Chris May

I have been accepting resumes for a while now trying to find developers for a client of mine.

I will be updating this article from time to time with new stuff.

DO have someone proofread your resume, cover letter, and email body.  Espically if you are not a native english speaker.  If you want your resume to go directly into the trash, then please, write your email with lots of grammer and spelling problems.

DON'T write in your cover letter that, while you don't have the skills/experience they are looking for, you DO have the skills/experience that really matters.  You have just managed to tell the person reading your resume that a) you don't have the skills they need, b) you think you are smarter than the person who came up with the needed skills/experience, and c) you are probably not easy to get along with.  All in the first sentence of your cover letter: BRAVO!

DON'T send a 9 page resume including every project you have ever worked on and details about said project.  I remember when I was told that resumes should be 1 page long (2 at the most) and I thought how wrong that was.  "My resme will be so awesome, 2 pages can't contain it!"  I realized very quickly how wrong I was.  I don't need to know the specifics of some project you worked on for 3 months back in 2002, and I don't need to know a list of every programming langauge, technique, or technology that you have ever touched. 

DO supply a cover letter, or at least turn your email into your cover letter.  It will get you bonus points.

DON'T include a stupid signature on your emails.  I actually received a resume that was signed like this:

--
If fishes could talk they'd ask for legs

Ok I guess that is somewhat funny in a Jack Handy kinda way, but it really doesn't belong on an job application email.

DON'T list "Internet Connection Technologies" that you have experience with.  I swear I got a resume with this as the 2nd heading (after education).  It listed "AOL Dial Up, AOL High Speed DSL, SBC DSL".  Before you start thinking, ok well maybe these were projects they worked on, you know, like working on the team to create AOL's dial up service... no this was not what they meant, it was clear from the rest of the resume.

DON'T just make up stuff if you don't know the answer to a question.  This isn't the ACT: there are penalities for guessing (it makes you look really stupid).  Now clearly there is a difference between making an educated guess (or talking in generalities instead of specifics) and trying to totally pull something out of thin air.  I recently interviewed a candidate who said he didn't have any project experience using AJAX but was aware of AJAX technologies.  So I asked him, can you explain how AJAX works?  I wasn't expecting much, just something about using client side script to make calls to the server w/o reloading the entire page.  Instead the answer we got back was "It's like JAVA running on top of Microsoft."  Up until that point I hadn't decided if this guy was qualified, and had he simply said "No, I am sorry I am not that familiar with AJAX" I probably would have still been considering him, but his terrible attempt at an answer removed all doubt that he was not qualified.

Haacked blogs about the 19 laws of programming.

My favorite, and one that I personally know to be very true, is Brooks law:

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Which can also be stated as:

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

 

Web development is number 2 of the most indemand skills for 2007:

http://www.hotgigs.com/pdf/contractworkforce2007_d.pdf?src=cwremailconsultantb

When they break down the web development category, I have extensive experience in almost but 1 of the top 10 sub categories, with my main area of expertise being the top item: ASP.NET development.

Good to know that I made a good decision to not focus on Fortran! :)

Some researchers belive they have found a new type of matter, called String-Net Liquid.

The suggestion is that electrons are not elementary particles, but rather are the end points of strings of other particles, similar to quantium entanglement.

The mesh of strings behaves according to Maxwell's equations, which deal with the propagation of light. 

They think that the vacuum of space might be filled with these strings.

Very interesting.

This is a really neat example of how to use the advanced search abilities of Google to narrow down your search to specific files.

From the article:

The following is a Google search string for searching open web directories containing downloadable Nirvana music files.  Substitute the term Nirvana in the search string for any other band of your liking.  You can always bookmark the search result for future use.

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Nirvana”

With some very slight modifications the same search string can easily be used to search for ebooks in DOC and PDF format:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(pdf|doc) “george orwell 1984″

Or perhaps your looking for some specific video file:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(mpg|wmv) “towelie”

 

CAPTCHA screens help keep bots from flooding sites like this one with spam.

I use a very basic CAPTCHA on the comments section.

Here are 2 articles talking about the effectivness of CAPTCHA, and ways that people can beat it.

http://haacked.com/archive/2005/01.aspx

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000712.html

This article discusses the turmoil of a multi-year software project, and attempts to answer the question: Why is writing software hard?

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/02/03/leonard/

http://www.codeplex.com will allow you to host your project on their servers, and apparently they are running TFS.

Here is another article on how to clean up your MP3 collection.  This time, it is on getting Album Art embedded intot he files.

Google is offering free processing on all orders through 2007 with their new Google Checkout service.

Alpha Geek has an interesting article on how to level the volume of your MP3 collection so that you don't end up with some songs being too loud and some being too quiet.

Basically they suggest you use MP3Gain and show you how it works.

I would like to try this, but I don't even own one any more.

I should see if they have one on ebay or the dollar store.

Here is a neat little collection of 10 different magic tricks and how to do them.

Pretty cool.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a way to "automate" things that computers are not quite able to do.

There really isn't enough info out there on it yet.  It seems like it could have some pretty interesting applications, but I don't think you can do anything realtime.

http://requester.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=15879911

SeaLand (not the one in Florida) is basically an old WWII fort that some guy claimed as his own "Country."

Now it is up for sale.

This site is getting hammered right now, but I will really want to check back later and see all the pictures.

Google does a lot more than just return search results.

Some of the stuff I use it for include weather, calculation and unit conversion, movie times, and as a dictionary.

Here is a page that talks about some of these, and some others that I didn't know about, like package tracking.

I came across this game: http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-bg.htm

It's more of a puzzle or mind teaser.  Apparently it took Bill Gates 90 minutes to figure it out.  I did it in about 10, not that I think I'm smart or anything :).

See if you can "crack the code."

Interesting list for 10 rules web startups should follow:

http://www.evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp

 

I saw a link from fark to www.YourOs.com which is supposed to be a web based operating system.  I tried to do a demo but it was too busy from the /. crowd.

This would be interesting to try, they say they have MP3 players, word processors etc.

I think this is pretty cool.

Check out the image below.  Then use the link below to open up just the image in a new browser window.

Resize the image (make it smaller) to see the secret message.

 

secret.gif (139.54 KB)

 

I was having such a hard time getting MS Virtual Server setup so that my virtual servers could access the public network and vice versa.

In the end the problem was caused by a service that is running to enable my VPN connections.

The service is called:

Cisco Systems, Inc. VPN Service.

As soon as I turned off that service, everything with my virtual servers network worked just fine.

 

I have tried to councel against sending datasets across web service calls, but we have a lot of instances where this is being done.

One of the problems with this is that datasets get bloated when converted to XML.

So I set out to compare the sizes of:

1. Serialized List(Of MyType)
2. Serialized DataTable
3. Serialized DataSet
4. XML Serialized Dataset

I wish I had done some research on this, because I would have quickly been reminded that DataSets always serialize as XML, even if you are using the BinaryFormatter. 

There are lots of people out there coming up with their own ideas for how to improve the serialization of datasets:

• Dino Esposito's Ghost method
• MSDN Surrogate Dataset Serialization
• Andres Aguiar's Customization of Generated DataSets
• Another Ariticle Summing Up Other Options

Anyway, this isn't really THAT big of a deal, because my real goal wasn't to improve the dataset serialization, but to simply see what it would be, and compare it to some other ways to serialize data, like in a list of business objects or a datatable.

The results are interesting:

Given a list of 1013 Business Objects (Records) the serialization results are as follows:

Method	Size (bytes)
List(Of MyType)	290,321
DataTable	819,575
DataSet	693,088
XML Serialzied Dataset	851,614

I have read that you can really decrease the size of the dataset by writing your own logic to do the serialization, but as everyone points out that is kind of a pain.

I heard this clip again today called "The Planet Is Fine".

Carlin is doing a show in New York, and he says he like exciting news. He wants to see bodies flying, smoke and fire, concrete falling from the sky, thousands of people in the streets trying not to get hit by falling concrete, stuff like that. Its crazy. It really sounds like he is talking about 9/11. I can't find a transcript.

Enistein wrote a riddle that he claimed only 2% of the population could solve. Well count me in that 2%, cause I kicked this brain teasers ass.

Puzzle

The spot where you check your answer is kinda messed up. If you get a 404 error, you are right (the page is missing), otherwise you wlll get something telling you that you were wrong.