of the mainland. I am buying a 360 next week specifically to play Oblivion, which is a hell of a lot bigger.
I bought this book years ago and still can't STFU about it, sorry.
At my previous job (web-based custom market research) we did hundreds of web surveys which had on the average some 400 data points per survey. These had distinct variable names, etc. and were built 100% by hand when I was hired in the company some time in 2002. My first survey project was a disaster, it took me about 20 hours from the final approved survey document to the dynamic version. The process was riddled with manual steps that created an infinite amount of room for errors.
Enter regular expressions.
While fiddling with BBEdit Pro I finally decided to take a shot at regular expressions. After an hour or so of experimenting I started writing a few filters that allowed me to cut down the turnaround from 20 hours per survey to a little over 10 hours. When I got to the point in which I wasn't able to figure things out from the BBEdit documentation and he web, I convinced the boss to buy me Mastering Regular Expressions.
Within the first 50 pages, I had picked up on additional regular expressions concepts that allowed me to eventually cut down the turnaround per survey to less than 8 hours. That's not 8 hours programming, that's 8 hours from the moment the approved survey is handed over to programming to the moment it passes QA checks and is considered ready to go live.
This was a $50 or so book, and it saved us thousands of dollars over the four years I worked at that company. Of course, my reward for saving the company all that money was to lay me off, and I "forgot" to leave instructions on how to use the text filters, so I imagine my replacement is right now writing surveys by hand.
Some of the things that proved to be killer uses for regular expressions within that context:
1. The approved survey would have specific variables that the analysts would need to keep for importing into SPSS later down the process. A text filter picks up those variables and generates a unique list of every variable needed for he survey. The variables are named with specific patterns, so you know which ones are strings, integers, etc.
2. Now that we have a list of variables, it means we can quickly generate the CREATE TABLE statement for the survey data. What used to be done by copying and pasting 400 times is (was?) now done by highlighting the text and running a macro. The output is the SQL command you need.
3. Since you already have the list of variables, you can generate the 400 statements needed to read each form variable into its proper variable in the asp code.
4. The same way you can generate the hidden form fields that you need.
5. The same way you can generate the INSERT statement to send your data to he database.
Little things like that. Eliminating all that copying and pasting really cut down on the QA overhead per project.
It is not just banking. Any time you have workers in direct contact with financial data you may held liable if you did not exercise due diligence.
You are a hiring manager for Pay Pal, and you are recruiting for a web/db programmer that will have full access to the system. You need to make sure the guy you just hired is not on his second chapter 13 bankruptcy or that he is moving cash advances off half his credit cards to pay the minimum on the other half, or other crazy indicator of unstable finances. These are risk factors.
Defense jobs have had financial disclosure rules for many years, they are at least as strict as those for banking.
Now, this doesn't mean you need to do this for every stupid job.
What TFA describes is the current state of general software development for hire, which has changed very little in the 18 years I have been programming.
It doesn't matter how well planned the project is, or how well educated the customer is, or the proper allocation of project champions on the client side, we all end up getting hit with b.s. look-and-feel complaints that end up taking higher priority than fixing bugs.
If you give the client the option between tweaking a template to a report, and tweaking the queries that feed the damn report so it runs 10% faster, the client will ask you to first make it pretty, then worry about the queries. If you dare ask them why, they will give you a b.s. explanation that it is all about perception. That the pretty page looks more "professional" and it looks like more work and care was put into it.
A word of warning to those of you that are new to for-profit programming: whenever somebody uses the "it looks more professional" gambit, it usually means he has no excuse and is hoping you will drop it. He asked you to do it simply to please himself. HE wants the damn color of the page changed, or that heading two pixels taller, etc.
Every couple of years we get hit with new programming methodology fads, but those don't help us with dealing with difficult customers. When you are pulling millions every year from the same two or three government contracts, the last thing your project manager wants is to piss off any of the primaries for the contracts. Extreme programming won't suddenly make your client listen to you.
Why the hell do you think that programmers are so rabidly enthusiastic about working for free for a specific open source project? These same programmers will drag their feet and hate life in general when working at their salaried jobs. At the free project a hell of a lot of the people involved in running the project will actually have a clue, while at the projects at the salaried job the norm is a lot of the people in charge won't have a clue.
It's going to be literally impossible to enforce. All it is going to take is for somebody within a special scope project to get ahold of this, implement it, and mark it as a classified document. The developers may never know this happened, and the people that violated the license will be under clearance restrictions so they can't talk about it. Even if they figure out it is being used, it will take months or maybe even years of FOIA requests to get the offending agency to even acknowledge the project exists.
That's one of the reasons I did not break them more often.
After the third adapter (and the second time I got stranded with no power on my work laptop) I made sure I always had at least two adapters per laptop.
The other thing is I kept an adapter exclusively at the office and one at my desk at home, a third one in my bag. The third one was my roaming adapter for whenever I went to work at a wifi cafe, or I had to travel.
None of these three ever wore out.
I am positive that you will find more failures in people that are (a) very mobile and (b) have only one adapter.
Anyone that has owned powerbooks or ibooks knows about the crappy power adapters. I have personally lost three, of which only one was covered under warranty. The two biggest weak points:
1. the connector that plugs into the laptop did not have enough ribbing material, so it frayed easily.
2. the thin cable that runs from the laptop into the brick had zero ribbing, it just simply ran into a hole. Frayed easily, I even had one catch fire.
After three Apple laptops I even started noticing how Apple tried to attack these problems. If you look at the last power supply shipped before the magnetic connectors came out, you will see that the "thin" cable is almost twice as thick as the one that shipped with iBook G3s and Titanium Powerbooks. You will also notice much thicker ribbing at both ends of that cable.
The worst of this is that the apple branded adapters were $79 apiece, while a perfectly working replacement, with much sturdier cables, could be had for $35.
1. An ex-coworker purchased a pair of swimming googles with a built-in mp3 player that used bone conduction instead of earplugs. This was at least one year ago.
2. Why not put bandpass filters that cut off outside of the dynamic range that can be generated by a human voice? This should cut a hell of a lot of the background noise.
A year later and I still think those googles were dorky as hell.
I have been programming for about 18 years, so I had my fair share of plain text editor v. IDE.
If the IDE allows turning on and off enhanced features, then disable:
1. Intellisense or anything similar that suggests code for you.
2. Code generation wizards.
3. Anything that will rewrite whatever you just wrote.
4. Magic database tools from within the IDE that will "design" your database for you.
I find the following features helpful in quickly teaching a new language, so these should not be disabled:
1. Context-sensitive help
2. Pop-up method lists that work on hovering, not as you type.
3. Pop-up argument hint lists, to show you the arguments and data types the specific function wants.
4. Hooks to online version of docs.
The biggest trap in the IDE world is the tool v. language argument. Your students need to learn the language, not the damn tool. You are not an Eclipse or VS.net programmer, you are a Java, C# or whatever programmer.
The two worst things for a n00b (that really needs or wants to learn, not for the casual geek that is just screwing around) is that the intellisense-type auto completes and the wizards will not teach them why they are doing what they are doing. Once they know how the damn thing works, then it is OK because the tool helps them write faster code with less errors.
I spent the past four years or so sharing my time between classic ASP in a legacy app, and building its replacement app in PHP. Both through BBEdit. It was not a lot of fun. I am at a new job and we use asp.net here, a platform I had not used for the four years I worked at my previous job. It took me two days to get back up to speed.
Why?
Because I already knew asp.net programming, so all I had to do was to get re-familiarized with Visual Studio, which had gone up three versions since last I had used it. To make things interesting, my previous experience was with c#, and this shop uses mostly vb.net. It did not slow me down a bit.
We need to teach new programmers the old and sacred ways we used to be able to pick up arbitrary languages with nothing more than a good reference and a decent text editor. Or Emacs. I know plenty of people of reasonable intelligence, and not even driven psycho geeks, just your average slackers, that have picked up php, perl, ruby and python without much drama. Why? Because long ago somebody bothered to teach them how to program.
There are of course languages that are close to impossible to deal with without the proper IDE, but most these lessons still apply:
1. Make them write their own code.
2. Give them as much context-sensitive help as possible.
3. Make them write their own code.
Damn good idea, I would have gladly hosted that site for free.
... is definitely .net.
.net, which was a problem since I had switched the company from classic asp to PHP over the past 3 years or so.
.net exclusively.
.net and is tired of turning down php work because all of the programmers are overbooked. I was able to jump in and do both kinds of work, so I took the job at the tiny shop.
.net jobs here in DC Metro, there is a lot of Java, but I am very worried about the morons that are doing the recruiting. I actually had a recruiter hand me a job description that had three bold bullets with mandatory Java skills, and he was still trying to con me into applying for the job.
.net people were advertising pretty much right on the median for the salary surveys for the area.
I got advance notice in late January that I would be laid off 3/31. Went into panic mode, started looking and all I could find was
For every call I got about php I got 20 for asp.net. I even learned that one of the biggest recruiting companies in the Washington DC Metro now recruits for
After two months, my number came up and I got laid off effectively 3/31. I got two offers on 3/31, one to work like an animal in a php/Oracle shop for a huge company, one to work like an animal in a tiny shop that only does
Apart from the near saturation of
Another problem I saw with the very limited supply of php jobs is that the people that are hiring are absolutely disconnected from the salary curves for this market. They want you to have 10 years of experience in C, C++, PHP, Ansi SQL, JSP, HTML, CSS, XML, etc. then they want to hire you for $50K or less. And they get offended when you laugh in their faces. I noticed this is only a problem with the open source type jobs, the
Killed my freehand drawing mad skillz.
I was a very good freehand artist until I took my first technical drafting course in junior high school. Took another one in high school, plus 6 credits of what used to be called "mechanical drafting." The icing in the cake was that we were the transition class for the switchover to AutoCAD (this was back in 1987 or so).
By the time I finished the transition to AutoCAD I could barely draw freehand anymore. I don't know if it was the tedious and repetitive drafting, or the detached way in which we embraced AutoCAD. What I do now is I can't draw 1/10th as good as I was able to when I was 12-13 years old.
"sequel" is old skool but accurate. The only reason we call it sql and not sequel (Structured English QUEry Language) is because of a trademark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql) issue.
That's how mine was setup, all mail routed to my gmail, then using the automated settings so my replies would always show the proper "From:" address. Yes, this rocks if you are trying to service a small organization, but if you are just dealing with your own domains, then it is probably easier to just route everything into one Gmail account.
Not everyone is getting 25 accounts, I got mine about two weeks ago and it has 10 accounts. It works great, zero real complaints by far.
WPS = Whatever Pedro Says.
I force them to dowload to their mail clients. If your mailbox grows too much, and you are not either the president or the ceo (small shop, the ceo and president are a married couple) then your old mail will start disappearing.
The best part is when I don't tell them, and months pass with no complaints, which means that once the mail is downloaded to their client they never bother to check their web mail.
What do I want?
.net or java and get a bunch of names, phones and emails, nothing more. No address, no resume, zilch. That means they have to call you and use social engineering to extract that information from you.
1. No more cold calls
2. No more cold calls
3. No more emails that serve the same purpose as a cold call
Why?
I have been in the workforce since 1992. After serving in the US Army from 1992-1997, I have found every job I have held through an online job service. My first civilian job was thru OCC, which eventually became part of monster.com. After four jobs I have learned a lot about the most common abuse of the job sites: cold calling.
These do a search for
How can you tell?
Because the "recruiter" will open by saying he ran into your resume online, then goes to explain about the "opportunities" and finally asks for a fresh copy of your resume in word format. That's your cold caller right there.
Another way to tell is because they are not buzzword compliant. There are tons of good recruiters out there, and they go through the trouble to learn the jargon of their market. When a recruiter calls you for a J2EE spot when your resume has ASP written all over it, that's a problem. When even after you explain it to him he still tells you he can't grasp how it is possible that a guy could spent 7 years programming for the web without using J2EE, there's something really wrong.
I think it is time that the job boards stop offering this kind of information for free, because all they are doing is driving us all crazy.
I carry one of those microcameras, mine is the Sony DSC-T1. It is smaller than my clickwheel iPod and it is pretty light. The problem is that it is too light and too small, so it is much more prone to shaking.
Because of this, there are two different use styles for this camera:
1. You take it out, turn it on (instant) and start shooting in auto, no need to worry about keeping the camera still or whatever.
2. You take it out, fiddle with the settings, then shoot and shoot until you get the shot that you want.
It is frustrating because you know you can make it take great shots, but only if you go through a lot of hassle. It will take very good shots on its own but only in auto mode, the second you move out of auto you need to start to worry about shake, etc.
The DSC-T* line was upgraded a half dozen times since I bought mine, but as far as I can tell these changes were to the chassis, the underpinnings are mostly the same.
We have zero history of autism in either mine or my wife's family, my son is the only autistic kid in any of the two families as far as we know. We are also two of the very few in all of the family that work in scientific fields. The interesting thing is that he is showing the exact tendencies to destroy toys (to see how they work) that I exhibited as a kid. And now as a grownup I wonder if some of my socialization issues in high school were on par with other nerds or I was showing some mild signs of autism.
My brother on the other hand was my complete opposite, he is the kind of guy that got bad grades mostly because he did not give a crap, not because of intelligence. His daughter was very precocious, learned to talk very early, and my mom (a teacher) had her reading before she was 5.
My dad was not a scientist, he was a policeman for 32 years but he was sort of a wizard when it came to fixing machinery with no formal training, and I also remember he was really good at running long calculations in his head. Could all this be related?
In 14 years in the workforce, the only employer that has ever trained me on the clock was the US Army. Not just the MOS and ASI, which added up to over 14 months worth of classroom time. It was also week or month long courses in specific topics. They had contractors that flew from base to base just to teach that one class.
Everywhere else I have worked at, training was on me. Zero OJT, and probably less than 12 hours worth of seminars, conferences and demos over the past 9 years or so since I turned civilian.
At my previous job I actually trained some of my programmers, but I was never offered training. Whatever I have picked up has been on my own. My budget includes buying a few programming books per month, so my only investment is the personal time I spend learning new stuff.
Would I let my employer pay for training? Hell yeah.
s/Under any circumstances/Under no circumstance/g;
1.Walk it into any Apple store or Apple authorized repair shop.
2. Tell them your mac stopped working.
3. When they ask you for the symptoms, tell them it showed a spining ball in many colors, like a rainbow. Then it beeped. Then it told you to reboot in many languages.
4. When you rebooted it, it refused to power up.
5. The proper answer to any probing questions is "uh, I don't know."
Under any circumstances are you to give the impression that you know more about macs than the guy taking your repair order. If the contents of the drive are an issue, take the drive out, connect it to another machine and delete the partitions. Check out the "user installable parts" document for your mac, it will tell you the exact procedure for pulling a drive without voiding the warranty. For the first generation iMac G5 it even tells you the color of the 3 screws that you need to remove, I bet that has not changed with the Intel version.
Good riddance. Evolve or step aside.
Notice how right as Nikon announced they would stop most of their film cameras, Zeiss recovered from the Contax failure by offering their glass for the Nikon F-mount.
Film photography is far from dead, but we are past the point in which you can wrap a business around expensive film-based gear and exotic film types. Kodak killed their B&W paper products, but it was not the end. Ilford is still around.
The same will happen with film. Now it would be nice if we can get Nikon out of the 35mm frame mindset when designing future SLR gear.