Here is a great account of what has to be one of the funniest and yet saddest things I have ever seen. The Creation Museum is actually real and charges $20 for adults on top of all this. Apparently it is God’s vision to charge you a lot of money to learn about what some funny people want you to believe.
Here’s a great writeup of it all:
http://crazytalk.typepad.com/bluegrassroots/2007/06/fun_at_the_crea.html
I’m going to go and pray for the future of our country. 🙂
One would think, right? I mean, after all, Wired is supposed to be one of the mainstream tech rags out there. Okay, it likes to think it is but that’s another story.
I go to this story today and on both IE7 and Firefox 2.x I can not for the life of me get this AT&T and Philips ad to go away that pops up directly over the story. I’ve clicked on them, waited, etc. and nothing. It just sits there. There’s no close button for the ad layer either. That’s just plain annoyin, Wired.
I know bad job postings are a favorite topic of mine and I stumbled across another one that made me laugh today. Here’s the link but I’ll also copy the relevant sections below. Job posting.
This position is scheduled to start in August once we go through the rigorous hiring process. At that time you will be a full time contractor and we will retain you for a minimum of 5 months. Beyond that and through the successful launch of the product we will be transitioning all team members to full time employment positions. Equity will be granted for those that join our team but only after we have gone through the trial period. Compensation for this particular position will be $4,000.00 per month. Yes it is the Bay Area and we are all used to making more, but startups require risk and the willingness to take chances and we are looking for those candidates because they are the ones that will make it through the good and bad times with us.
Okay, why is this bad? First off, they’re hiring you for 5 months at $4,000 a month. Contracting with no benefits should pay at least that a week in the SF Bay Area. There is no equity for 5 months. They have no obligation to hire you. They could just drop you at the end and walk away without even blinking. If you’re going to work for that little amount of money for the skills they’re asking for you should be getting guaranteed equity (if that’s even a good deal).
There are other reasons to be suspicious of the people doing the job search because of the following skill set they want:
• Extensive experience in J2EE technologies, with a strong understanding of the common design frameworks like Struts & Spring.
• Deep understanding of query Tuning concepts, Web Security concepts like Man in Middle attacks, cross site scripting, sql injection, phishing etc.
• Extensive experience in configuring and deploying applications on JBoss, clustering
• Extensive experience with Apache
• db admin tasks like db clustering, db configuration etc (mysql)
• Experience in working with build utilities like Ant & Maven
• Automated build systems like cruise control
• ability to write db components like Stored procs, Functions, Triggers etc for MySQL
• basic Understanding of networking, and ability to work with SANs
First off, how many people with killer database skills also understand cross site scripting attacks? I can tell you that list will be pretty damn short. On top of that they’re not really even looking for a Java developer based on these skills but more an operations and system engineer that has some Java coding. They have one line dedicated to Java and it only mentions Spring and Struts.
Run, don’t walk, from this job posting. Seriously.
It’s insane how bad comment spam has gotten on blogs. My blog is not high traffic by any stretch of the imagination. I get anywhere from 10-20 uniques a day. Sometimes it will spike if I post something interesting but lately I’ve been pretty quiet. Even being quiet I am getting almost 100 spam attempts per day. I can only imagine what popular sites go through.
I recently added an additional tool called Bad Behavior that blocks the spam before the attempt is made. In its first 24 hours it has already blocked 48 attempts and Akismet caught another 40 or so that made it through Bad Behavior’s first screen.
I also plugged in the dofollow plugin since I’ve read how the rel=”nofollow” attribute can actually cause more spam to come at your blog rather than less. I figure it can’t hurt.
I wonder how much spam attempts bog down some of the larger blog sites. It really has to be nuts. My current employer will most likely face a spam onslaught at some point when we start to ramp up traffic. I’m not looking forward to that.
Seriously. Customers will appreciate it more and give the company the benefit of the doubt. I’ve had so many instances in the past where if a company had just come clean it would have given them a lot of good will. When we moved to San Francisco about 7 years ago the moving company’s driver got pissed, dropped our trailer off at the yard in Phoenix and drove off. He didn’t tell anyone. Well, the company bullshitted us for 3 days telling us our stuff would be there the next day. Three days we took off of work. No truck. Finally they came clean. It took a threat to start talking to my congressmen about who is in charge of interstate commerce to get a call from the CEO the next day. Granted, the truth wouldn’t have been pretty but it was going to come out anyways. Then, we found out that once they did figure out where the trailer was they sent a 19 year old driver to get it. It’s not legal for this kid to drive across state lines at night due to his age I believe he said but he did it anyways because the company told him to.
So what brought this rant forward? FedEx. Normally FedEx is pretty good. Not this time. I ordered a projector from woot the other day and it shipped very quickly. It even got to the Benicia terminal a day earlier than expected. I might get my projector a day early I think. Wrong. So it goes into a delivery exception while on the truck a day early and returns to the terminal. No biggie, it’s still expected to be here on time. The next day comes and we wait around…and wait….and wait. Then, at 7:50pm we notice that another delivery exception has been noted on the account and that it is going back to the terminal. But this time it gets better. The report says “customer not available or business closed”. My wife was home the entire time waiting in the living room about 15 feet from the front door. The dogs were in the house as well. There is no way the FedEx driver attempted delivery. I called FedEx and asked what happened and of course all the person on the other end could tell me was what I saw on the Internet.
Then the kicker. I ask “aren’t the drivers supposed to leave the yellow door tag indicating that they attempted delivery?” She says it’s a “courtesy” and not “policy” and that he might have run out. I call BS again. This is just ridiculous. It’s obvious that the driver never attempted delivery and just headed back to the terminal.
Well, it gets better. The next day the package never even gets put back on the truck. It just sits at the terminal and I call again. This time they guarantee it will be delivered the next day (today). I’m not holding my breath. The next kicker though, is that yesterday they again show a delivery exception with “customer not available or business closed” yet again. This, even though it never went out for delivery in the first place.
FedEx, get your act together. It’s not so much to ask for a huge company like yourself to actually have a better feedback system on tracking.
This issue seems to get beaten to death but since I switched back to IDEA from Eclipse recently it was something I revisited(1). While on Eclipse I had just used Courier New but I’ve never really been totally sold on it. In general I don’t like serif fonts for coding. The serifs seem to take away from on-screen readability. But I never really liked any of the sans-serif monospace fonts available either. Lucida doesn’t look good to me…something about the spacing bothers me. Fonts are one of those purely subjective things, though. I have tried some of the bit mapped fonts that I’ve seen listed by other people in the past as well but since I run at relatively high resolutions they don’t ever work well. I really needed a scalable font.
Enter Consolas. Consolas is this new monospaced font from Microsoft that is standard on Vista and available for those that have Microsoft Visual Studio. The installer won’t actually even let you install it unless you meet those constraints. But luckily you can install the free version of Visual Studio, install the fonts, and then remove it. 🙂 And then you can save the font files off by themselves for future use.
Here’s an example of the font on IDEA with font anti-aliasing turned on, running under Java 6. Even running under Java 6 you still need to turn on font anti-aliasing to get it to look similar to Eclipse. I’m hoping the next version of IDEA that officially supports Java 6 will be able to use the platform anti-aliasing that comes built-in.
I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has switched to this font or if they’ve tried it. This is my favorite so far and I’m really happy with it. It’s funny sometimes how something that would seem so insignificant as a font can change your productivity. Well, I should say that a bad font can really screw with my concentration at times…I’ve had enough experience with typesetting/publishing in the past that crappy fonts bother me a lot.
(1) Switching was not really my choice. My new group uses IDEA while my previous one used Eclipse. They’re both good IDEs. This isn’t really a post about the merits of each IDE.
I tend to look at local job postings on a semi-regular basis. Not because I’m looking to leave my current job usually but rather because I’m curious and like to see what trends are forming and to see how healthy the local job market is.
But by watching these listings I’ve definitely formed opinions about what I think are warnings signs to stay away from a particular company/post.
1. They say how great or HOT they are in a given area
I’ve seen both Nextag and now Next Internet using this tactic on Craigslist. If you’re so hot, why do you have to tell me about it? If you’re so hot, you’re going to get interest without having to ask for it just because you’re at the center of the known geek universe and word tends to travel pretty fast.
2. They post for the same job every few months
Unless it’s a large company that I know is in growth mode then either one of two things probably happened. One, it’s a really crappy place to work and every person they find leaves within a few months. Or two, they didn’t find anyone and decided to put it off for a few months. Most of the time it seems like it’s from one of those companies that’s probably just barely staying afloat. They aren’t going under but they’re not really growing either. I’ve worked for one one of the latter before and it’s not fun at all.
3. They have completely unrealistic expectations
This one is more obvious but I’ve learned that a company that has unreal job requirements either expects a superhero / rock star developer or they really haven’t defined the job they’re looking for. The exception to this if they say something to the effect that they know that no one has all of these things but they are looking for someone with a certain set of them. It’s still a little worrisome because it still kind of smells like they don’t know what they are looking for but it’s not a definitive red flag. The times that I’ve talked to companies that want the rock star it’s amazing that they generally are also companies that balk at paying at rock star levels. I’ve seen one on in the east bay that is always looking for consultants in the 5 year experience range with a number of technology requirements and actually posts a salary level of sub 60,000. In the Bay Area that just isn’t happening. Well, unless it’s not a full time job.
And that leads me to my last one for now…
4. They post salary levels that are just insanely low
This one is really obvious but it’s more an amazement thing on my part that a company is so out of touch that they think they’ll get anyone by listing a salary that is at least 20K below market for a given job. It’d be one thing if it was a startup offering huge stock grants and being up front about that but it’s another when it’s just some consulting firm that has been around for a while.
Overall, at least here in the bay area, the job market is doing pretty well so if you are talented it puts you in a pretty good place to be a lot pickier about the type of company and environment you decide to work in. You just have to be diligent about looking for the warning signs of a company that would not be a good fit or has internal issues that would drive you crazy.
What other red flags do you notice in job postings? I’m sure there are a ton of them and these are just the ones that I thought of off the top of my head.
At my new place of employment (okay, so it’s been a few months already — time flies!) we recently decided to put a continuous integration server in place. We had started with cruise control because a company we partnered with already had it setup and in place. Cruise control has never been the most user-friendly and easy to use server and so we set out to find another one.
Before you think this is a review of a bunch of integration servers, I’ll just say it’s not and get that out of the way. We didn’t really have the time do a thorough review of every server out there. We just needed an integration server that was easy to setup and run. Luckily we found it when we tried out Bamboo from the folks over at Atlassian. We are already using Jira and Confluence in house so it also made sense to just get most of our communication tools from one vendor. It was extremely easy to get going and to integrate with our Subversion repository. Its unit test run integration seems to work extremely well, also. We know we aren’t using all of its functionality but as we have time and new requirements pop-up I’m sure it will get more extensive use (abuse) in our shop.
The thing that struck me, however, was just how many vendors there are that have continuous integration server products. The ones that we found were Parabuild, Pulse, Bamboo, Anthil, Cruise Control, Team City, and Gauntlet (from Borland). I know there are some others such as Continuum and Luntbuild but I didn’t really even have them on my list.
I guess I look at this and see two things. One, the market is extremely saturated. Some of these products are probably not going to see a lot of adoption. These generally aren’t expensive products and so you have to sell a lot of them to justify even having a few full time developers and QA engineers on the product. The second is that this shows just how much adoption there is for continuous integration and testing in Java development shops nowadays. I think this is a great thing because it means more and more developers will get exposure to the concept of unit testing and continuous integration. I still see too few developers that have exposure and experience with this concept.
I think next I’ll come back to more discussions about hiring woes and some recommendations for developers that are out looking for a new job.
I picked up a Ninentdo Wii this morning. I had to get up at 6:40am to make it to Wal-Mart by 7:00am to get it. They’ve been amazingly hard to come by lately. I normally don’t set foot in a Wal-Mart but last week I couldn’t make it to the Wii Lovefest at Best Buy, Circuit City or Target due to some family commitments. I was out of Wally world by about 7:35am and headed over to Target to see if they had any wiimotes. No on that adventure.
First things first, Nintendo, why oh why didn’t you make more Wiimotes? I mean, Wal-Mart gets 35 Wiis and they have TWO wiimotes. Two!! How can I play head to head against friends when I only have one controller? Bad bad.
Second, why oh why (sensing a trend?) didn’t you make more component video cables available? Most people that play video games these days and that are early adopters have TVs with component inputs and would love the 480p.
Okay, bitching aside…let’s get to the play! I picked up Zelda and a few other games. I haven’t opened them yet since I didn’t have time to check reviews and don’t want to open them until I’ve made sure they aren’t crappy release games. I’ll probably keep Zelda and I hear that Excite Truck is fun. I got Cars mainly because Allie loves that movie and it’ll be fun to have her cheer on Lightning McQueen or Mater.
Kudos for built in 802.11g support Nintendo! I don’t have to make my network vulnerable to every script kiddie on the block, however, I did have to put my network into mixed mode which I wasn’t quite as happy about. It connected, pulled down the system update and away I went.
I popped in Wii Sports and pulled up the game. Graphics? Not so great but it’s a free title and meant to show off the controllers so I forgive them there. Gameplay? Fun. Seriously fun to be able to move around and use your hands to box and bob and weave from the opponent. You really can work up a sweat in this game. The bowling was probably the most fun of them. The boxing was probably 2nd with golf a close 3rd. Baseball and tennis were just okay. In baseball it didn’t make it obvious that you could throw screwballs and splitters and curves if you held down different buttons. It didn’t also seem like I could control pitch or batspeed by slowing or speeding up my swing/throw. The tennis was just ho-hum. I still need to explore it a bit more and maybe do the training to see if they show any other hints.
Overall, though, you can definitely see what game makers are going to be able to do with the platform when they get going on it. With the Wii selling so well I think we’ll start to see more titles built with motion sensing in mind and really make the console shine.
The only other knock is that it’s not in high definition but if the games are more fun then that’s what really counts. And I can get an XBox 360 for my HD appetite if I decide to.
Now for the disclaimer. I didn’t read the manual yet so all of this might be in there.
Coming up next: Unboxing photos of the Wii! I couldn’t wait to put up the unboxing photos before I took some time to actually play the thing!
Games I’ll probably get: Madden and SSX (when it comes out).
I can’t believe how cold this winter has been for us. We’ve been here for a little more than 6 years now and we’ve never seen a winter like this. For us, cold is 32 degrees Farenheit. Yeah yeah, if you’re from Chicago or Milwaukee like we were then I know it’s not really cold but that’s what cold is to this area. I really don’t remember it dropping below freezing for more than a night or two and if it did it was just by a degree or so. However, this year it’s gotten into the 20s for multiple nights now. Looking at the records it seems like we’ve set record lows in some cases by as much as 8 degrees over the last 5 days or so. The rest of the week is only warming up to the lower 30s for our lows so it’s still going to be really cold compared to normal.
Our neighborhood has a weather reporting station which also has historical data available so I was able to go back and look at how cold it got each night. It’s pretty slick actually. I was able to check remotely while we were on vacation to see how cold it got. Not that Anaheim was that much warmer.
I guess global warming doesn’t make it warmer everywhere.
Predictable Chaos 