I've seen a lot of responses that small companies can be bad too. In my experience, most small companies are not dilbert like, and a small company is the only way to avoid the dilbert situation.
I joined my current company as employee 16 and the company is now up to 60. When I was hired I reported directly to the VP of engineering. Recently he became overwhelmed as the Engineering team grew to 20. We hired to senior engineers/managers just under him. I was able to interview and recommend my own boss! I am very happy with the situation.
What you want to look for:
The company is small
The management is smart
The management is technical (CEO and VP of eng have CS degrees in my case)
The management is hands off and will let you take the ball and run with it
If those three items are met, you will work in a non-dilbert workplace.
As for the fringe benefits, I agree that smaller companies may not have onsite health clubs, volleball courts, or free meals in a cafeteria like some large famous companies now do. However in my experience, to attract talent, they have to pay salary above the average, and the the health plans they offer are just as good as big companies. Plus you may be offered stock options that have the potential to become worth a heck of a lot (but don't count on them).
The marketing department is forever complaining that the csv file I sent them has 500,000 rows and Excel can only see the first 60,000 lines. Open Office is just as bad, and older versions can only see 30,000 lines. If Open Office didn't have limit, 90% of the marketing department would switch from Excel tomorrow.
Let me be the first
(Score:1, Troll)
by eclectro (227083) on 2006-04-13 13:46 (#15122701)
to say that I'm glad dupe and spell check have been added.
I don't think this deserves the "troll" moderation. It sounds like eclectro would rather have dup and spell check functionality for editors than bookmarks. Because he said so in a slightly humerous fashion doesn't mean he should get a bitchslap. Stoopid moderators.
my last comment about Google was meant in jest. But if I were to choose a search engine based on the results for "search engine", Yahoo has by far the best results. Check the links yourself and see.
To me the front page of search engine doesn't matter. I never see it. I type my search terms into firefox and it displays the SERP for my preferred search engine.
Talk to me about how clean the SERP is and how clearly the ads are marked and I'd agree with you.
Microsoft has been showing the signs of being able to build a search engine to rival Google for some time now.
Bright people working for them
msnbot has been crawling as much as googlebot for well over a year
Put those two together: a good source of data and a bunch a bright people and you should be able to build a great search engine. I've been waiting for MSN to turn up the juice for a while now. I've recently been seeing some signs of it, I don't doubt there are better things to come.
Until three months ago, microsoft search seemed to favor front pages of sites to a ridiculous degree. Most of the traffic to the sites I monitor came in from the msn search engine to the front page. This was despite the fact that the crawler had visited scores of sub-pages. The only reason I can think of for this is that branded search terms would probably give better results. If you search for the name of a company, you would almost be certain to get their home page. It was almost no good for finding facts though. Recently this has begun to change and sub-pages are starting to see hits referred from msn search.
I'm hoping that Yahoo picks things up too. With their recent purchase of del.icio.us, they have another fairly substantial datasource of popularity of pages. I'm hoping that they start giving Google a run for their money as well. I'm less optimistic with them though as their relevency team seems to be out of touch with users such as myself. They seem to highly favor in-house content over better external content and they seem to think that much of what people search for is items to purchase rather than facts or even product reviews.
Don't load the story into the original page itself. When somebody clicks on the [+] to open up the full description, use AJAX to load it into the page dynamically.
The best of both worlds: small initial page size, dynamic content.
Great idea. I have used the front page customization to turn off the politics section bring extra stories from sections into my front page. This gives me even more control, so I like it.
There needs to be a bit more work to get the rough edges that I see out:
My personal RSS feed no longer matches my home page. I see "Officer's Group Calls for Ban On 25 To Life" even though it is hidden on my home page
RSS feeds should have no description for the stubby version of the story. Currently I'm seeing a full description even for those stories that have only a title on my home page.
Stub stories in the mysterious future on my home page have a annoying green top 3 or so pixels.
JSF hard to develop
on
JSF vs ASP.net
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have a small project at work that I inherited that is written in JSF. It is a pain. Don't go there. I have problems with JSF:
Non-existant error reporting: If an exception is throw by the code backing it up, the error message on the front end will be something like "Exception: '{mycomponent.dosomething}'". Which really means that dosomething threw some other exception that it is hiding from you.
Everything is a post: JSF tries to apply MVC to the web, which is fundamentally broken IMO. The web is transactional, not event driven. To make it appear that everything has callbacks, all the links in the web app are done by making javascript submit a POST form for the page. Much harder to debug than any other web app that I've ever worked with. You can't just see the params on a GET url and expect links to work like every other link on the web
I've never used ASP though, so I can't really compare. Myself I prefer servlets that spit out XML and use XSLT to give HTML. The designers don't seem to like the XSLT much though.
Another advantage that Evolution has over Thunderbird is the filters. I switched to evolution because the filters were much more powerful than Thunderbird. I especially like its ability to play sounds as a filter action so I only get alerted to new mail that my filters deem especially important.
Recently I switched most of my filters to procmail on the IMAP server, and with the important messages pre-filtered into folders, evolution's filters can never see the messages and never play the sounds anymore. I considered switching back to Thunderbird, but it had two other disadvantages: 1) It asked me to accept the certificate that I generated for my secure mail connection every time it starts, whereas evolution asked me once and remembers. 2) Evolution can check for mail in all subfolders, thunderbird only ever seems to see my new mail in subfolders when I click on that subfolder.
2a. Also spell things incorrectly. If a keyword gets a thousand hits, its most common misspelling will get at least a dozen. You can get a lot of traffic by including a few well-placed misspellings.
I fired up firefox with LiveHTTPHeaders extension and here is what I found when I contacted www.catalogueofships.com:
> GET / HTTP/1.1
< HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily
< Location:/?ABCDEFGH
> GET/?ABCDEFGH HTTP/1.1
< HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily
< Location: /
> GET / HTTP/1.1
< HTTP/1.x 200 OK
It appears that the page is redirecting and then redirecting back. I can imagine that would confuse some browsers. Especially if the browser cached the first redirect and didn't actually fetch the same exact page a second time.
There is probably something in the http spec about not caching temporary redirects. In fact not caching them makes perfect sense to me. So safari has a bug of some sort with redirect caching.
However, what the server is doing seems to be fairly brain dead as well. Why would you redirect away and then redirect back? It appears that there is not cookie set between the two. The server must be remembering your IP address and serving you actual content on the second hit from that IP Address. That would certainly explain the "teaching issue" that causes safari to work with these sites after visiting with firefox.
The only explanation that I can come up with is that somebody discovered this obscure caching bug in safari and built a system to expose it. It seems that the blank page problem would be easy to fix in either safari or the web server.
Agreed. Just run IMAP on the server, leave all your mail on the server, and make sure the server gets backed up.
Can AJAX finally bring us "push technology"
on
Ajax in Action
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Could we finally get push technology with AJAX?
I'd like to have the following, all of which have been cumbersome and refreshy to implement in a web browser so far:
A news page that I can leave open and automatically gets new stories added to it without refreshing. (CNN that I can leave open and know that stories will apper within a minute of them being posted)
A stock ticker that is always up to date. (Yahoo finance that I don't have to refresh)
Weather forcast and current conditions that change in real time.
Some way to glue all of them together into the same page ala RSS
I've made sites with fairly mainstream content before, which were totally ignored by Google
That is precisely what the "rich get richer" effect is about. This study seems to be measuring the wrong thing. Of course your mainstream site is going to get a few hits from Google because your site mentions something in some quirky way that other sites don't. However, because there are already 10,000 sites about what you have written, you will never get into the top ten search results. Google puts sites near the front of the SERPs because they have lots of incoming links. Sites that are in the top will get a lot more traffic and some percent of that traffic links to them. Sites at the bottom, get few new incoming links.
Yes those few visitors that you are getting from Google are more visitors than you would get if Google did not exists, but that says nothing about the relative number of visitors that your competitors are getting.
kuro5hin.org is the other site that I used to read where the stories for the front page are chosen by the users. Kuro5hin eventually pissed me off enough because so many people insisted that nothing get to the front page without perfect grammar and spelling. Almost all the good stories are rejected IMO.
I would personally rather read a badly written write-up of something that is interesting rather than a well written fluff piece. I guess that is why I put up with CmdrTaco.
I have been reading slashdot for years and digg for months. I don't ever see one replacing the other. Some people will like one, some will like the other, but many will like both. Here is my comparison:
Editorial:
Slashdot: Targeted by very technical editors, I generally want to hear about 40% of the stories.
Digg: Targeted by users, I generally want to hear about 5% of the stories.
Comments:
Slashdot: Best comment system I've seen with a large number of commenters (threshold 4 for me)
Digg: Comments are worthless.
Timeliness:
Slashdot: Stories are often days old (and duplicates abound).
Digg: Generally havn't seen it before.
RSS:
Slashdot: As a subscriber, I get a full customized rss feed with some unexpected plums (see my latest journal entry)
Digg: The RSS feed doesn't contain the link to the story, forcing you to go to their useless comments page.
Microsoft is slowly losing their cash cow of operating systems and office software. Linux and open source software are poised to take over this area. Microsoft sees Google moving into new markets that they feel they should have been able to monopolize as well.
The good news is that Google doesn't have quite the strangehold on search that microsoft had on OS and office software. The best Google can do to maintain a monopoly is patents which are hopefully less holding than Microsoft's vendor lock in strategy. Nobody has to use the same search as everybody else to be compatible. Any individual is free to choose a search engine. If MSN search and Yahoo get their act together and gave Google a real run for their money, everybody would win.
I bought my hybrid five years ago when they first came out. I was on the waiting list for the first of the Honda Insights. At the time gas was just over $1 per gallon. With the sticker shock over what I would pay for a simlar non-hybrid and with $5000 battery replacement, I calculated that gas would need to average about $5 a gallon while I owned the car for it to make sense. I bought the hybrid because:
I wanted to be a good environmental citizen
I wanted something different and cool to drive
I was single, just out of college, and could spend the extra money because I had a programming job
Overall the car has worked out well. Especially in the first couple years, I would have strangers approach me in parking lots and ask questions. More people would be interested in my car than even some of my friends with fancy sports cars. The story of how I named my car "The FJM" is a funny story.
The insight has some of its own unique problems because it is a two seater: It makes it hard to take friends anywhere, and now that I'm expecting a daughter I can't put a car seat in it. Because it is so different, I have to take it to the dealership for almost all of the maintenence including oil changes. I'm also getting to the point where I will have to get the batteries replaced soon and I'm not looking forward to it.
Bottom line is that you should only get a hybrid if you think they are cool. They probably won't save you money. (But here is hoping that the gas price doubles soon:-)
You can change the license of your work to the GPL (or, possibly, one of the licenses deemed "GPL-compatible"; IANAL, so consult a lawyer first). (Emphasis added)
You cannot use the GPL to include code licensed under the GPL in an application licensed under a "GPL compatible" license. The GPL is very clear, you can only use the GPL to license code under the current or later versions of the GPL.
This is some random commentary to make sure that my post has enough characters per line on average to get by the lameness filter. Just a few more words should do it. Then I will be over the limit. Maybe you would like to hear a bit about my projects: Attesoro - A internationalization editor for Java programs. Coinmill - A currency conversion website with many currencies, and features such as abilty to parse English sentences asking for currency conversion. Java Utilities - Utilities for common task in the Java programming language such as parsing CSV files and string manipulation.
Drag and drop is a "feature" that I wish I could disable in my email client. I am forever dragging a folder into some other folder by accident in Evolution. My filters handle all the sorting that I need to do, so I don't even drag mail around. Drag and drop only ever gets in my way.
Slashdot Mirror
I joined my current company as employee 16 and the company is now up to 60. When I was hired I reported directly to the VP of engineering. Recently he became overwhelmed as the Engineering team grew to 20. We hired to senior engineers/managers just under him. I was able to interview and recommend my own boss! I am very happy with the situation.
What you want to look for:
If those three items are met, you will work in a non-dilbert workplace.
As for the fringe benefits, I agree that smaller companies may not have onsite health clubs, volleball courts, or free meals in a cafeteria like some large famous companies now do. However in my experience, to attract talent, they have to pay salary above the average, and the the health plans they offer are just as good as big companies. Plus you may be offered stock options that have the potential to become worth a heck of a lot (but don't count on them).
The marketing department is forever complaining that the csv file I sent them has 500,000 rows and Excel can only see the first 60,000 lines. Open Office is just as bad, and older versions can only see 30,000 lines. If Open Office didn't have limit, 90% of the marketing department would switch from Excel tomorrow.
my last comment about Google was meant in jest. But if I were to choose a search engine based on the results for "search engine", Yahoo has by far the best results. Check the links yourself and see.
Nobody at all recommends Google. More proof that Google search is not as good.
Talk to me about how clean the SERP is and how clearly the ads are marked and I'd agree with you.
- Bright people working for them
- msnbot has been crawling as much as googlebot for well over a year
Put those two together: a good source of data and a bunch a bright people and you should be able to build a great search engine. I've been waiting for MSN to turn up the juice for a while now. I've recently been seeing some signs of it, I don't doubt there are better things to come.Until three months ago, microsoft search seemed to favor front pages of sites to a ridiculous degree. Most of the traffic to the sites I monitor came in from the msn search engine to the front page. This was despite the fact that the crawler had visited scores of sub-pages. The only reason I can think of for this is that branded search terms would probably give better results. If you search for the name of a company, you would almost be certain to get their home page. It was almost no good for finding facts though. Recently this has begun to change and sub-pages are starting to see hits referred from msn search.
I'm hoping that Yahoo picks things up too. With their recent purchase of del.icio.us, they have another fairly substantial datasource of popularity of pages. I'm hoping that they start giving Google a run for their money as well. I'm less optimistic with them though as their relevency team seems to be out of touch with users such as myself. They seem to highly favor in-house content over better external content and they seem to think that much of what people search for is items to purchase rather than facts or even product reviews.
The best of both worlds: small initial page size, dynamic content.
As always, thanks for the new features.
There needs to be a bit more work to get the rough edges that I see out:
- Non-existant error reporting: If an exception is throw by the code backing it up, the error message on the front end will be something like "Exception: '{mycomponent.dosomething}'". Which really means that dosomething threw some other exception that it is hiding from you.
- Everything is a post: JSF tries to apply MVC to the web, which is fundamentally broken IMO. The web is transactional, not event driven. To make it appear that everything has callbacks, all the links in the web app are done by making javascript submit a POST form for the page. Much harder to debug than any other web app that I've ever worked with. You can't just see the params on a GET url and expect links to work like every other link on the web
I've never used ASP though, so I can't really compare. Myself I prefer servlets that spit out XML and use XSLT to give HTML. The designers don't seem to like the XSLT much though.Recently I switched most of my filters to procmail on the IMAP server, and with the important messages pre-filtered into folders, evolution's filters can never see the messages and never play the sounds anymore. I considered switching back to Thunderbird, but it had two other disadvantages: 1) It asked me to accept the certificate that I generated for my secure mail connection every time it starts, whereas evolution asked me once and remembers. 2) Evolution can check for mail in all subfolders, thunderbird only ever seems to see my new mail in subfolders when I click on that subfolder.
2a. Also spell things incorrectly. If a keyword gets a thousand hits, its most common misspelling will get at least a dozen. You can get a lot of traffic by including a few well-placed misspellings.
> GET / HTTP/1.1
< HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily /?ABCDEFGH
< Location:
> GET /?ABCDEFGH HTTP/1.1
< HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily
< Location: /
> GET / HTTP/1.1
< HTTP/1.x 200 OK
It appears that the page is redirecting and then redirecting back. I can imagine that would confuse some browsers. Especially if the browser cached the first redirect and didn't actually fetch the same exact page a second time.
There is probably something in the http spec about not caching temporary redirects. In fact not caching them makes perfect sense to me. So safari has a bug of some sort with redirect caching.
However, what the server is doing seems to be fairly brain dead as well. Why would you redirect away and then redirect back? It appears that there is not cookie set between the two. The server must be remembering your IP address and serving you actual content on the second hit from that IP Address. That would certainly explain the "teaching issue" that causes safari to work with these sites after visiting with firefox.
The only explanation that I can come up with is that somebody discovered this obscure caching bug in safari and built a system to expose it. It seems that the blank page problem would be easy to fix in either safari or the web server.
Agreed. Just run IMAP on the server, leave all your mail on the server, and make sure the server gets backed up.
I'd like to have the following, all of which have been cumbersome and refreshy to implement in a web browser so far:
I've made sites with fairly mainstream content before, which were totally ignored by Google
That is precisely what the "rich get richer" effect is about. This study seems to be measuring the wrong thing. Of course your mainstream site is going to get a few hits from Google because your site mentions something in some quirky way that other sites don't. However, because there are already 10,000 sites about what you have written, you will never get into the top ten search results. Google puts sites near the front of the SERPs because they have lots of incoming links. Sites that are in the top will get a lot more traffic and some percent of that traffic links to them. Sites at the bottom, get few new incoming links.
Yes those few visitors that you are getting from Google are more visitors than you would get if Google did not exists, but that says nothing about the relative number of visitors that your competitors are getting.
I would personally rather read a badly written write-up of something that is interesting rather than a well written fluff piece. I guess that is why I put up with CmdrTaco.
Editorial:
Slashdot: Targeted by very technical editors, I generally want to hear about 40% of the stories.
Digg: Targeted by users, I generally want to hear about 5% of the stories.
Comments:
Slashdot: Best comment system I've seen with a large number of commenters (threshold 4 for me)
Digg: Comments are worthless.
Timeliness:
Slashdot: Stories are often days old (and duplicates abound).
Digg: Generally havn't seen it before.
RSS:
Slashdot: As a subscriber, I get a full customized rss feed with some unexpected plums (see my latest journal entry)
Digg: The RSS feed doesn't contain the link to the story, forcing you to go to their useless comments page.
Let me ask again. Can we pleeeeeeeaaaaeeeaaaze take the serenity poll down and replace it with something else?
The good news is that Google doesn't have quite the strangehold on search that microsoft had on OS and office software. The best Google can do to maintain a monopoly is patents which are hopefully less holding than Microsoft's vendor lock in strategy. Nobody has to use the same search as everybody else to be compatible. Any individual is free to choose a search engine. If MSN search and Yahoo get their act together and gave Google a real run for their money, everybody would win.
I bought my hybrid five years ago when they first came out. I was on the waiting list for the first of the Honda Insights. At the time gas was just over $1 per gallon. With the sticker shock over what I would pay for a simlar non-hybrid and with $5000 battery replacement, I calculated that gas would need to average about $5 a gallon while I owned the car for it to make sense. I bought the hybrid because:
Overall the car has worked out well. Especially in the first couple years, I would have strangers approach me in parking lots and ask questions. More people would be interested in my car than even some of my friends with fancy sports cars. The story of how I named my car "The FJM" is a funny story.
The insight has some of its own unique problems because it is a two seater: It makes it hard to take friends anywhere, and now that I'm expecting a daughter I can't put a car seat in it. Because it is so different, I have to take it to the dealership for almost all of the maintenence including oil changes. I'm also getting to the point where I will have to get the batteries replaced soon and I'm not looking forward to it.
Bottom line is that you should only get a hybrid if you think they are cool. They probably won't save you money. (But here is hoping that the gas price doubles soon :-)
You can change the license of your work to the GPL (or, possibly, one of the licenses deemed "GPL-compatible"; IANAL, so consult a lawyer first). (Emphasis added)
You cannot use the GPL to include code licensed under the GPL in an application licensed under a "GPL compatible" license. The GPL is very clear, you can only use the GPL to license code under the current or later versions of the GPL.
"GPL compatible" as defined by the Free Software Foundation works the other way. The FSF defines GPL compatible code as code that can be incorporated into a GPL program and licensed under the GPL.
It is also interesting to see the most popular web sites. Start by typing www. into google suggest. The top 10 are:
Typing one more letter shows you the top sites for that letter. Here is the top for each letter:
This is some random commentary to make sure that my post has enough characters per line on average to get by the lameness filter. Just a few more words should do it. Then I will be over the limit. Maybe you would like to hear a bit about my projects: Attesoro - A internationalization editor for Java programs. Coinmill - A currency conversion website with many currencies, and features such as abilty to parse English sentences asking for currency conversion. Java Utilities - Utilities for common task in the Java programming language such as parsing CSV files and string manipulation.
Drag and drop is a "feature" that I wish I could disable in my email client. I am forever dragging a folder into some other folder by accident in Evolution. My filters handle all the sorting that I need to do, so I don't even drag mail around. Drag and drop only ever gets in my way.