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.

As I have grown older, I have learned to understand some of the quirks in my personality, and adjust my expectations accordingly.

For example, my whole life I have always had periods of intense interest in some subject only to lose interested after a couple months.  Various video games, RC Car building and racing, drawing, electric guitar, etc.

So now when I get older and I get ultra interested in some new subject, in the back of my mind I say "Ok, I know this seems like the most important thing right now, but in 6 months you will proably not be THAT interested anymore."

I would have bet you money that would have been the case with my most recent endevor, trying to learn spanish.  But here I am, listening (even paying for) podcasts, buying iPhone translation software (this software is really great), taking Spanish lessons twice a week with an instructor from Peru, and even booking a vacation to mexico to get 6 hrs of Spanish instruction a day.

I guess in my old age I am growing my attention span :).

In the next 72 hours, you expect the new campaign to generate 10x more traffic than you have had in the last 72 days.  How do you scale to deal with this problem?

Do you buy more servers?

A few companies are starting to offer instant scalability for needs like this.  Amazon has been doing this for a while with their web services, but it isn't very useful for people who need the site to be running 24x7 (and it isn't very MS friendly).  But now there are other companies coming into play to provide the service I am talking about.

https://www.gogrid.com/

and

http://www.mosso.com/

Both offer the ability to instantly scale up your infrastructure as needed.  You can buy more CPU cycles, storage space, bandwidth etc, for a short time period.

This may (or may not) be ready for prime time, but it an interesting development for sure!

I recently upgraded my iphone to the new version 2.0, almost entirely for 1 reason: exchange syncronization.

After some minor issues setting up, I got things working correctly and it worked great.  But, as soon as I connected to a wifi and tried to do anything with exchange it fails.

I first experienced this at work where we use 802.11 WPA-PEAP, so we were eager to take advantage of 2.0s support for WPA-PEAP.  We installed the profile and were browsing at fantastic speeds... but no email was coming through.

I couldn't send or receive any email.

We tried using the admin tools to look at the iphone console messages and they talked about some ASxxxxxx errors, error code 451 came up a lot.

I hoped it was something with our work network, but when I got home I found that once again, I couldn't send or receive anything.

Fantastic.

I'm hoping I am not the only one with this issue and someone else will read this and have more to add.

Update: It seems that the cause, for some unknown reason, is related to the profile that our network administrator is able to create with some new administration tools from apple.  Apple provides a tool to create profiles so you can send a config file to an iPhone and it will setup everything (email, wireless access etc).  When this profile (even if only for access to 1 wireless network) is on my iPhone, all exchange communication over our WiFi failes.

Update 2:  Ok maybe there is something else going on here.  I have removed the profile and I still can't send / receive from my home wifi.  I tried it at my parents house too and I get the same result.

Here are some keywords/error messages that I am getting:

Exchange Account Verification Failed

Cannot Send Mail.

An error occurred while delivering this message.

Update 3:  Alright, it appears we have it working now.  There were some settings across a few of our exchange proxy servers that might not have been updated, and also there are some activesync settings that allow you to configure an "inside" url and an "outside" url.  After much poking around, I think Mike Driscoll got it figured out.  Thanks Mike.

I recently wrote about how the Flickr Uploadr tool sucks, but the other part of that article was how the web upload tools for Flickr is very nice!

FancyUpload is a set of code using Flash/Javascript to perform out of band file uploads.

This is basically how Flickr allows you to queue files for upload in their web client, and it is very useful in this sense because it would be extremely painful to be forced to post every single image individually.

For me, I am more interested in the ability to post very large files without leaving the brower in a fashion that seems to make it look like it is "stuck" when really it is just uploading a giant file.

Flickr provides an application called Flickr Uploadr to help you upload your images, and it really sucks.

I have been trying to get it to upload my collection of images for the last 24 hours and it has failed at various stages of completion upwards of 10 times.  Each time it fails in the middle of a batch, it seems unclear as to if when I restart I am uploading the same images again or if it is smart enough to not upload images that have already been uploaded in the earlier batch. 

I think it probably isn't smart enough.

The other thing that is really crappy is that it is really really slow.

Using the web based upload tool (which is really sweet btw) is about 4-8x faster than using the Uploadr tool.  This is very frustrating because it should be the other way around.  You can do a lot of things with a rich client that you can't do in a web page, but apparently Flickr didn't put the effort into the Uploadr app.

Jungle Disk is another product (only 20 bucks) that runs on top of the S3 service from Amazon.

http://www.jungledisk.com/

Unlike S3 Backup, it acts as a virtual drive (like a USB drive) that you can drag files to/from.

The interesting part for me, is that they supposedly employ some kind of caching algorithm so that most files (I assume given availabe drive space) are cached locally so you don't have to go up to the server and download the whole thing when you want it.

Might be worth looking into.

Most internet providers for businesses offer some kind of SLA to show their commitment to continued uptime.

One of my customers who uses AT&T Business DSL recently had a multi day outage. 

So what does AT&T's SLA provide?

Customer connectivity shall be restored in 24 hours or less from the time AT&T is notified of the outage. *Customer shall be entitled to one (1) day's credit (based on 30 day calendar month) from the Customer's recurring monthly service fees if AT&T fails to meet the 24 Hour Service Restoration SLA.

Yes you read that right.  Your business has no email or internet access for 3-4 days and what does AT&T do for you?  They might knock 10 bucks or so off your bill.  How nice... well at least they don't make me waste any more time .... oh wait..

(*) Credits are not automatically applied. Customer must apply via the Business DSL SLA website located at http://www.att.com/businessdslsla, or by calling our Customer Care at 1-877-722-3755.

Wow. 

Jott is an interesting site that allows you to send emails from your phone.

You call a number, say the name of the person you want to send a message to, and it will do speech to text conversion and send the email.

As I understand it, they employ 2 different speech recognition engines, and if the 2 don't agree on what you said, they offload it to a person to do the typing.  Pretty interesting!

You can also set reminders and it will email ou 15 minutes before the reminder time.

Not sure that I will ever really get into using it heavily, but I thought I would give it a shot.

They also have an API so I could write up some code for my site and "phone in" my blog posts and they would show up here.  Pretty interesting indeed!

Here is the API: http://jott.com/jott/developers.html

Amazons S3 service already had crazy cheap bandwidth and storage.

Today I got an email that they are LOWERING the price even more!

Current data transfer price (through April 30, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.180 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

I am still not sure who to blame on this...

Is Comcast packet shaping Netflix, or is Netflix just not able to provide enough consisten bandwidth?

I'm leaning toward Comcast as being the problem behind this, but I haven't been able to fully verify it.

I have bandwidth to spare:

But netflix doesn't seem to like it:

Comcast has been caught "packet shaping" traffic for specific P2P applications like bittorrent.   While this isn't exactly packet filtering, the desired effect is to limit bandwidth for a given application.

It is total BS.

The last 2 nights, I have been trying to use Netflix, and even though speed test have me around 15 mbps (10 T1s worth of bandwidth), I am getting bandwidth warnings, and buffering pauses while trying to watch an episode of Dexter.

This is the message that I get:

Comcast has an interested in making your Netflix experience as terrible as possible: they want you to use their on demand video service!

Would they really do something like this?  Of course they would!  The question is not would they, but are they.

The only other possability is that Netflix itself is having some issues, but I can't seem to find anyone else seeing these major issues.

I am a season ticket holder for the Chicago Fire, and over the last few years, they have infuriated me numerous times with what appears to be total incompitance in running the business.  I won't go into it all now, but to point out yet another way they have blown it.

Let's say you ran the Fire, and you were trying to use your website to promote your home opener.  Don't you think you would try to avoid confusing your fans as to what time the games starts?

If you print out the season sechedule, it says 7:00.   If you look at the ticket, it says 7:30!

This is just dumb.  Dumb.

There are threads going on among fans on the various soccer related websites trying to figure out what time the game starts??  What is this, Guadalajara?? 

People love Apple, and they love iTunes, but I continue to believe that iTunesis the worst piece of widely used software out there.

Today I was trying to add a podcast to iTunes, and like months before, I ran into the problem of not being able to find anywhere that I could click to add a podcast.

It seemed the only way to add a podcast was to do so through the iTunes store.

Last time I gave up and was lucky enough to find the podcasts I wanted through iTunes, but this time the one I wanted to add wasn't listed there (or at least I couldn't find it).

After even more searching I finally found how to do it.  You need the URL as a link, and then you need to drag the link from your browser window, onto the "Podcasts" navigation link that is on the left hand side of iTunes.

Totally... stupid.  There is no other way to describe it.

This is pretty cool: http://www.jwirc.com/chat.html.

Microsoft really does a terrible job explaining all the variations of Visual Studio .Net 2008 (and there are many):

• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
• Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition
• Visual C# 2008 Express Edition
• Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition
• Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Architecture Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite
  

After a lot of searching, I finally found this data sheet that explains most of it.

Why this was so hard to find is anyones guess.

One one of my dasBlog sites that was built before Akismet was supported, I accientally allowed for pingbacks to be tracked.

Ping backs are supposed to happen between blogs whenver you link to another blog article.

It's really a great idea!  If you are reading a blog post, you might see a list of 4 ping backs at the end.  These URLs are the locations of other blog articles that reference the article you are reading, so you might want to check some of those out to get those authors poing of view on whatever topic is being discussed.

But, of course, spammers ruin it for everyone.

Yesterday I got 18,000 pingbacks from sites selling prescription drugs in a matter of a hour or 2.

So I turned off ping backs, but that left me with a ton of spam to clean up.

Lucky for me, someone else has already run into this, and built a tool for stripping it out!

Really nice!  The only problem I found was that it didn't report issues with my config file (I had a bad character in there).  Actually, it WOULD report them, but would immediately begin processing the files (with no patterns to match against) so you couldn't tell that it was reporting it.

So if you run into a problem with this tool, try putting in a bad content path.  This was throw an exception and you will have time to read any debug info in the command terminal indicating if there was a problem with your config file earlier in the process.

After I fixed this issue, it worked great!

Thanks!

I recently wrote about some issues I was running into with Lenovo computers losing drive space.

I detailed it in this article:

What happened to my drive space (on my Lenovo laptop)?

Well, I think I found the solution.   My Lenovo came with built in Rescue and Recovery software (Under Thinkvantage).

This software tries to make local backups so you can rollback if you get a virus or something.

The problem is, it is very tricky, and doesn’t let you know that it is eating up your hard drive. 

The files never show up on your C:.  So, right now your C drive might show 80 GB total, 500 MB free… but if you show all files on the C drive, and select the properties of them, they all only add up to 45 GB (where is the rest?).

Well IBM hides these backup files somewhere.  I just noticed now that mine, even though I have never knowingly clicked “OK” when prompted to do a Rescue and Recovery backup, is saving 30GB of backup data.

So if you want to delete these, you can do the following:

1. Run Rescue and Recovery
2. Click on Advanced in the lower left hand corner
3. Click on Advanced (again) in the title bar
4. Select "Delete backups"
5. Select some backups to delete.

Thats it!
 

When Google Desktop first came out, I loved it.

It gave quick search results searching across multiple categories on my machine, and it was fast.

But the more I used it, the more I noticed things I didn't like.  Links to files that didn't exist.  Missing search results.  Incomplete results.

So even though I had a bad experience when I first tried Windows Desktop Search when it was in beta, I decided to try it again.

There is no quesiton, this is a clear cut total win for Microsoft.

Windows Desktop is fast, gives much more complete results (espically from my email), and has a much nicer user interface when compared with Google Desktop.

I have to say, I am suprised, but happy that it works as well as it does.

Give it a shot, cross your eyes just right and see the words that pop out.

Do you need to come up with some Use Cases?  Maybe you need to create a Software Requirements Specification document.  Or, how about something as simple as writing up some test cases.

ReadySET provides (for free) a set of software engineering document templates to help you come up with these articles.

Just select the type of document you are interested in and customize as needed.

Chances are I will never get time to do this, but still it would be nice.

Sometimes you might need/want to know what ports on your machine are being used.

If you try to start up a process listening on some port and it reports that the port is alread in use, what do you do?

The answer is to use this command:

netstat -a -n -o

This will show you all port activity including the PID so you can open up task manager and find which process is using which port.

Craigslist is good for laugh every now and then.

Usually it comes in the form of someone looking to hire someone to develop a site "Just like MySpace" with a budget of $500.  Or "I have a great way to run auctions online, a real Ebay killer.  Need you to implement my ideas.  Budget $1000 plus equity in the new company."  LOL.

But you can get a good laugh too by posting your own listing and reading the responses.  For example, I posted recently looking for someone with experience integrating business systems with quickbooks.  I wrote that, initially, I just wanted to sit with the person for a few hours to point me in the right direction, and to talk about some of the best practices for doing tihs type of work, but I might have them do some of the development work.

Here is one of the responses I got:

** CRAIGSLIST ADVISORY --- AVOID SCAMS BY DEALING LOCALLY
** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home
** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping
** More Info: