If you want to show our stuff, suggest pairing
on
How To Show Code Samples?
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· Score: 2, Informative
As a hiring manager I find preconceived code samples worthless. There is only one way to know if someone can code during an interview, and that is to pair program with him/her.
I use a technique I learned from Rob Mee at Pivotal Labs. I spend roughly an hour test driving a simple project with the interviewee that Rob specifically crafted to determine the capabilities of the candidate, from the basic level of competency up to that Rockstar ability to spot the elegant solution intuitively.
During an hour of pairing with someone you get a good idea of what they can do, much better than you can from reading pre-fabricated code samples or merely asking quiz questions (whether about stuff someone can memorize from a book or silly brain teasers).
Ning is an example of something I've been calling a Blank White Server. It taps into the wisdom of crowds to create a sort of uber-application that has many facets but all built upon the same social network, the same tag system, the same capabilities (API/developer produced libs).
Some ideas about BWSs:
You won't have to rebuild your social network when you sign up with a new web app (or your any other aspects of your profile).
You'll be able to create mashups of your favorite web apps.
You'll be able to alter/increase/delete the functionality and features of your favorite web apps.
They tremendously enable the long tail to be served.
They are almost guaranteed to have the most popular and the most specialized functionality demanded by users.
Companies that host BWSs will spend far less (almost no) time (and money) developing web apps than traditional Internet companies, yet they are almost guaranteed to be hosting killer websites.
They are a bit like a functional wiki.
They are bit like an web operating system.
I see Blank White Servers ultimately being distributed across the Internet and linked peer to peer, hosted by anyone who wants to run one and sharing the common userbase, etc. Ning looks more like the AOL vs Internet model to me, which is ironic.
I'm thinking of building one in rails, anyone interested?
I was standing about three feet away when the segway ran over the roomba. It was indeed a great testimony to the hardiness of both machines. You could probably make a great game out of it; release a couple of speedy roombas and see how many you can run over in a given time limit.
What I actually found more interesting though, was the number of times people fell off the segways. I've been to a few conferences before where people were taking turns on a segway, and I'd never seen anyone fall off. In about 30 minutes of watching the segway riders at ACC 2004 people fell off at least two dozen times and ran into immobile objects just as much. Also people kept overcompensating when trying to get on it for the first time and were thrown into this violent thrashing mode where they'd feel like they were falling forward so they'd rapidly lean back, causing the segway to pull back and then they'd feel like they were falling back so they'd rapidly lean forward, etc. One guy got into this mode after zipping around waaay too fast and was slammed face first into the carpet -really hard-. Looked like a snowboarder digging an edge in.
My theory on this was that at all the other conferences there was only one segway, but at this one there were two. Somehow the presence of another segway rider was causing people to push themselves too far too fast instead of easing into it.
They are fun to ride though, even if you do look like a dork doing it.
For me without a doubt the most unappreciated (in the box office at least) movie was True Romance.
It came out at the same time as another Christian Slater movie, which was a romance so I never went to see it in the theater because I got it confused with the other movie (Untamed Heart). I imagine a lot of people did the same thing.
But True Romance is a great flick. Written by Quentin Tarantino and starring Gary Oldman in one of my favorite of his performances (and I think he may be the most underappreciated living actor).
-Dav
p.s. OT, but check out my IMDB/MT hack to make posting movie reviews to Moveable Type easier.
It doesn't matter what kind of phones we americans get (I have a Danger Hiptop which has a full keyboard for PDA/web/email functions and a toy camera attachment).
The last time I was in Tokyo a Japanese guy asked me pretty much the same question, I told him imo the real problem with why American phones suck is that the American cellphone network sucks. And the American cellphone network sucks because America is a freaking big ass country. And I mean "freaking big ass" in every sense of the way, but in this context I especially mean that it's got a lot of cellphone network that would have to be replaced in order to have the sort of system that can support the new generation phones.
Do you have any idea how much that would cost? I don't exactly, but I bet it's hella more than what it cost the island nation of Japan or even big ol' Europe for that matter. And in this economy try getting a corporation to lay down a bet of that size that they aren't going to get immediately leap frogged on their choice of rollout.
What a wonderful essay on the American education system. It should be required reading for all educators and parents of school-aged children
Tangentially, I'd like to say I'm freaking sick and tired of most of the highest posts being marked (Score 5 Funny). There should be a way in preferences to autmoatically subtract N points from posts marked 'Funny'. I appreciate a good one liner, but I'd rather not see them at the top of every discussion as if no one ever has anything serious to say here.
Last night before I went to bed I had done a GeoURL neighbors search to see what was registered around Tokyo. This morning I reloaded that search to see what had been added, to my surprise a lot had been taken away. Here's the cache html from last night: last night, and here's the html that just loaded: this morning.
I had noticed last night that some enterprising hotel marketer had plastered GeoURL with links to their hotel web sites (and hundreds of these, all over the world, not just Japan) and thought that while this probably exposed an oversight in the GeoURL design it was certainly a legitimate use of the system. The oversight being that they should have added categories to separate business from personal, etc, so that if you were looking for blogs in a certain area you wouldn't have to wade through links for hotels, coffeeshops and thrift stores.
But now they're all gone. If they were taken away by the original link poster, well OK, but I find it more likely that someone at GeoURL got rid of them. I find this disturbing; It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It would be easy to add another META tag that Geo-URL could use to do this categorization. That's what they should do rather than start getting picky about who can use the system. Fuck censorship.
I just checked the source for one of the de-listed hootle.com pages and it does indeed still contain the geo.position data that is accepted by GeoURL. I say again: fuck censorship.
Yeah I did too, for my girlfriend in Tokyo: Tokyo Tidbits. The cell phone also takes videos that are posted too. aliases, procmailrc, some perl...what can't you do?
I have a Danger Hiptop here in the U.S. and we have a private blog for our personal communications/media. It makes dealing with a long distance relationship much more bearable.
A note about converting the coordinates for those of you not in the US (or not using mapquest):
I was able to get coordinates for my girlfriend's blog in Tokyo but had to convert from degrees-minutes-seconds to the decimal format GeoURL wants. I used this converter.
Serial Experiment Lain is one of the best productions of any sort that I've seen in a long time. I actually have not seen the entire series yet, but I think it is a fantastic example of cutting edge animation, and so far not a single tentacle rape scene! Tivo has been sporadically grabbing Lain episodes for me for awhile now, I might have to look into getting Tech TV just for that.
I also have come to enjoy Cowby Bebop. It's an odd mixture of sci-fi anime, westerns and late 50's jazz beat. There's a lot more to anime than what I had assumed at first. There's a lot of potential in this artistic medium that is only now surfacing in The States.
There's code to be written. Life in a startup (yes there are some still around)... I'll be coding all day and into the night tonight, like the last two weeks and the next few days (I will take a few days off around New Year's Eve).
Her blog isn't really set up yet, it's still using the default Moveable Type design and we haven't settled on a domain name / title for it yet so I didn't want to post it. But you could find it easily enough with a few mouse clicks I guess.
A two camera phone sounds nifty, does this phone do video streaming too?
For myself, I just ordered the danger hiptop which seems to be the best such thing we've got so far in the States. It was only $99 (after rebate) through the amazon.com link
A friend of mine in Tokyo recently bought one of those cell phones that can take movies and snapshots and email them to someone (over the G2(?) 144kbps link). So I had the idea to set her up with a blog and use procmail and xmlrpc to autopost her cell phone media captures to her blog.
The original poster is on the right track. He's going to be OK. But those of you thinking it's too late and you should have travelled before you get locked in, reexamine your situation. What's really locking you in?
Question tradition. Question everything. Question my advice. The important thing is to really think about how you're living your life and what you really need for happiness and survival.
Here's some of my favorite books that capture this spirit. They're short reads, with a deep impact:
Seems it is true...the security of your web server depends on how effective you are at keeping up to date on patches, no matter if you are running Windows or Linux.
Of course! Open source maybe more secure than closed source, but nothing is 100% secure other than when the box is turned off and locked in a vault.
Slightly off-topic, but it might be of interest to people reading this thread:
If you are interested in OpenSource flavored filmmaking you should check out OpenCinema.org. It's a fledgling project that intends to deliver open source tools that allow for collaborative (or individual) scripting and storyboarding (think SourceForge for Cinema Artists). It also hopes to work with other projects that will be providing distribution mediums such as the Open Source Streamin Alliance.
Developers and Filmmakers are needed to help out in the software design/implementation process.
I bought this book from Sundman at LinuxWorld, and I'm maybe an hour or so from finishing it. If I hadn't -met- Sundman I would assume he was a promising teenage sci-fi writer (he's over 40 I'd say), because the story line develops nicely and he obviously has the ability to tell the story fairly well. But the characters are flat and seem to reveal various '-isms' and stereotyping I would expect from an immature writer. Several times he describes new characters with something along the lines of "straight out of central casting." That's a pretty weak band-aid to cover up the fact that your characters -are- straight out of central casting. The expositions seemed quite awkward at times also.
And the main character I found to be a boring pathetic overly-macho chump whose always-in-charge abilities were completely unbelievable. I have no sympathy with him whatsoever, and I'm praying he gets killed before the end:)
All that said, it was worth the $5 I paid. You could see some promise there, and I'll probably check out his next one just to see if he's improved. But I have to disagree with the reviews that place him up with Bruce Sterling or Neal Stephenson, it's not even in the same league. His use of technology and geek-material is thorough and fairly well done (maybe even better than Sterling or Stephenson), but Sterling and Stephenson aren't just geeks...they're also very acomplished writers.
At OSCON someone (maybe it was in Lessig's keynote) asked "how much do you spend on protecting your rights and your freedom? And how much do you give telecommunications companies?"
I went to the EFF booth downstairs afterwards and signed up to have $25/month charged to my credit card. It's a start.
I was there for this speech; it brought the house down but a lot of it was in the delivery. Sterling is a talented reader with great stage presence (and this was evident in spite of the fact that he was sitting behind a table reading from his notes the whole time). Whoever typed up the transcription should jsut release the mp3 then you'll get it.
I have some GPL'ed 3-D Anaglyphic code here if anyone wants to play with this sort of 3-D rendering. Of course, you could also use jad to decompile that applet if you feel randy.
Slashdot Mirror
As a hiring manager I find preconceived code samples worthless. There is only one way to know if someone can code during an interview, and that is to pair program with him/her.
I use a technique I learned from Rob Mee at Pivotal Labs. I spend roughly an hour test driving a simple project with the interviewee that Rob specifically crafted to determine the capabilities of the candidate, from the basic level of competency up to that Rockstar ability to spot the elegant solution intuitively.
During an hour of pairing with someone you get a good idea of what they can do, much better than you can from reading pre-fabricated code samples or merely asking quiz questions (whether about stuff someone can memorize from a book or silly brain teasers).
- You won't have to rebuild your social network when you sign up with a new web app (or your any other aspects of your profile).
- You'll be able to create mashups of your favorite web apps.
- You'll be able to alter/increase/delete the functionality and features of your favorite web apps.
- They tremendously enable the long tail to be served.
- They are almost guaranteed to have the most popular and the most specialized functionality demanded by users.
- Companies that host BWSs will spend far less (almost no) time (and money) developing web apps than traditional Internet companies, yet they are almost guaranteed to be hosting killer websites.
- They are a bit like a functional wiki.
- They are bit like an web operating system.
I see Blank White Servers ultimately being distributed across the Internet and linked peer to peer, hosted by anyone who wants to run one and sharing the common userbase, etc. Ning looks more like the AOL vs Internet model to me, which is ironic. I'm thinking of building one in rails, anyone interested?I was standing about three feet away when the segway ran over the roomba. It was indeed a great testimony to the hardiness of both machines. You could probably make a great game out of it; release a couple of speedy roombas and see how many you can run over in a given time limit.
What I actually found more interesting though, was the number of times people fell off the segways. I've been to a few conferences before where people were taking turns on a segway, and I'd never seen anyone fall off. In about 30 minutes of watching the segway riders at ACC 2004 people fell off at least two dozen times and ran into immobile objects just as much. Also people kept overcompensating when trying to get on it for the first time and were thrown into this violent thrashing mode where they'd feel like they were falling forward so they'd rapidly lean back, causing the segway to pull back and then they'd feel like they were falling back so they'd rapidly lean forward, etc. One guy got into this mode after zipping around waaay too fast and was slammed face first into the carpet -really hard-. Looked like a snowboarder digging an edge in.
My theory on this was that at all the other conferences there was only one segway, but at this one there were two. Somehow the presence of another segway rider was causing people to push themselves too far too fast instead of easing into it.
They are fun to ride though, even if you do look like a dork doing it.
Doesn't OS X have the 'locate ' command?
It's faster that ls -R | grep since it goes against a pre-indexed db of the file system.
I hate resized screenshots.
Ah! I love this book! I about jumped out of my seat as soon as I saw the trumpet icon :) ...but isn't it supposed to be a muted trumpet?
Nevertheless, it's a great name choice....
and next up, alaska to tierra del fuego
For me without a doubt the most unappreciated (in the box office at least) movie was True Romance.
It came out at the same time as another Christian Slater movie, which was a romance so I never went to see it in the theater because I got it confused with the other movie (Untamed Heart). I imagine a lot of people did the same thing.
But True Romance is a great flick. Written by Quentin Tarantino and starring Gary Oldman in one of my favorite of his performances (and I think he may be the most underappreciated living actor).
-Dav
p.s. OT, but check out my IMDB/MT hack to make posting movie reviews to Moveable Type easier.
It doesn't matter what kind of phones we americans get (I have a Danger Hiptop which has a full keyboard for PDA/web/email functions and a toy camera attachment).
The last time I was in Tokyo a Japanese guy asked me pretty much the same question, I told him imo the real problem with why American phones suck is that the American cellphone network sucks. And the American cellphone network sucks because America is a freaking big ass country. And I mean "freaking big ass" in every sense of the way, but in this context I especially mean that it's got a lot of cellphone network that would have to be replaced in order to have the sort of system that can support the new generation phones.
Do you have any idea how much that would cost? I don't exactly, but I bet it's hella more than what it cost the island nation of Japan or even big ol' Europe for that matter. And in this economy try getting a corporation to lay down a bet of that size that they aren't going to get immediately leap frogged on their choice of rollout.
What a wonderful essay on the American education system. It should be required reading for all educators and parents of school-aged children
Tangentially, I'd like to say I'm freaking sick and tired of most of the highest posts being marked (Score 5 Funny). There should be a way in preferences to autmoatically subtract N points from posts marked 'Funny'. I appreciate a good one liner, but I'd rather not see them at the top of every discussion as if no one ever has anything serious to say here.
Oh, if only we had an Open Content Network.
Last night before I went to bed I had done a GeoURL neighbors search to see what was registered around Tokyo. This morning I reloaded that search to see what had been added, to my surprise a lot had been taken away. Here's the cache html from last night: last night, and here's the html that just loaded: this morning.
I had noticed last night that some enterprising hotel marketer had plastered GeoURL with links to their hotel web sites (and hundreds of these, all over the world, not just Japan) and thought that while this probably exposed an oversight in the GeoURL design it was certainly a legitimate use of the system. The oversight being that they should have added categories to separate business from personal, etc, so that if you were looking for blogs in a certain area you wouldn't have to wade through links for hotels, coffeeshops and thrift stores.
But now they're all gone. If they were taken away by the original link poster, well OK, but I find it more likely that someone at GeoURL got rid of them. I find this disturbing; It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It would be easy to add another META tag that Geo-URL could use to do this categorization. That's what they should do rather than start getting picky about who can use the system. Fuck censorship.
I just checked the source for one of the de-listed hootle.com pages and it does indeed still contain the geo.position data that is accepted by GeoURL. I say again: fuck censorship.
Yeah I did too, for my girlfriend in Tokyo: Tokyo Tidbits. The cell phone also takes videos that are posted too. aliases, procmailrc, some perl ...what can't you do?
I have a Danger Hiptop here in the U.S. and we have a private blog for our personal communications/media. It makes dealing with a long distance relationship much more bearable.
A note about converting the coordinates for those of you not in the US (or not using mapquest):
I was able to get coordinates for my girlfriend's blog in Tokyo but had to convert from degrees-minutes-seconds to the decimal format GeoURL wants. I used this converter.
Serial Experiment Lain is one of the best productions of any sort that I've seen in a long time. I actually have not seen the entire series yet, but I think it is a fantastic example of cutting edge animation, and so far not a single tentacle rape scene! Tivo has been sporadically grabbing Lain episodes for me for awhile now, I might have to look into getting Tech TV just for that.
I also have come to enjoy Cowby Bebop. It's an odd mixture of sci-fi anime, westerns and late 50's jazz beat. There's a lot more to anime than what I had assumed at first. There's a lot of potential in this artistic medium that is only now surfacing in The States.
There's code to be written. Life in a startup (yes there are some still around)... I'll be coding all day and into the night tonight, like the last two weeks and the next few days (I will take a few days off around New Year's Eve).
Her blog isn't really set up yet, it's still using the default Moveable Type design and we haven't settled on a domain name / title for it yet so I didn't want to post it. But you could find it easily enough with a few mouse clicks I guess.
A two camera phone sounds nifty, does this phone do video streaming too?
For myself, I just ordered the danger hiptop which seems to be the best such thing we've got so far in the States. It was only $99 (after rebate) through the amazon.com link
A friend of mine in Tokyo recently bought one of those cell phones that can take movies and snapshots and email them to someone (over the G2(?) 144kbps link). So I had the idea to set her up with a blog and use procmail and xmlrpc to autopost her cell phone media captures to her blog.
Next thing I know, this concept is a big deal and I find similar systems popping up all over the place.
It seems to be an up and coming meme, and I imagine that this nascent meme combined with 3G speeds could really turn into something exciting.
Question tradition. Question everything. Question my advice. The important thing is to really think about how you're living your life and what you really need for happiness and survival.
Here's some of my favorite books that capture this spirit. They're short reads, with a deep impact:
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
The Alchemist by Paulo Coehelo
Of course! Open source maybe more secure than closed source, but nothing is 100% secure other than when the box is turned off and locked in a vault.
If you are interested in OpenSource flavored filmmaking you should check out OpenCinema.org. It's a fledgling project that intends to deliver open source tools that allow for collaborative (or individual) scripting and storyboarding (think SourceForge for Cinema Artists). It also hopes to work with other projects that will be providing distribution mediums such as the Open Source Streamin Alliance.
Developers and Filmmakers are needed to help out in the software design/implementation process.
I bought this book from Sundman at LinuxWorld, and I'm maybe an hour or so from finishing it. If I hadn't -met- Sundman I would assume he was a promising teenage sci-fi writer (he's over 40 I'd say), because the story line develops nicely and he obviously has the ability to tell the story fairly well. But the characters are flat and seem to reveal various '-isms' and stereotyping I would expect from an immature writer. Several times he describes new characters with something along the lines of "straight out of central casting." That's a pretty weak band-aid to cover up the fact that your characters -are- straight out of central casting. The expositions seemed quite awkward at times also.
:)
...they're also very acomplished writers.
And the main character I found to be a boring pathetic overly-macho chump whose always-in-charge abilities were completely unbelievable. I have no sympathy with him whatsoever, and I'm praying he gets killed before the end
All that said, it was worth the $5 I paid. You could see some promise there, and I'll probably check out his next one just to see if he's improved. But I have to disagree with the reviews that place him up with Bruce Sterling or Neal Stephenson, it's not even in the same league. His use of technology and geek-material is thorough and fairly well done (maybe even better than Sterling or Stephenson), but Sterling and Stephenson aren't just geeks
At OSCON someone (maybe it was in Lessig's keynote) asked "how much do you spend on protecting your rights and your freedom? And how much do you give telecommunications companies?"
I went to the EFF booth downstairs afterwards and signed up to have $25/month charged to my credit card. It's a start.
I was there for this speech; it brought the house down but a lot of it was in the delivery. Sterling is a talented reader with great stage presence (and this was evident in spite of the fact that he was sitting behind a table reading from his notes the whole time). Whoever typed up the transcription should jsut release the mp3 then you'll get it.
I have some GPL'ed 3-D Anaglyphic code here if anyone wants to play with this sort of 3-D rendering. Of course, you could also use jad to decompile that applet if you feel randy.