last updated:03 Oct 2003 11:24 UK time JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 28 Sep 2003) | View Other Weeks be careful about what you post on the net | Sun 28 Sep | Celmai Taredin Parcare A long, long time ago I was a member of a public discussions network called FidoNet. It was exactly like Usenet - only that the nodes (the servers) of the network called each other using modems and exchanged the messages. So, the communication was almost exclusively by phone. Well, this network was really cool - like in this forum, you could talk with a lot of interesting people there. There was one discussion area (or group) about jokes, where people posted jokes. So, I posted some jokes myself. Some of them were dirty jokes, but not very dirty. Well, lots of years later, I have searched for my name on Google, and I found out that a lot of people saved the FidoNet joke posts to files, and put the files on the web! There were files with hundreads of jokes put on the web. Those files were saved from the FidoNet jokes group, and also contained the names of the authors, etc. So anybody who searched for my name, could find my name near some jokes, and some of them were dirty ones. I have worked hard to contact every webmaster who put up such files and asked them to remove my name. It was very tough. I did this every month for an year, until I have cleared my name. Now, at that time, there was no archive.org, and no Google (Altavista were the kings of search), so I guess there is no trace, now. Be very careful about what you post on the net under your real name. It may come back to haunt you later! Sun 28 Sep | Simon Lucy | Ummm, so it was ok to post this stuff amongst a small tribe of anorak wearing, pipe smoking, jesus sandal wearing short folk with either curly bushy hair or receding hairlines; but not the general populace who'd likely never heard of you? Sun 28 Sep | Celmai Taredin Parcare | Yes, it was ok. They were techies, and were obviously not my employers! Also, at the time I posted the jokes, I was younger and didn't care so much about having a job, etc. Now I care. Sun 28 Sep | Sum Dum Gai | I think it's a sad reflection on the society we live in when you have to worry that sharing a joke amoungst friends could get you fired (or not get hired). Sun 28 Sep | Philo | Go read this thread: http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=73857&ixReplies=38 where some people google on job *applicants* - that's right, you could be losing jobs before you're even called because some people think it's appropriate to judge you by what they read about you (or others with the same name) on the internet. Philo Sun 28 Sep | StickyWicket | If you think that storing dirty jokes is a sad reflection, what about the fact that every piece of data about you is now stored on corporate databases and indexed via your social security number. Right now, every major transaction I've made, my credit history, my medical history, my grocery shopping habits, my movie renting habits, the cable channels I've ordered (and Pay-per-View shows I've watched), my marital history, my driving record, and my tax returns are all available for a moderately enterprising person to scour. It's a brave new world we live in and I haven't even started mentioning the really paranoid stuff yet. Sun 28 Sep | bread crumbs | I always google a job applicant. And I never would care that they wrote some dirty jokes on the internet. Hell, if they were a programmer, I'd expect it. Anyhow, googling an applicant is usually very interesting. You often find an interesting history of articles, code snippets, advice... Any programmer worth hiring will leave a trail. Sun 28 Sep | Robert Moir | Well 'Bread Crumbs', what do you do if they give themselves cute names like 'Bread Crumbs' when posting online? Or if you want to trace the writings of 'John Smith' or someone else with a popular enough name? Does 'John Smith' get a chance to explain that the reason he has no history online is because he posts under the name 'Frodo'? Does he get the chance to explain that the 'John Smith' whose distasteful jokes you've read in alt.tasteless isn't him? Sun 28 Sep | Celia Redmore | I googled my name recently. The oldest reference was dated January 1997. That's pretty scary. I suppose I should be glad that I spent my teenage years pre-internet. Sun 28 Sep | Chris Ormerod | Google my name and I am quite proud of what comes up. Although I wouldn't have the faintest idea of what 'Group Theory and its application to Knot Theory.' is. Now tell me, how accurate can googling names be when I am pretty sure that my name isn't too common and I can find another one in Sydney with the same name? Sun 28 Sep | www.marktaw.com | http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=74076 Since this is the current thread, I thought I'd post this link here... Sun 28 Sep | M | This sounds like the urban legend that when going into an interview, the interviewee gets cut off and starts honking and flips the other guy the bird. Well, as it turns out, this is who he is interviewing with. The moral is to 'be careful about who you yell at on the road.' I guess the real message is: 'be careful what you do' and I would bet we are all for that. In my opinion, the Internet has increased the ability to be anonymous (hence 'm' and not my real name). Sun 28 Sep | tim | Even Bill Gates has his early posts stored for posperity in Google Groups. If he is big enough to ignore this stuff you should too. Thanks. Portals vs Aggregators | Sun 28 Sep | Prakash S I was thinking about this problem, how can one justify the time and investment on Portal technologies like PlumTree/ MS SharePoint when a simple RSS/ Atom based solution will do the same? Thoughts.... Sun 28 Sep | G | Personally I never recommend a free solution when there is a commercial one that is better, or at least just a little better. Why? Because I want the people I work for to know that software costs money, and has value. If I give them free solutions, in time, they will start thinking that software has no value, or should be free. I write software for a living, and I don't want my clients to think that the software I write is less valuable. Finding a commercial solution that is better than a free one is usually very easy. Also, in case something happens, you are somewhat covered by the fact that you picked a good solution from a good vendor, and not some amateurish software. Sun 28 Sep | Rick | You are right - it's not good to lower our perceived value to our employers. A solution, if you want to use free software, is to find a commercial vendor that sells that software and support for a fee. This way, the CYA factor is also taken care of. However, using commercial software is much better - that way, the money goes to the developers of the software, and not to some firm that just repackages software, like RedHat or others. Sun 28 Sep | Simon Lucy | Oy veh. RSS agregation can't be commercial software? Read what he wrote, not what you think he wrote. In any event, continuing to promote solutions which cost oodles more money and which don't necessarily get the job done instead of exploiting common technologies (such as RSS), isn't going to do much for your career prospects in the long run. Sun 28 Sep | G | If the free software is much better than the commercial software, I recommend it. But if the commercial software is better than the free software, I recommend the commercial software regardless of the cost. I my OSS hippy colleagues propose to recommend free software, I seek out and test commercial alternatives, and many times I convince them that the commercial alternatives are better. I also try to educate them about OSS vs. commercial software, and why it's better for their career to recommend and use commercial software, instead of promoting OSS for free, and thus commoditizing software. Sun 28 Sep | M | Prakash - Call up MS and ask for a 180 day evaluation of their software. Tell them you want to be convinced their product is better than the free alternatives and want to try it out. If it is successful, you will buy. They seem to be sensitive to this quagmire these days. Uncommonly Awesome Offices | Sat 27 Sep | Michael After I read Joels description of the new Fog Creek offices, I began to wonder how uncommon that kind of environment really is. Does anyone here work in a place that nice? With private offices, two windows that look outside, extra wide desk with covert cord management, etc, etc. And does anyone work somewhere nicer? What are average programmer working conditions? Michael Sun 28 Sep | valraven | My best 'office' was a big cool noisy lab that i usually had all to myself. Sun 28 Sep | Thomas David Baker | I have been moved approximately eight times in five years. I have worked in a small training room that was never meant to be an office (though this was great because it was all programmers - a lot of Unreal: Tournament got played), various parts/floors of an open-plan office that was full, an open-plan office that was near-empty, a crap office that was out of my way (didn't go there) and my home (that's where I went instead of the crap office). None of them even remotely compared to this. With two network ports per floor box in most cases and some of them broken we actually have our own switch that we paid for supplying the necessary connectivity. Our offices aren't awful but they are just standard offices for office workers as designed about 10 years ago or more in some cases. Sun 28 Sep | Fairlight | I currently work in an office which was originally a farm and was converted into large office facilities. It's OK. but by no way not fancy as FC's offices Sun 28 Sep | TheWeasel | The worst was a cube near the entrance door in a builing undergoing refurbishment. Anytime someone came in to the office (50 people, lots of foot traffic), I'd get a blast of pneumatic drill echoing up the stairwell. My home office - I'd give it 93/100: Amazingly Awesome. I've got two windows. One looks to the mountains, the other to the sea. Two big desks, three PCs, good quality window blinds, uplighting for the evenings. and a decent sound system. We get maybe a dozen cars going past in a day. If I could afford to replace the noisy PCs with quieter ones, get a new coffee machine and some new chairs it would get 99/100. Sun 28 Sep | M | I used to work in an old training room with my team mates on the top floor of an office building. One side of the room was all windows looking over Lake Union in the Seattle. It was the best situation we ever had. Very quiet, dark (keep those bright lights off) and productive. There were only five of us and we got to configure our desks how we wanted. Naturally we all pointed to the window, which is something they usually don't do! Like all good things in a corporation, it came to an end soon enough. Since then, I have been working from home for the last three years. It has been a blast to be around my family, but like all good things in a corporation... Sun 28 Sep | mackinac | Michael, it would be interesting to know what your experience has been. The average software developer's working conditions are no where near as nice as the new FC offices appear to be. Shared office space, cubicles, open-plan, bull-pen, or whatever, are the norm. A few companies provide private offices, then mess them up by not paying attention to noise levels. I have worked in a place that was that nice. It didn't have exotic design with angled translucent walls, etc. It was just four sheetrock walls, a door, a couple of windows, and some standard office furniture. And it was reasonably quiet. That is, it had the essentials of a good programming environment. There are a few companies that have a reputation for providing decent workspace for their developers. Microsoft and SAS are among the few large companies that do. Most are small companies. Unfortunately, small companies that are successful often get bought up by large companies. Sun 28 Sep | d | The dozen, or so, offices I have worked in have been the usual variations on industrial ugly.  However, I have always had a reasonably comfortable chair and the environments have always been reasonably quiet and nicely lit.  Sun 28 Sep | Gordon J Milne | The best office I ever has was in my last job. It was on the 17th floor of one of the few tall buildings in the Christchurch (New Zealand) CBD. It had large windows with a view toward the Port Hills so the soutch of the city. I had a very large workstation-style desk which felt even larger due to the fact that my monitor was an 18.1in Philips Flat panel (1280x1024). Most of the time I had the office to myslef until my last month there when I shared it with a marketing/sales guy who talked very loudly on the phone. My boss' office was better. He had the corner office on the floor. His desk was the same size but he could see the Port Hills to the south and the mountains (currently snow covered) to the West. But his monitor was a Samsung 240. So he had a large desktop in the real and virtual worlds. Unfortunately, I don't work there anymore due to a downturn in business. It was a great place to work. Good people (if not many of them) and fun projects. Unforunately we weren't making enough of a margin on them so something had to give. Sun 28 Sep | Andrew Lighten | Dunno about the 'best' office, but my worst was a doozie. Tin shed mounted on the wall in a steelworks. Long wooden bench with plastic stacking chairs. Dirty, horrid place to work. That was also the one place I've ever worked where I was reprimanded for wearing casual clothes. I got tired of going to work in a clean white shirt and coming home in a grey/black shirt. Somebody, please explain voice-over-IP to me. | Sat 27 Sep | Can you hear me now? Im not much of a techie, but something has me puzzled. Its very common when surfing the web to notice distinct delays (or worse) when attempting to load a web page. Presumbably, somewhere between you and the web server theres some kind of bottleneck. When you do a traceroute, you can often find out where the latency is the highest. You might think that these types of problems would wreak havoc with voice-over-IP. Even a half-second delay would make it virtually impossible to have a normal conversation. And yet, people even manage to make trans-continental IP calls. So... what gives? How do Internet telephones manage to get around the usual problems of sending packets across the Net? Ive run some Google searches on this, but I couldnt find anything that addresses the issue directly. Thanks. Sat 27 Sep | StickyWicket | Voice over IP is typically designed to be run over a 'managed' network. What this usually means is the the network (e.g., an enterprise LAN or a cable company's HFC network to your home) is engineered for the appropriate amount of bandwidth to handle X number of calls without jitter (invalid packet sequencing) or delay being an issue. When you run VoIP over the public Internet, you are using some sort of provider that will try to simulate the 'perfect' network as much as they can. They will use RSVP or MPLS to give your packets a higher priority over non-voice calls and will route your calls with minimal hops. Hope this helps. I can tell you more if you ask. Sun 28 Sep | Andy | I am just speculating here... when you load a web page, you're using HTTP obviously, which is not the protocol that a VOIP system would use.  HTTP runs on top of TCP/IP, which is a reliable protocol on top of UDP, and unreliable protocol, which is faster, but doesn't make as strong guarantees about the data arriving.  Audio data is different than regular data in that e.g. 1% of bytes being 1% off isn't going to matter at all.  So this fact can be exploited to make the latency less than that of loading a web page.  That's the general idea, I'm sure someone else can explain this in more detail. Sun 28 Sep | Celmai Taredin Parcare | TCP is not implemented over UDP. Both TCP and UDP are implemented over IP. UDP is a sort of 'IP with port numbers' (IP doesn't know about port numbers, TCP and UDP do). An IP datagram, or data packet, contains a field which tells it which high-level protocol has generated the datagram. So, when the IP layer of a computer receives an IP datagram, it passes it to whatever protocol can handle it: TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc. Voice over IP usually uses UDP. Sun 28 Sep | Thomas David Baker | In fact all streaming voice/video tends to go over UDP or a more specialized protocol above IP because there is no point in resending packets if the action has moved on. There's no point in TCP's overhead slowing you down if you're just going to discard packets that come in late anyway. Sun 28 Sep | StickyWicket | In managed networks, the physical and data-link (i.e., MAC) layers are well known and their properties can be engineered for reliable data delivery (e.g., on a cable company's fiber/coax network or an enterprise LAN's switched Gig-E). Since IP is not very reliable, it is enhanced through protocols like RSVP and MPLS to ensure there is enough bandwidth and that voice traffic (like video) has the highest priority. VoIP typically uses UDP at the transport layer because it is a lightweight protocol. TCP is too heavy and has unnecessary features like retransmission. Above UDP, the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) is often used (on managed networks) because it facilitates streaming data like voice and video. At the session layer, SIP is often used for call control. There are many implementations of VoIP and each one does what it can to address the inherent problems with IP-based networks. The traditional phone network is circuit switched. That is, each call you make reserves a complete circuit through the entire network and uses this bandwidth whether you're talking or not. Obviously, packet switching is more efficient for data (e.g., web surfing). The advent of VoIP was marketed by saying that VoIP calls are more efficient than old, circuit switched calls. However, in a typical VoIP call, you are still going to encode voice into a 64Kbps stream (like the old way), but then you have to add the MAC header, the IP header, the UDP header, and the RTP header. This means your 64Kbps call is now a 115Kbps call. Then, you have to add the overhead of encryption. Some implementations can compress your call and strip out redundant headers (voice stream packets tend to have the same headers), but this reduction is more than compensated by the fact that you have to reserve bandwidth through the network to maintain quality of service. Thus, we are essentially recreating the circuit switched world on our packet switched networks. Considering that our old phone networks are already paid off, this doesn't seem economically feasible. Nonetheless, nobody thinks legacy voice calls are exciting and IP is the future. Sun 28 Sep | Stephen Jones | Things like Net2Phone work because you can afford to lose a fair proportion of voice data and still get a clear message; when you are dealing with a load of noisy lines then the quality declines and can reach unintelligibility. The real double whammy is that the places with good telephone lines, and thus clear communication, are the cheapest to call; so a call to the UK, US or Australia costs about 5 cents a minute and is crystal clear, whilst a call from Saudi to a Sri Lanka mobile over Net2Phone costs 81 cents a minute, and the quality is so bad you give up and pay the $1.35 a minute the normal phone line costs. Sun 28 Sep | Robert Jacobson | I just found out about a new, free, voice-over-IP program called Skype: http://www.skype.com/ I tried it on my local network, and the quality was quite good. (Even just using my notebook's crappy built-in microphone.) Don't know how well it holds up over in real use over a distance, though, when the packets have to bounce through multiple networks. Sun 28 Sep | UI Designer | It would be interesting to know what the internet phone equivalent of this would be: 'Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.' Sun 28 Sep | Alyosha` | When I call my girlfriend in Colombia, it's about 5c a minute if I call her, 30c a minute if she calls me.  When we talk over the computer (AIM), it's about 3c a minute for her, free for me.  So, it's a good deal. Wireless Internet Connection in Apartment | Sat 27 Sep | wifi I had posted in an earlier thread, http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=73608&ixReplies=17, the problem of getting frequently kicked out of my wireless network. I posted the follow-up results below - for readers that have interests in the results or if they have similar problems. I also posted a question at the very end below. My signal strength is 11 Mbps. My OS is Win XP (Pro) Following suggestion posted on the thread, I treid a number of suggestions below and followed a number of permutations, in case some suggestion had a cascading effect. A-Line of Sight (LoS) : I moved the Notebook to LoS of the base station. Problem still occured. B-Turn off Microwave and/or Cordless telephone: I turn them off. Problem stiil occured even if Notebook was withing LoS of base station. C- The Enable IEEE authentication box under the advanced tab is unchecked. The above suggestion C did the trick. The Notebook has been running for two hours and I have not been kicked out. I have experimented with turning on the Cordless phone and moving away from LoS of the base station - still works :) I was wondering by Unchecking the Enble IEEE Authetication box, have I made my wireless network unsecured? Can others access the netowrk or surf from my base station? Thanks again for all your assistance in the previous threads. Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | So, can you connect to your modem without authenticating yourself? Didn't you say you could? Wouldn't that mean anyone else could? This might offer a small amount of safety. Can you set up the the router's DHCP so that only a certain IP address can access the network, have it give out completely different IP addresses, and then set up your computer to request that IP address? Then at least only one address works, you always request it, and if someone tries to gain access, you'll know something's up (unless you're not home at the time, but then what worry is that - your computer isn't on the network, as long as they don't download kiddie porn or share mp3's you should be ok). Sun 28 Sep | Nat Ersoz | I think the authentication reference is with respect to 'IEEE 802.1X network port authenticaton' which is a method for key exchange, not encryption. In a typical home network, your keys are static (you enter them on the client and access point, and they don't change until you change them). Using 'IEEE' the access point will authenticate a user and possibly provide unique keys to each user. Anyhow, the short answer is 'no, you are not compromised'. The caveat, is 'at least not any more than the rest of us using WEP'. The 802.1X auth/key mgmt would be a great method for future access points to create random cycpher keys and distribute them. Cisco has proposed similar methods (LEAP/Radius) for helping to alleviate the WEP vulnerabilities by changing cycpher keys often. Sun 28 Sep | . | >'C- 'The 'Enable IEEE authentication' box under the advanced tab is unchecked.' It was giving problems when unchecked, or unchecking it solved the problem? Joel, how do you compensate the "non programmers"? | Sat 27 Sep | Sonny Just curious Joel. After seeing your office layout, its obvious that the programmers are the prima-donnas at Fog Creek. My q is how do you compensate or manage the non-programmers, therefore they dont feel to be 2nd class citizens? Sun 28 Sep | Li-fan Chen | > the programmers are the prima-donnas Holy.. did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed buddy? Sun 28 Sep | sell out | I think it's more likely that he doesn't know what prima donna means. He's trying to say that programmers are considered the most important part of the organization, and they know it. Whether or not he really believes that they are self-righteous and overly demanding, I don't know. Either way, he has a very interesting question. Hopefully Joel knows enough to give non-programmers offices too. Sun 28 Sep | Celmai Taredin Parcare | Non-programmers should be constantly worked very hard. Hey, it's easy to find them and they don't mind low pay (and if they mind, just replace them). A good sales or marketing man is worth his weight in gold. However, the coffee maker is not, and should be treated as such. :) Sun 28 Sep | na | coffee maker? it's definitely a C, so No Hire :) Sun 28 Sep | Celmai Taredin Parcare | The coffee maker seems to be a lowy function, unless we rename it to: Coffee Maker Officer = CMO :) This sounds really impressive on the resume: January 2001- March 2002: CMO for BrainTrust, Inc. Can't find a good name for the chief stamp licker, tough. Sun 28 Sep | Sam Livingston-Gray | Postage Hydration Analyst? Sun 28 Sep | d | Postage Hydration Analyst? LMAO. sonny, I'm happy I'm not the only one who noted the explicit definition of all people who are not developers as second class. At least second class people get shelves. Sun 28 Sep | Robert Moir | I'm sure that Joel will be along shortly to tell us he didn't mean that the way it sounded. In the meantime, who else thinks its a natural function of the way people are Joel is a developer. Joel believes developers are your most important asset. Developers are the first class citizens in FogCreek. Marketing people think they are the important part of a company -- Who do you suppose is the first class citizen in a company founded by a marketing person? Sun 28 Sep | Mike Swieton | A point: in a software company, the developer is probably the most important people. Sure, a great product is useless without good marketing and sales, but all the marketing in the world can't sell a product that doesn't exist. Sun 28 Sep | Robert Moir | I don't disagree with you in the slightest, Mike. But I still think that the question of who gets the primo work space is connected to what kind of person is in charge. We talk about development companies run by the clueless here who treat their programmers like dirt often enough. Sun 28 Sep | Mike Swieton | Actually, I am thinking back to the article, though I'm too lazy to reread it... Does he ever actually say that the marketing/etc guys don't get such similar offices? He doesn't say they do, but... ? 8-} Sun 28 Sep | somebody | You're too lazy to reread the article but not too lazy to post about it and wait for an answer here? From the article: >> Private Offices. Not only did we get spacious, windowed private offices, but even the common area workstations (for non-developers) are hidden in clever angular alcoves, so everyone gets their own private space without line of sight to anyone else. << Sun 28 Sep | z | Joel IS the "marketing guy." He's also the guy managing the buildout of the office space so he's the "director of operations." All his articles are about managing software engineering, so he's also the main project/product manager. What non-programmers are even necessary at his company? Software Ill never write.. | Sat 27 Sep | Eric Debois Hey. Im guessing Im not the only one here to have new ideas for software every other day or so. I figured itd be fun if we shared some of those weird, impossible, cool or briliant ideas we have but cant be arsed to do anything about. Ok, here goes... **Fantasy vision debugger** A program that can take the code of a smaller program and use it as a script for an RPG/RTS style visualization. All objects, variables, messages and events become characters, castles, battles in the scenario. Imagine, rouge varibles riding off into the wild, couriers riding back and forth between camps in an infinite loop and unused goblins standing around scratching their bellies. **HTML wordprocessor** Yeah, I know this is pretty well covered by existing products. But I would like a word processor that ONLY saves in HTML. It should have all the normal WP features but all formatting should be done with CSS. The only exception should be directions for printing/page layout which could be included as comments. Also, The app should have the ability to connect directly to a DB server so that it bypasses the normal open/save procedures and stores only in a DB. Why? Documents that can be read anywhere! Documents that can be transparently stored in a DB and indexed for searching. Documents that can be repaired manually if they break...and a system that enforces a policy that would benefit a great deal of corporations. **Meta Navigator** An addition or plugin for Google. Instead of a list of search hits the meta navigator would deliver a visual display with boxes representing the pages and arrows for the links so that you get a web of possible sources. Good hits could be darker in colour or something. Why? Well, In searching for specific information one must often follow links in the pages one finds. Having a map (on a differnt tab or something) would simply be nice and helpful. You could see where youve been and what is yet to be explored and you wouldnt have to use the back-button so much. Ok.. anyone else? Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | > **Fantasy vision debugger** I read about someone who somehow mapped Doom to their computers - the monsters were processes. They'd go in and blast the offending process, though sometimes a larger, more important process got in the way... Oops. I'm reasonably sure the article wasn't a joke. What about software to organize random notes? A combination outliner, wiki, blogger, search engine, etc. I know exactly what it looks like and what it does, but I'll never write it. Sat 27 Sep | realist | Software where I click a button and nice crisp $100 bills start spewing out of the A: drive. Sat 27 Sep | Amon | I believe you're referring to this: Doom as a tool for system administration http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | YES ! DOOM AS A TOOL FOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION. I don't even like Doom but I love this idea... Sun 28 Sep | na | language/dev environment where you cannot make buggy programs :) buggy, in terms that the problem won't compile if there is any chance that there is an exception, and you do not handle correctly. -------------------- software emulator / code snippet replacer where after analyzing a part of code the system reasons what are the possible outputs, and with that info it can optimize it. silly example, but a for (i=0; i<10000; i++);b=i*2;return b; has only one output, so we can make it 10000 faster :) -------------------- the rest is so secret, that you think I'm crazy and should go to therapst :) Sun 28 Sep | Chris Hoess | I was under the impression that 'impossible to write buggy software' environment was precluded by the halting problem, but maybe it could work for your more limited case. The software to organize all categories of notes sounds like JWZ's 'Intertwingle' idea, or maybe Mitch Kapor's Chandler. Why doesn't Java have an immutable Date class? | Sat 27 Sep | T. Norman Before I go and write my own, anybody know of any reasons why Sun didnt include an immutable Date class?  Are there special pitfalls which caused them to make Date and Calendar mutable?  Links to any articles from Sun itself would be most useful. Sat 27 Sep | Joe Blandy | I was just reading about this the other day. Sun realizes that it was a mistake to make them mutable, but is not going to fix it. Quote is from: http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/community/chat/JavaLive/2003/jl0729.html > Josh Bloch: I wish I could say that we plan to > rework Date, but we don't. This is clearly one > class that we got wrong; it never should have > been mutable. But it's so widely used that it's > too late to rework it. Sometimes you just have > to live with your mistakes:( Sat 27 Sep | Alyosha` | I'm curious: how is this a problem? Sun 28 Sep | T. Norman | Joe, excellent link. Thanks. Aloysha, here is a link describing the usefulness of immutability: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp02183.html Sun 28 Sep | Anon. Coward | But if you and everyone on your team really agrees the Date class ought to be mutable, can't you get all the benefits of an immutable class by simply ***agreeing nobody will modify any existing instances of the Date class***? Granted, it's not theoretically sound because there might be some renegade team member who forgets the agreement and modifies a Date object without telling anyone--but on the other hand, if he feels the need to do that, then it implies that maybe there is value in having a mutable Date class after all. Sun 28 Sep | T. Norman | We could agree not to mutate any Date instances, but that would create additional work of policing and reviewing to prevent it from happening. Nobody here and now would do it deliberately, but there are non-obvious ways in which it could happen inadvertently, and 2-3 years from now a different set of programmers could create subtle bugs in the system by (deliberately or ignorantly) introducing mutable Date behavior into a system that was expecting immutability. It's much better to create an immutable class and let the compiler prevent the problems. Someone who needs mutable Dates can still use the original Date class. I just wished Sun would have done it so I wouldn't have to do it, and there would be a standard for it. Although I see why Sun won't make the existing Date immutable, because that would obviously disrupt existing bodies of code, I don't see why they couldn't create a new class that holds a date which is immutable. Sort of like the immutable String and its mutable cousin StringBuffer. Infopath 2003 and future of Microsoft Access | Sat 27 Sep | JD Hi All, I just stumbled upon Infopath 2003. Check http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/infopath/demo/start.htm Designing form part looks pretty intersting to me. But I am not really sure whether I would like all my data to be stored in XML assuming I have LARGE amount of data and I am not using Infopath to submit my data to central Application Server. As I cant see Access in Office 2003, I think Infopath 2003 will take its place. I am not very sure if its very nice to replace a decent RDBMS with some XML driven application. I think Infopath has its place (we can have _richer_ intranet apps built with Infopath) but we need MS Access too. Your views? JD http://jdk.phpkid.org Sat 27 Sep | JD | Oops, I just found that Access 2003 will be there as well! :) http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/editions/access.asp JD http://jdk.phpkid.org Sun 28 Sep | fool for python | The idea with Infopath is to send the xml to a web service which can process or store as needed. Or just leave in a file system for use later by whatever needs it. Spam killer for personal use? | Sat 27 Sep | Frederic Faure Hi, I just set up the Spamassassin-based Perl scrip Pop3Proxy last night, and although it works (ENLARGE PENIS VIAGRA in the subject line only set Spamassassins rate to 3 stars, though ;-))... its a pain to set up. Does anyone know of a good spam killer for personal use, and easier to set up? Thank you PS : Extra credit if someone knows why IE-based browsers Crazybrowser and MyIE2 render pages slower than IE... Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | What are your criteria for this spam killer? Can it work as a plugin for out look? I read about one that actually connected to every person who used the software, and saw if there was an email everyone was deleting & marking as spam... Unless you check your email every second, this program will delete the email before you even see it. I forget the name of it, but someone around here might know, or google might turn it up. Sat 27 Sep | Frederic Faure | Pop3Proxy uses SpamAssassin as its spam engine, and lets you download e-mail from multiple POP3 servers (one port = one remote server). It requires setting up Perl, plus a couple of modules, and set up Pop3Proxy. So I was wondering if someone knew of an easier, and preferably free/open-source alternative. Thx Sat 27 Sep | AlexK | http://keir.net/k9.html Sat 27 Sep | Simon Lucy | POPFile, Bayesian filtering http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=14421&group_id=63137 Or, Mozilla Mail with its inbuild Bayesian filtering. With the former I'm currently running at about 97% efficiency in identifying spam. Sat 27 Sep | Roy Pardee | I'm digging the SpamBayes addin for outlook: http://sourceforge.net/projects/spambayes/ It took me a while to train it up properly (and messages from my wife still seem to wind up in my ProbablySpam folder) but it's really quite good. It was really nice having this installed when LovSan hit--those messages (and the various bounce messages) all went right into DefinitelySpam. HTH, -Roy Sat 27 Sep | JWA | I've been using Cloudmark's SpamNet since the beta and it works great for me. --Josh Sat 27 Sep | Tarun Upadhyay | K9 referred above is the easiest to setup and train. It learns pretty fast on your spam pattern and then work at >99% accuracy. (you of course should still setup whitelist and blacklist rules for all obvious things) My current statistics are: % that matches blacklist rules 31 % that matches whitelist rules 21 overall spam catching accuracy 99.7 Sat 27 Sep | matt | +1 vote for Cloudmark Spamnet. It's very easy to install and catches almost all spam. There is a monthly fee, but it keeps me from getting distracted playing with anti-spam software. Sat 27 Sep | Tom Vu | >>With the former I'm currently running at about 97% efficiency in identifying spam. How do you know? What does POPFile do that you can quantify a 97% efficiency. Sun 28 Sep | Brad Wilson | SAproxy is a POP3-proxy with SpamAssassin embedded into it. The setup is dead simple, unlike full SpamAssassin, and doesn't require any access to the SMTP server. It does, however, require you to use POP3 (no Exchange or IMAP support). Sun 28 Sep | mark | I vote for the SpamBayes outlook add-in too. Works really well. Only ever let one spam through, and that was because it was all in French. Sun 28 Sep | M | I am a windows person, but I must say I am impressed with my wife's Mac (OSX). Its email program does a bang-up job on knowing which mail is spam. Unzipping and Zipping files | Sat 27 Sep | Fairlight Is there a way of zipping and unzipping files without doing it through a command line ? Basically Im looking for a component (OCX, Automation controller) which enables me to ZIP a file without startint a command line session Sat 27 Sep | Peter Ibbotson | Have look at www.gzip.org , they have links to an OCX (or the zlib folks do) Sat 27 Sep | Kendall Swan | Check out lszip (Lindersoft product). We have the DLLs installed on 90,000 custom machines. The URL is lszip.com or lindersoft.com Sat 27 Sep | Philo | nsoftware has a zip component. Haven't used it, tho. Philo Sat 27 Sep | Alex | I use xceedsoft's zip/unzip component.  Never had any problems. Sat 27 Sep | JWA | We use DynaZip-NX with no problems ever. MS used DynaZip for the zip support in WinXP, which is a pretty good endorsement. --Josh Sun 28 Sep | Li-fan Chen | I believe infozip (the free one) has one too. Another thing you can do is let wscript call it for you. Sun 28 Sep | Li-fan Chen | http://www.codeguru.com/vb/articles/1854.shtml Sun 28 Sep | Clay Dowling | You should probably check out pkware.com. They originated the zip file format, and they have an API for several common languages.  It's how they make their money, since they give away at least a version of their software. Sun 28 Sep | Tony E | I think you will find most zip products out there are based on zlib. http://www.gzip.org/zlib/ Developing a product while having a full time job | Sat 27 Sep | Fairlight Ive got a secure full time job as a software developer. In my spare time I would like to develop video games for the Mac and the PC, in order to self publish them through the internet. My question is the following, has anybody manage to build (developing a full blown commercial product) his company while having a full time job ? Is it possible, without burning out after 9 months ? Please share you experiences (bad or good) Any tips and advices are obviously welcome since it seems a very daunting task. Sat 27 Sep | no name | Ha ha ha. You're a scream. (I presume by video game you mean modern real time 3D.) Sat 27 Sep | na | do you have the energy to manage that? you won't have personal life, that's sure. I mean, are you serious, or you will loose your motivation in 2 weeks. maybe reduce your work time to 6-7 hours if possible, or try to work from home. first, try it for 2 weeks, maybe it won't last longer than that. Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | You should take a look at your life as a corporation. What are your expenses? Where can you cut back? After a year of living in a $300 room instead of a $3,000 apartment, you can afford to take some time off to dedicate to this pursuit on a more full time basis. Also, video games are expensive and difficult to produce, modern games involve teams of people.... large cross disciplinary ones, voice actors, and more. Can you compete with that? Do you really think you can be the next Max Payne (produced by a low-budget studio, the actors were their friends, the cut-scenes were static drawings with voice overs). Why not start small, make a proof of concept type game and release it as freeware/shareware. Maybe if it catches on you can get some funding, or at least a small income from the shareware version, not to mention some encouragement, or at least feedback based on it's success or failure. Also... Why aren't you hanging out in the game development forums? Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | .. Of course if you just want to make small, freeware/shareware games, Video Poker, Lemmings 14 or something, then that shouldn't be too difficult for one person to do alone in their spare time. Sat 27 Sep | sgf | Spent 5 years trying. Gave up. Can't be done if you have what is commonly referred to as a "life". You know, wife, kids, friends, activities...  Decided they were more important. Sat 27 Sep | Noname | A secure software development job?  Isn't that an oxymoron? Sat 27 Sep | Fairlight | I don't intend to compete with product like Max Payne. I'm more looking at smaller but still addictive 2D games, look at Tetris, no fancy 3D engine but great gameplay. There are a lot of people who can't afford to play 30 hours a week on games. I want to write games for these people who just want to have a 30 mins blast during lunch. Sat 27 Sep | Scot | You really need to look at this site: http://www.dexterity.com/articles/ Sat 27 Sep | Scott | I created a game for a niche hobby (board wargames) and it took five calendar years including one year of basically doing nothing. Then it took the threat of an impending layoff to get me fired up to finish it over several months of 30 hr/wk marathon sessions, and when the layoff finally came I struck out 'full time' marketing it on CD through mail order, conventions and internet (this was circa 1998 before the internet was that big). In six months I made $50K (U.S.) mostly from mail order and the conventions, though had $40K in costs. And I still make a steady $400 a month or so since I switched it over to shareware/registration codes a few years ago, which is nice but not riches. But it did get me into the games industry as a programmer full-time (which I've since left), so I am glad I went through it for the experience if nothing else... I think. Like sgf said though you have to make a choice or otherwise balance personal life and your project, because pure lack of hours is the problem. Even a simple Lemmings is at least 1K programming hours, where will that time come from? I only averaged 5-7 hours a week in the end, usually in spurts of all-weekend sessions rather than steady weekly progress. Also really examine the scope of what you're thinking of, really chart out all the tasks involved, all the inputs, algorithms, screens, features, etc just like you'd do at work and create a realistic estimate no matter how disheartening it is. If you're thinking something as detailed as what you'd buy in the stores, it's going to be 5K programming hours minimum, and based on 5 hours a week in the long run you'll never get it done. So you need to scale back to something that's attainable if your goal is to really finish it and sell it. If you think you're really just interested in it for the fun parts of the programming, realize of course that's only 10-20% and the rest is gruntwork no different than your f/t job, so maybe you'd be happier hacking quick prototypes together and scrapping it a month later and just doing it as a hobby with no expectations or guilt. But if you do want to make a serious product, here are some suggestions: * The first stage when you're super-enthusiastic about everything, try to do as much low-level grunt stuff as you can ( framework, data structures, events, etc) with everything else in the framework in place but stubbed out. Make the graphics and menus super-simple placeholder and simple bitmaps you make yourself. * Next stage is when you lose total interest as you realize you have nothing that works, it's just a bunch of buggy low-level classes and crappy programmer art. This happens maybe a month (?) 3 months (?) a year (?) into it. At this point switch to doing the main menus and GET SOME PROFESSIONAL ARTWORK... there is a huge morale boost when a really cool-looking splash screen or menu background appears when you start your game, and all it takes is a simple background .bmp and some button bitmaps or animations you can have made from artists on the internet for $100 - $500. This kind of morale boost can keep you interested for a long time. * From then on take a top-down approach, start at your initial menu and into the game and keep asking yourself 'what's keeping me from releasing this game?' to determine your next tasks. Only list about 10 things at a time (which will only take about 30 seconds to find, usually...) then stop, bring up the code, slog through them all and check each one off. Even if some didn't get fully fixed, they'll show up the next time you do the iteration so will be caught eventually, and you'll have a lot of pieces of paper with a bunch of items checked off which helps with the sense of accomplishment. * Try to keep regular visual progress even if you work two months on some invisible subsystem then just a day arranging to get some new bitmaps made for the sake of change. Regular visual changes no matter how trivial programmatically really give you the primary sense of progress, even though you know things are a lot different underneath. * Don't try to stick to a regular weekly schedule, which you probably won't keep and then just feel guilty about -- what worked for me was during the week I'd always say THIS weekend I'm going to do nothing but work on the game. Then if it happens, great, if not, I'd just say I'll do it NEXT weekend (which was the case 3 out of 4 times for me). And don't plan on doing anything during the week, but if you do then it's just an extra bonus. * Avoid the huge temptation to constantly reengineer everything unless what you remake can be finished within a few weeks. It's a morale killer to have something working and then suddenly not work at all while you're rebuilding, so you either avoid work on it because you're stepping backwards, or you finally decide to kludge it back together so you can move forward again -- which makes it no better off than when you started. Also check out the thread below, 'Smart, but don't get as much done.' There's a lot of good tips there... Sat 27 Sep | cheapo | Quite possible, go for it! The last company I worked for, there was one developer who worked on his game part time (with the company's blessing, it did not interfere with his work). He finished it in about 1 year, resells it for $15 as shareware, and sales are STILL going on strong 4 years later (add-on levels, minor revisions, etc..). In fact, when he got laid off 2 years ago, he supported himself with the revenue from the game, and put out 2-3 more titles. Thing about the shareware avenue, if you have a decent idea and the ability to envision good gameplay, you can churn these out once per year and they still keep making you money. Right now he's semi retired, working 20 hr weeks updating his software for fun while travelling. (laptop + gprs phone = freedom!) And it's not like his game was a huge market hit. You would have never heard of him or his game (and personally I wouldn't enjoy playing it, but that's just me =) ). Sat 27 Sep | Tom Vu | I don't know about building a company while employed but there are people who wrote quality software that became a business. Snort and toad are two examples... www.snort.org www.toadsoft.com Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | Fairlight - go for it. What do you have to lose? The worst possible scenario is you have a half written game and the experience an self knowledge that comes from having written half a game and given up. At least you'll have the answer to the question "can I write a game part time?" Sat 27 Sep | Li-fan Chen | I think if you want to have a side job, it will steal the least amount of energy if it's something along the line of what you do at work. So that you are expanding your domain within reason, otherwise you'll waste quite a bit of time getting on track. If you have the ability to control your use of time very well though, forget what I said, you could probably take on any domain. Sat 27 Sep | David | I'm doing that very thing right now, except not a game (it seems EVERYONE is trying to make shareware games). I'll tell you, it's both fun and tough. The ONLY way you'll make it is if you have the full support of your family. Of course, if you have no family, that's not an issue. Instead, you'll need the support of your friends, because you won't be able to do as many things with them. I've been working on my product for nearly 2 years now. I've watched very little TV and very few movies in that time. Granted, I have a wife and small child (2 children now, as of last week). So, think long and hard. I've had several people start and then stop working with me on this project because they couldn't sustain their motivation. Sat 27 Sep | RocketJeff | >>I think if you want to have a side job, it will steal the least amount of energy if it's something along the line of what you do at work. Be careful just how close it is to what you do at your full-time job (and what your employment contract says about it, if anything). There have been several court cases in the US about situations like this, and the courts have usually ruled that if your sideline software is similar to your full-time job's, the company you work for is the owner of the software (even if it is at home, on your own equipment). These cases were with employees without employment agreements. if you have one, you should obviously read it to see what it says. Sun 28 Sep | Li-fan Chen | Allow me to add a qualifier than, most contracts are non-competes.. so what I mean is don't catch yourself competing in the same business domain (which is usually what a non-compete is trying to protect: your employer's ability to protect its investment in you from direct competition).. but try not to end up doing C++ when you really know Java.. because even small sharewares will really stress your lifestyle.. so why waste all that time trying to learn a new tool while your personal shareware competition is quickly gaining on you.. as some gentlemen have mentioned previously. I don't think it is currently very common for a company who has send you to MSDN training to try to stop you from use the same knowledge in your next job or in your home businesses. But as the last post have pointed out, it is common for your employer to be nervous about knowledge learned in-house. How many of you would sue your employee for patching her home computer from a nasty virus because she used company resource to learn about it (the company admin spend 15 minutes explaining it to her.. the company had to eat the time.. and she IS running a home business on that home computer in question.. and she DID sign a non-compete that specifically said she can't share in-house information) As always, if it's worth all of your spare time at home and your relationship, it's probably worth a visit to a lawyer. Bring along your employee manual and non-compete. Sun 28 Sep | Noname | Even if you happened to learn the stuff in-house, companies don't have any claim to knowledge that is readily available to the public, like general knowledge about languages, platforms and algorithms that can be learned out of a $40 book or public web sites. Just go ahead and develop whatever you want, but don't let your company know about it. Sun 28 Sep | Johnny Bravo | I think what Scott said about visuals is quite an important aspect in software development in general. Most workflow models (you know: waterfall etc.) underestimate the morality boost of having something visible out there. Even worse, many formal approaches actually teach you not to do that eye-candy until the very end of the project because it is considered 'fun but not vital', often labeled as 'programmers want to do the eye-candy stuff because they are too lazy to solve the really difficult problems'. But in the end it's just like 'producing' food: the nutrition scientist might know what's healthy, but only the chef can make it taste delicious! Sun 28 Sep | M | Don't get married. If you are already married, good luck! ;) Sun 28 Sep | Bill Rayer | I've been working for many years on a high level computer language ( http://www.lingolanguage.com ), both part-time and full time, and I agree 100% with Scott's comments above. In particular: 'Avoid the huge temptation to constantly reengineer everything unless what you remake can be finished within a few weeks.' That is so true I should print his comments and glue them on the wall. The danger is you write a class and get it working, then you realize how it should be written and want to re-design it. DON'T - otherwise this happens: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Babbage.html . Learn from Babbage, he designed the first computer. Sun 28 Sep | runtime | cheapo: what is the name or web site of your friend's shareware game? I'm interested to see how he markets his game. thanks. Do you Google just about everyone you meet? | Fri 26 Sep | Anonymous for this one My philosophy is that you cant be too careful these days. Whenever I meet anyone of any significance -- whether its clients, potential romantic partners, or new neighbors -- I immediately Google them (or as soon as practicable, anyway). Youd be amazed at the stuff you can find out that way. Im always surprised that the vast majority of my business clients never Googled me (so far as I can tell, anyway). Most of them dont even look at my website, ferchrissake. Naïve fools. Information is power. Fri 26 Sep | Marc | I do it all the time. One question, how do you feel when you can't find anything at all? I google every technical resume that comes in and it worries me when I can't find anything on them. Fri 26 Sep | Philo | What do you google on? Name? Email address? What do you expect to find? Philo Fri 26 Sep | no name | How do you know you're not making decisions based on namesakes? Fri 26 Sep | Anonymous for this one | I Google on whatever it takes to get the information.  One time I found out that a potential client was involved in a nasty legal battle with his landlord.  I've never actually learned something truly stunning (like my would-be blind date is a paroled ax-murderer or something), but I've often found out stuff that makes me go, "Hmmmm....". Fri 26 Sep | Marc | Name and email address. As for what I expect, I'm not sure. But it is hard to believe that anyone in this business has managed to never post anything to a news group or put up a page on the web. If you search for me you find the 3rd or 4th link is to a message I posted to the Sane-Devel mailing list back in 1997 (sane is a twain driver for Linux). Fri 26 Sep | Marc | I do worry about the namesake issue. But at least with me (searching resumes) I have a context for which to look for. I can feel pretty confident that the posting to alt.computers is accurate while skipping the NFL stats for the same name is also a safe bet. Sat 27 Sep | Brian R. | I have a rather unique name, but just Googled it.  My name is as ubiquitous as dirt.  How can you have much confidence in getting the right guy? Sat 27 Sep | Underachiever extraordinaire | You know what's _really_ depressing?  When you Google all the fat, drunk, and stupid people you knew in college -- and you find out that they're now successful attorneys, doctors, and business executives. Sat 27 Sep | Philo | 'I Google on whatever it takes to get the information. One time I found out that a potential client was involved in a nasty legal battle with his landlord.' So? Philo Sat 27 Sep | na | I use different email addresses / fake name for a while now, just because these issues. I use my full name in normal discussions, etc, while I use a fake one where is chance that in the future I want to hide that. Sat 27 Sep | Matt Latourette | In short, no.  I rarely ever google anyone.  Really, about the only time I google somebody is when I google for a old friend that I've lost contact with.  What exactly do you hope to accomplish by googling everybody you meet?  Do you really trust some statement on the web that may or may not actually have been written by the person in question and that you probably don't have sufficient context to fully evaluate more than your own impressions of the person in real life interactions? Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | 'What exactly do you hope to accomplish by googling everybody you meet?' I suspect it's done largely out of boredom... More mindless surfing the web really. Sat 27 Sep | mb | Apparently the name for this is 'counter-googling'. Because some places do it at a counter? Don't know, though I read one story where an immigration official did this to someone on arrival. http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/2003/09/COUNTER-GOOGLING.html http://joi.ito.com/archives/2003/08/26/authenticated_my_id_with_google.html I need to get a new domain and start using a pseudonym--if you ask me in person (that includes email), I'll happily tell you my real name. But in a long-term archived format? Um, that worries me. Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | New from the people who brought you disposable e-mail addresses: Disposable Identities. Yes that's right, tired of running into pesky ex-boyfriends at the supermarket? Well we can give you a completely new identity.... He won't even recognize you. There are a number of books out here on protecting your privacy. A quick trip over to Amazon will reveal a few... As long as you don't mind Amazon knowing you bought them or browsed for them. I have a few tips on my website as well, and yes that is my real name on the About Me page. That's even my real photo. Google finds me real fast. Sat 27 Sep | Alyosha` | No. Just the women I think are hot. You know, for stalking them later. I once had an interviewer google me after a particularly grueling interview, where he came across my blog in which I reported on the experience. I got the job. Sat 27 Sep | no name | > Google all the fat, drunk, and stupid people you knew in college -- and you find out that they're now successful attorneys, doctors, and business executives. I google those people and they don't even show up. They probably get their secretaries to do their email. Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | 'I google those people and they don't even show up. They probably get their secretaries to do their email. ' Yeah same here. Though I guess it would make a difference if you were in school with all computer science people. I wasn't. Sat 27 Sep | Anonymous for this one | Philo: Finding out about a client's legal problems can have implications for predicting the client's future behavior and for estimating his or her ability to pay. It's an important piece of information. Matt wrote, 'Do you really trust some statement on the web that may or may not actually have been written by the person in question...' Ah, but the web also has things written _about_ people, not just _by_ people. Sat 27 Sep | still anon. | I spent a lot of time getting my real name removed from the google archives.  Now I only post anon.  There's just a few sites/messages that have my name now, most of the google results are by some nudist/swinger freak in NY.  Sat 27 Sep | Philo | Anonymous, you do realize that every story has three sides, right? In addition, I will venture that personal life!=professional life. I know a guy who has had his power cut off a few times because he simply forgets to pay the bills. But he's a project manager at his job and highly respected. Why? Because he knows that at work he has to overcompensate for his forgetfulness. At home it's just him, so he doesn't really care that much - if the power's cut off, he just goes and pays the bill. I think employees should be judged solely on work performance. Period. Pulling their private lives into it is wholly unfair and unreasonable. Philo Sat 27 Sep | Unsilent Bob | Pardon my ignorance, but how do you "google" somebody?  I use Google to search for my own name, and it turns up hundreds of hits none of which are me.  No matches on my email address.  Is there a special "people search" within Google that I don't know about? Sat 27 Sep | no name | I agree with Philo.  Chances are that your name is not unique and you had better be damn sure that what you find on google actually refers to or is by the person you're interested in.  Even so, most states have court records that are easily accessible on the net.  Be careful how you go about judging people. Sat 27 Sep | r1ch | I've always been protected from this - I've got the same name as a celebrity, so you'd have to dig through a whole load of other junk to find anything about me... Sat 27 Sep | Anonymous for this one | Philo, my client was involved in lawsuits with the landlord for his (the client's) place of business, not the client's personal residence. Sat 27 Sep | Matt Latourette | 'Ah, but the web also has things written _about_ people, not just _by_ people.' Yes, you're right about that. The graffiti on the bathroom walls and the office rumors about who's f#@king who are also a matter of people talking/writing about people and generally have about the same amount evidence to back them up. I have a friend that works for a shipping company, which shall remain nameless. According to office gossip, she's been screwing her boss for years. One day, her housemate stopped by the office to visit. Shortly thereafter, the rumor around the office was that she was having a torrid lesbian affair with her housemate. Of course, there's not one whit of truth to it all. She's been in a monogamous relationship with her boyfriend for a long time and they've recently gotten engaged. Whether you're googling people on the web or just listening to the conversation at the water cooler, you're likely going to find gossip, not information. Sat 27 Sep | Anonymous for this one | Matt, have you Googled many people before? You're likely to come up with newspaper articles and other such (relatively) reliable sources of information, and not just random rumors. To give another example, when I Googled another client, I found an article from some local newspaper that showed he was in a partnership with a real estate developer to do some major renovations/expansion on a local ski area. Again, useful information for me to have -- and information that I never would have found had I not Googled. You never know what will turn up. Of course, you have to use your judgment when evaluating sources. Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | ' You're likely to come up with newspaper articles ' Wow. How many of us have had newspaper articles written about us? I was mentioned once in Wired, but I thought that was a pretty extreme example. Sat 27 Sep | Steve H | true story: When google aquired all the really old usenet stuff I had a great time searching for old friends/co-workers from college. Then I found a post from my old boss in alt.sex.beastiality looking for a 'large dog or small horse'.. Sat 27 Sep | Matt Latourette | I just gave it a try and googled the math department sysadmin from my college days (someone I knew fairly well). What did I find? Mainly mailing list archives, USENET posts, and a few web pages. 1) Apple SCSI drive post 2) A post that had so little context that I couldn't figure out what the topic of conversation was or whether or not it was actually written by the person I knew, despite knowing this person well. 3) A mailing list flame in which he roasts a troll. I only know this was written by him because I know that particular email address belongs to him. Someone who just met him would definitely not know this. 4) A web page for Marines who served in China. Definitely not him. Anybody could figure that out. The age is wrong. 5) The web page for the indie record label that published albums for various bands that he played in. 6) Web page for a CD store that carries one of these albums. 7) Mailing list archive for some software package I've never heard of. 8) rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic post that simply lists his name along with a lot of other names of people all over the world. 9) A PDF newsletter from DuPont that mentions some foreman with the same name. It's not him. 10) Another military service page. Not him. 11) Court records about some well drillling operation. Not him. 12) A posted question about a laser printer 13) County birth records. Not him. 14) Newsletter for people interested in Cthulhu stuff. Name is mentioned as a volunteer that they've lost contact with. I can't tell whether or not this is him. 15) Broken link to an old PDF from the math department. So where exactly is all the useful information that I was supposed to find? IMO, the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad and would be truly abysmal if I did not already know a lot about this person. Note that I specifically picked this person as a best case scenario for finding information because he has an unusual last name and has been on the net continuously for a long time, since before there was such a thing as the web. I guess I'd have to have a lot more time on my hands and a burning desire to find out what so-and-so posted on alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die four years ago for this to be a useful source of information for me. Sat 27 Sep | David Jones | Go ahead. Google me. I dare you. :-) Sat 27 Sep | realist | I just googled myself, all the other 'Realists' are pretty well rounded sort of folk too. Musicians, artists, astrologers...etc Sat 27 Sep | anon | Davy Jones, I googled you and found your locker. Sat 27 Sep | Tony Chang | Well, this is what we skeptical of this method are talking about: 'I found a post from my old boss in alt.sex.beastiality looking for a 'large dog or small horse'' May I suggest that those who think this means anything are gullible newbies who just arrived on the net? I would find it *more* interesting to find a boss, high school principal, or politician who *didn't* have 'incriminating' posts in alt.sex.bestiality. Forging email headers is trivial and obvious to do, and an extremely common 'gag'. Sat 27 Sep | Mike Swieton | Take any information with a grain of salt, but it can be useful. Most likely more useful with tech people, though. They're more likely to have something up. If you google me, you'll see my web page and some messages from my mailing lists. I imagine it would be useful when hiring: does this person have dozens of troll-ish posts to boards and lists? You often can confirm identities here by email addresses (many mailing lists post them in archives, even if in a slightly munged anti-spam format), and the sorts of mail they've sent can give character information. Big grain of salt, of course, but I see no reason not to: if they have any online presence and a non-ubiquitous name, it should not be difficult to see a bit about them. As for googling love interests... I should be so lucky to meet sexy girls with online presences 8-} Sat 27 Sep | Pepe LePieu | So if someone hates their boss, should they post in his name dozens of times to alt.sex.bestiality with tips on how to receive anal sex from large dogs? Or should it be small poodles? Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | If you hate your boss, you should find the next country he's going to, post some anti-their-government propoganda to a website in their country in his name and... Whoops, wrong thread. So it seems that if someone were malicious enough, they could ruin someone's reputation with a few falsified forum and newsgroup posts. I guess this is similar to ruining someone's credit, but easier to do, and presumaly less malicious (though let's face it, ruining someone's credit and preventing them from getting a job are about on par). Perhaps the best defense here is a good offense. Become increadibly active in humanitarian groups, in fact, hire people to post to alt.save.the.whales and rec.peace.and.love and a few of your grandmother's cookie recipies to some cooking sites all day every day. Just look at Joel Spolsky, how much dirt could you bring up on him? It seems he's 'controlled' his Google results to within a certain degree where the percentage of bad possible hits to good ones is highly favorable. Sat 27 Sep | Tony Chang | Fake sex histories on asb is so old schoool. Try a.s.extropians. Sun 28 Sep | www.marktaw.com | What is an extropian? I did a dictionary.com search for extropy and this is the definition: log in for this definition of extropy and other entries in Webster's Millennium™ Dictionary of English, available only to Dictionary.com Premium members. Sun 28 Sep | Philo | If you google on my real name, which is incredibly unique, you'll find that I died in 1996 (I still remember coming to work and finding my obituary on my desk, placed by a friend). That's okay, though - I was published and highly respected. Oops - just did a whowhere search. I appear to also be living in Massachusetts. Philo Sun 28 Sep | Steve Wheeler | Google on mine, and you find a number of academics, a cookbook author, and a deceased modern artist. You also find a drag racer and an ice-skating magician. I'd hire me, based on that. For what, I'm not certain. Sun 28 Sep | Bill Rayer | I googled myself and discovered I am a chief of police in Nebraska. Sun 28 Sep | Tony Chang | We know from thermodynamics that, in the big picture, the amount of entropy/disorder/chaos/noise/unretrievable energy in the universe is continually increasing. This begs the question to explain evolution, which posits that things are eternally getting more structured. The answer is that in a local system, entropy can decrease and extropy/order/structure/intelligence/usable energy increase. For more information: http://extropy.org/ http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/jpbonsen/extropianism.html Sun 28 Sep | Stephen Jones | I just googled 'Stephen Jones + computers' and 'Stephen Jones + Saudi Arabia', and the llink to all my Joel postings on 'usabiltiy must die' comes up fifth on the first page, so sometimes it works with common names. When I Google for 'Stephen Jones + EFL' the 'Usability must die' link comes up first, even though I have scarcely ever mentioned EFL on these forums, and the hundreds of postings I have made in my own name on the leading International EFL forum don't come up at all. On the other hand change 'Stephen Jones' to 'Steve Jones' (which is the name everybody outside the web, and many on, know me bye)and I disappear off the map. This no doubt tells you sometning about the perceived formality of the web. Sun 28 Sep | www.marktaw.com | ... or your perceived formality of the web, Stephen Jones, aren't you the one who names yourself in your posts? Google my name and you get my webpage, the president of InnerCool Technologies, a mention in Wired (in multiple languages) and my personal favorite: 'He and Mark Wieczorek swore that they would sodomize a goat, if Matt and I would give them $50, supply the goat and some rubbers.' Really, I never said this. It was a sheep... I mean, it was a different Mark Wieczorek, I never went to CalTech. Unfortunately, thats the exact quote that shows up in Google. Continuing on, it seems I have several PhD's from multiple universities, mostly in what seem to be scientific fields.... I remember 5 years ago the only other Mark Wieczorek on the web was a thermodynamics (or something similar) student and he had his photo on the web. I think he gets quite a few mentions on Google. It seems so many people have my name that it's impossible to seperate the wheat from the chaff. I wrote a review of 'The Sporting Life' which shows up as Google's 46th hit, but didn't write a review of Eyes Wide Shut, which shows up as #48. It seems I'm also in the swiss boy scouts, and 'David Mark Wieczorek' is a Private First Class in the US Marines, deceased. Interestingly, my father was a US Marine. I'm also a Chef Manager, Astronomer, Bass Player (wait, I really am a bass player), I lectured at MIT, and wrote papers with a girl whose name is eerily like the name of my high school sweetheart. I run Track and Field (which I did do, but apparently one of my dopplegangers did too - my track & field records never show up in Google). I'm in the Cincinnati Fire Department, and I'm a Certified Pranic Healing Instructor and Associate Certified Pranic Healer. I'm a collections manager. I live in Germany. I play video games and role playing games. How many of you can say that you've been thanked in for 'pointing out the problems with the original gamma-ray flux derivations' in a paper on 'Thorium abundances on the lunar surface.' I hope being dead, or willing to sodomize a goat in some sort of college contest won't be held against me when I apply for a job. webDAV... | Fri 26 Sep | christopher baus (tahoe, nv) Ive been thinking about using webDAV (MS webfolders) in a CMS system I am considering.  Has anyone had any experience with it using either the Apache or MS or another implementation?  It seems the IE client is about the buggiest portion of the entire browser.  It might as well be beta software.  Sat 27 Sep | ... | i'm using webDAV in a couple CMS systems. one based on IIS, and another based on apache. i have run into a few problems, but nothing severe. what issues are you having? Sun 28 Sep | Johnny Bravo | Yes, IE's WebFolders is buggy. Try Cadaver. Tech Exec fired for criticizing Microsoft | Fri 26 Sep | Dennis Atkins Well it looks like the MS gestapo is at it again: A technology executive whose company does business with Microsoft Corp. has been forced out of his job after he helped write a cybersecurity report critical of the software giant, according to sources with knowledge of the situation. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1804&e=17&u=/washpost/a2328_2003sep25 Wow! Fri 26 Sep | no name | It makes a nice conspiracy story, but the reality looks like there was one guy who was a bit of a loose cannon, and had certain agendas which his employers disagreed with on intellectual - not corporate - grounds. There's a lot more to security than saying it's all Microsoft's fault. I would sack him too. Fri 26 Sep | no name | I wouldn't sack him because he criticised Microsoft, but because his analysis was superficial. Fri 26 Sep |   | He got fired because he criticized his company's main client.  The fact that he criticized his company's main client indicates he had morals.  Maybe not a lot of tact, but morals nonetheless. Fri 26 Sep | risk taker | I was going to say the only thing he was guilty of was bad business sense.  Then I realized that I thought doing the right thing meant bad business. Fri 26 Sep | who cares | > He got fired because he criticized his company's main client. This is the superficial interpretation and the one that makes a great story. Howevever there are other interpretations. It doesn't seem a very solid report. I would expect this guy probalby had regular arguments or differences with his colleagues there, and his participation in, and leadership of, this weak report was like a final act of not just poor analysis, but also subordination. Fri 26 Sep | When will you learn | 'It doesn't seem a very solid report' Another head in the sand Microsoft bigot. Fri 26 Sep | Mike | BTW he was the founder and CEO. Fri 26 Sep | who cares | News reports call him the CTO ( chief technology officer. ) Given that there is also an R&D director, and the firm is not a big corporate user, I suspect the CTO may be a relatively unimportant role. Fri 26 Sep | name withheld out of self-preservation | I don't think Microsoft overtly asked them to fire the guy (for stating the obvious and getting lobbyists to distribute it), but some MS employee had to state their displeasure, and whatshisname's company clearly saw the short-term threat to revenues. There is a freedom of speech, but that's only a promise from the federal government, not corporations. Sat 27 Sep | no name | This is what my sales buddies mean when they say geeks don't understand business. People, you just don't publicly criticize your biggest client. It doesn't help the bottom line. Sat 27 Sep | I like Coke AND Pepsi equally | Ok, take of your Microsoft blinders and consider the situation if Coke's CEO stated he truly preferred Pepsi, but frankly thought that soda was evil and bad for kids. Or how about a lawyer publically stating that his client was guilty... It may be the truth, but publicizing it is hardly the right thing to do. If you dont believe in what your organization is doing, you shouldnt be working there. In this case the problem has fixed itself. Sat 27 Sep | name withheld out of self-preservation | Well, martyring the whistle-blower is bad for Microsoft and good for him, since he'll likely find a job elsewhere... and has free publicity.  Many won't want to hire a whistle-blower, but he'll probably land ok. Sat 27 Sep | Frederic Faure | For those interested, the report is here: http://www.ccianet.org/papers/cyberinsecurity.pdf Sat 27 Sep | who cares | If anyone wants to talk about conspiracy and bias, have a look at the crowd that published the report. Microsoft this, Microsoft that, Microsoft are nasty, .... http://www.ccianet.org/index.php3 Sun 28 Sep | Jacco | Also have a look at http://www.ccianet.org/membership.php3 and who do we see there? Well known 'friends' of Microsoft like Sun, Oracle and AOL. I think think this CCIA one of these bodies that's just cranck out reports that contain whatever their sponsors/members want to made public by a seemingly independent organization. (Microsoft has a few of them as well). Those reports have no value at all, it's just rewriting the (political) arguments of the sponsors into something that sounds objective (and CCIA didn't even do a good job at sounding objective). Sun 28 Sep | name withheld out of self-preservation | They're lobbyists. The authors (Schneier, et al) don't have the resources of their own, so they used the Washington machinery of companies like Sun and Oracle. Obviously the CCIA did this of their own interest, but are people claiming they paid off the well-known authors to possibly dirty their names? That sounds like a big charge. Sun 28 Sep | G | If I had a company, and an employee of mine criticized like that one of my customers, I would have done exactly the same thing! Sun 28 Sep | who cares | > are people claiming they paid off the well-known authors to possibly dirty their names? That sounds like a big charge. First, if you commission a report on the security problems of a software monopoly, do you think the outcome or the target is in any doubt. Second, there are heaps of authorities with interests aligned with CCIA who can be enlisted to write such a report. Third, the fact that Geers - the guy sacked by At Stake - even participated in such a loaded exercise reveals a strong anti-Microsoft attitude that probably caused numerous issues while he was at AtStake. Sun 28 Sep | Michael K. Bryor | 'Those reports have no value at all' Yeah, when they said there are security risks inherent in using MS software, it was all a despicable lie without any basis. Just a bunch of politics. MS operating systems and software are THE most secure and reliable products available. The so-called 'Reports' of problems so far are just lies and propaganda. The few cases where there was a 'security' issue is really where the user was so stupid they never should have been allowed to have a computer in the first place. Sun 28 Sep | who cares | Yeah, that's right. Barn, aim at, fire. The Soul of a Chef | Fri 26 Sep | Tayssir John Gabbour Keller has put in skylights, an expensive design decision requiring compilcated rerouting of the exhaust systems above the stoves. He wanted abundant natural light in his kitchen. I knew I had to have the kind of place that would attract people who can do this kind of food, he explained. I just got _The Soul of a Chef_ by Ruhlman, second book in his series, and this quote reminds me of Fogcreek. It was uttered by the main chef of Napa Valleys French Laundry restaurant, and for a couple paragraphs the book talks about the carpeted mats in the kitchen, and two long windows that run the length of it. After reading his earlier book, I emailed the author that I thought there were parallels in software dev and the cooking industry; and he seemed to like Joels article on Big Macs, as well as http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/30/trotter.html . It seems the cooking world has many battles eerily similar to the ones in the software world. I could write a long review about them, but this would be a long post. ;) Im curious if anyone has any good books outside the software dev genre, that you feel applies to the developers world? Fri 26 Sep | www.marktaw.com | Sleightly cynical here... isn't "a good work environment" a nice to-have no matter what your industry is? Fri 26 Sep | Bob Ng | people issues are endemic across all disciplines.  Wake up nerds! Fri 26 Sep | Tayssir John Gabbour | Maybe I shouldn't have linked this too closely with Joel's recent entry. My point was there exist books that really bring out parallels between crafts... The nice workplace thing was just a couple paragraphs out of two books. And I wouldn't say great places to cook are easy; to the contrary, they're tough and you're expected to find your own motivation to love the work. Plus, people eventually get sick of doing things another guy's way and desire to work for themselves. In fact, the French Laundry's owner wishes he could create a restaurant with about five cooks who work independently, with no head chef imposing his will. But there are other parallels. In the US, there's the Culinary Institute of America, which has many good qualities but many in the industry are disturbed at its influence and sometimes play political games... they also have a grueling 10-day certification test for ~$2.5k that many question. These are some obvious parallels. However, the author is skilled enough to talk about inner motivations of cooks he's met; the uneasy rift between selling yourself and being a 'real cook.' (The story of Mel, anyone?) Other stuff too, I recommend the book. I guess I don't care about the old debates on whether a nice working environment is good. There are a lot of restaurants and software shops, only a few are dream places to work, and the people staffing them are a little insane. Instead, I want to learn about books. Another good book was one Joel mentioned, _The Secrets of Consulting_ by Weinberg. I don't consult, but it certainly was... educational... Giving advice looks like a subtle and risky craft. Fri 26 Sep | Marc | I've said for years that Chefs, Musicians, and Programmers are all leaves off the same tree. Even having done all three I'm still sometimes astounded by the similarities of these professions (especially restaurants and software shops). I'll have to pick up the book; sounds like a good read. Sat 27 Sep | Albert D. Kallal | >I've said for years that Chefs, Musicians, and Programmers are all leaves off the same tree. Even having done all three I'm still sometimes astounded by the similarities of these professions (especially restaurants and software shops). Do you have any nice cute article that expands on the above? While the “Big Mac Vs chefs article is close, it spends too much time on IT and consulting. I would love to find a real nice written article that explains the similarities between Chefs, Musicians, and Programmers. Anyone with a good story / reference? Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn Sat 27 Sep | www.marktaw.com | No but I could build one for you. All three involve studying, often by example: Is that tarragon? Was that a G major followed by a B minor seven? What algorithm does Friendster use? Building up a set of tools: Does everything you cook have paprika? Everything you play sounds like Led Zeppelin. I think Joel spent too much time at Microsoft. Finding creative solutions to problems: By braising the Mahi-Mahi and bruising the cucumber, I find that each bite remains fresh. Instead of going to the 'V' chord in the chorus, I go to the 'VII' chord, which adds even more tension. Instead of making API calls, I cache the information in RAM. Sacrificing your personal ego sometimes for the greater good: I find this dish works better without Paprika. You're right, a guitar solo isn't quite appropriate here. Okay, maybe I won't write the applicaiton in Lisp. Some people are talented and lazy, others aren't talented and work hard, and other mixes of the two. I don't think I need to give you any examples. Throw in a few more similarities, a few differences, and pad it out with some anecdotes and personal experience, and you have yourself an article. All three have rules, which can be broken, a scientific and artistic side, all three can be done alone or in collaboration, and all three have an audience that needs to be pleased... or not. All three have superstars, personalities, punditts, magazines. All three can be appreciated by anyone, and have obscure or very public examples of work that defies convention. All three are mediums in which everything has been said, and everything is always new. By the way, go to any audio forum and ask for their favorite recipe for ______ and a dozen people will step foward. Sun 28 Sep | TheWeasel | I'd recommend this book to anyone with a passing interest in cooking or dreams of running their own restaurant. Keeping on-topic, the section on the Certified Master Chef exam is interesting for the way its its discussion of 'do we need certification for our industry' mirrors the discussion you see on these boards and elsewhere. The middle section about running a small highly succesful restaurant is perhaps the most entertaining and vividly illustrates the value of learning, thinking hard about what you do, and team work, and also of the importance of networking in career development. The final section about a restaurant that has achieved /some/ of its owners personal goals is good source of inspiration to anyone else trying to Get There. One thing I really think the s/w biz could take away from this book (other than an appetite) is the idea of apprenticeship. I forgett the actual term used, but the idea is to spend a week, a month, a year working in other kitchens to get new ideas, recipes, techniques. Over all, an excellent read. Grudgingly admitting defeat | Fri 26 Sep | Philo Have you ever had to implement a technology you *hated* in a proof of concept? Did you do your best to make it work anyway? Did you have to eat crow and admit itll do the job (possibly dooming yourself to working with it forever)? Or did you, either intentionally or by simply not trying hard enough, allow the technology to fall flat on its face? [Id recommend withholding your name on this one] (This thread brought to you by the allowing the tech to fail observation by Portabella in the VLDB thread) Philo Fri 26 Sep | Alyosha` | Not to hijack your thread, but I wonder if anyone has ever done a proof of concept which didn't ... prove ... the concept (i.e., the initial analysis lead you down the primrose path to unmaintainability and unscalability (is that a word?)). To answer your question, Philo, no, I've never had that experience, cause I'm always right. =-) Fri 26 Sep | pdq | I have done a proof of concept that showed we didn't have the knowhow to do the whole project. The development team swore if they put a little more time in the prototype, it would work. The performance was an order of magnitude from what we needed so we punted and ended up licensing something instead. To Philo's original thread, nope. Usually self fufilling prophesies. Fri 26 Sep | SteveM | Well, I've been 'forced' by senior management and sales&marketing to implement something I was convinced and adamant just couldn't work. More than once it's turned out I was wrong; when I really tried I made it work... I've always chosen to regard this as conclusive evidence of my own genius Fri 26 Sep | Portabella | > something I was convinced and adamant just couldn't work. Well, the longer I stay in IT, the less I am inclined to say 'Can't work', because I've seen so many amazingly bone-headed ideas actually made to work. I call this the follow-through coefficient, and claim that it can be described by an equation like this one: worth of idea * follow-through coefficient In other words, even really good ideas will fail if they do not have enough oomph, and even really bad ones can often be made to work, given sufficient push. Please note that just about *anything* can be made to work if we have control over what the requirements are, since we just change the requirements to match what we actually did. I've actually seen projects which were run this way, though usually not commercial ones. Fri 26 Sep | Tom Vu | >>proof of concept which didn't ... prove ... the concept yes. I would say about 95% (or higher) of my research is thrownout. Fri 26 Sep | Dave | Sometimes, even on a commercial product, it simply makes sense to tweak the requirements to match reality. We oftentimes create a UI design that turns out to be not *quite* do-able. Instead of spending three days trying to wrestle with Windows Forms to get it to look *just perfect*, we just change the requirements. Note, however, that we only do this for those requirements that really don't matter, such as small tweaks to the UI. For important requirements, we would cut the feature before we'd work the requirements around the difficulties of the particular technology, since going forward without doing it right would drag down the quality of the product. Fri 26 Sep | Wedge | What's wrong Philo?  They picked Oracle, didn't they?  They probably did it just to spite you if you've been talking up SQL Server to them as much as you have here. Sun 28 Sep | Clay Dowling | I've had a few. My attempts to use ActiveX from C++ have all ended in scrapped code. Pretty much anything I've done with Visual Basic has wound up scrapped, since it was obvious that it was unmaintainable in the long term. My proof of concept for getting rid of embedded HTML in ASP programs went right out the window. Actually, I followed that proof of concept a few months later, and have since used a variant of it in almost all of my software. Sql server question | Fri 26 Sep | sql newbie i have about 1.5 GB of text files created every day. i can have these automatically entered into sql server, which would enable me to run some handy-dandy analysis software blah blah blah. i would like for sql server to automatically delete all records in this table that are older than say, two weeks, or something like that. whats the best way to do this? thanks for your help. Fri 26 Sep | John | If the table has a column (create_date) that is set to the date when the data is loaded something like delete tablename where create_date < dateadd(dd,-14,getdate()) will delete all the records older than 14 days. SQL Server has a scheduler that can be used to run this once a day. Fri 26 Sep | sql newbie | excellent!  thanks so much! Fri 26 Sep | Glade Warner | Anticipate the delete of 1.5 GB of data to take some time, especially if the data is stored into many rows and there are indexes on the table. I've worked with an Oracle database table that was large and hand several indexes. It took more time to delete the rows from the database than it did to insert them in the first place. Fri 26 Sep | Philo | It might be worth writing an SP to drop the indexes, run the delete, and then put the indexes back. Philo Fri 26 Sep | Li-fan Chen | Second philo here, the reasoning behind it is because everytime there's transactions happening to a table.. the table index(es) needs to be maintained. That means.. take whatever part that was affected.. recalculate the index.. save the index. Not to mention the logger has to write to the rollback log your action, row by painful row. And as you delete these rows one at a time.. the index is wasting a lot of time rebuilding an index for the rest of the records that are soon to be deleted anyway. So for an offline db, do it exactly as philo says, for online, add a step to duplicate the table without the index.. and without the rows you need.. rename as proper... or if you can.. drop a partial index on the records affected. Sat 27 Sep | Troy King | I have to manage millions of deletes a day. The best way to do it is not to do it at once. It ties the log up for too long and makes it grow like crazy. If you can make deletes more frequently than once a day, you should. Even a once-every-five-minutes delete would be ideal, if it suits your data. That way you don't wind up with a bajillion delete rows in the log and wind up waiting a half hour on the checkpoint. Sat 27 Sep | Philo | Heh. I thought 'turn off logging' was obvious - it's usually the indexing that trips people up. Philo Sun 28 Sep | Troy King | Philo, please, for the benefit of us all, post directions on how to delete specific rows from a table in SQL2K without logging it. TRUNCATE TABLE doesn't count because it deletes all rows. Tell us any way you know how to turn off logging for the purpose of a DELETE in SQL2K, since it's so obvious and funny to you. Sun 28 Sep | Philo | Rule #1: Think before posting. Rule #2: If tempted to make a quick quip that really requires no thought, rule 1 becomes imperative. Totally moronic post on my part. When doing a bulk *insert*, you can do so without logging by using BCP. I honestly don't know what was going through my brain when I wrote that. My apologies. Philo Sun 28 Sep | Matthew | Troy, Re: disabling logging, check out Recovery Options. I believe (though its been a while) that Simple Recovery will disable logging. Of course, you will want to make sure you do a full backup before and after the job. Simple Recovery is similar to trunc. log on chkpt as well. Seeya Where to Place a Job Ad? | Fri 26 Sep | Dave Im about to put a job ad up, and I wonder if Monster.com is still frequented by a lot of folks? Ive used them in the past, but its been about a year since Ive hired my last programmer, and I wanted to know if things have changed. Does anyone have an opinion out there in terms of if Monster.com is one of the places youd look first if youre looking for a programming job? (I know Id look there first.) Id like to use one service only, and Id like to use the best one... Thanks, Dave Fri 26 Sep | Prakash S | YOu could put on Simon's website http://www.ijustheard.com - it will hekp the folks on this forum.... Fri 26 Sep | RocketJeff | Do you really want to post an ad? At this point, you'll be drowning in email within an hour. I'm looking for a new job and in the past 2 weeks I've been directly contacted by a couple of companies (not recuiters) based on the resumes I have on computerjobs.com and dice.com. Talking to them, they decided not to post the ad because of the email flood and the annoying calls from recruiters trying to place people (they didn't want to use recruiters). There are enough current postings on the job sites that both were able to find enough qualified people without have to post the job. Fri 26 Sep | Dave | Prakash - Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out. RocketJeff - That's an interesting take, but I guess my gut reaction is that I don't have time to go hunting people down. Instead, what I do is purposefully make it a little involved to apply for the position. I have a multi-page questionnaire that I ask applicants to fill out. In addition, I refuse to review plain-text submissions sent via the 'automatic' tools on Monster. Plus, I can judge by how people chase the job how much drive and motivation they have. Anyhow, this process has worked very well for us in the past, and I think I'm going to stick with it, but thought I'd throw the question out there to see if there was any 'out of the box' thinking I should be doing... I'll look into both suggestions. Thanks! Fri 26 Sep | RocketJeff | Dave, While I'm sure you get people desperate enough for a job that they're willing to jump through hoops, do you think you're actually getting the best qualified people? Heck, I haven't had a full-time position in 11 months and I wouldn't follow your procedure. People who make you jump through hoops just to get an interview are usually the same people who continue to jump though them after you're hired. Fri 26 Sep | Sam Livingston-Gray | http://www.craigslist.org - depending on your region, of course. Fri 26 Sep | Philo | 'RocketJeff - That's an interesting take, but I guess my gut reaction is that I don't have time to go hunting people down.' Then you don't need to fill the position. Philo Fri 26 Sep | Dave | RocketJeff: The real superstars recognize the fact that I'm providing them with the ability to gain an edge over their competition, and leap at it. The best employees I ever hired were those who went to town on the application. I'm afraid not enough people realize that when you apply for a job, you're selling a product--yourself. So, I'd compare your question to someone who would ask, 'Do you think the vendor will actually spend the time to fill out this RFI?' Only if they want the business... Fri 26 Sep | Dave | Philo: Huh? I'm afraid your response is counterintuitive. Only if I had spare time should I question my decision to take on another employee. I need to spend my time managing my project and reading questionnaires from those employees who want to fight for a position at my company, not going out and hunting people down. Dave Fri 26 Sep | Andrew Burton | I use http://www.flipdog.com and http://www.computerjobs.com when I'm looking for a job. Fri 26 Sep | z | >>> RocketJeff - That's an interesting take, but I guess my gut reaction is that I don't have time to go hunting people down. <<< The concept here is that you have your choice of spending time hunting people down or spending time sifting throught the flood of responses you'll get when you post the job ad. Some employers think the former is more efficient. Fri 26 Sep | gc | What browser do people use for flipdog?  Please be specific as to version.  My initial attempts to use that site resulted in various browser crashes and hangs.  I have never seen site that caused so much trouble for the browser.  I use Netscape 7.0 and have tried a couple of others (don't remember which now.  I finally gave up.) Fri 26 Sep | Anonymous Coward | You could try reading the big orange box in the centre of the page that says: *** NOTICE *** This site contains programming that requires a different version of your Netscape browser. FlipDog.com currently supports Netscape 4 (versions 4.07 to 4.79). Fri 26 Sep | Tom Vu | put your ad on a mailing list targeted to desired skill set. I have found that people who are really interested in the technology or field subscribe to a mailing list Fri 26 Sep | Alyosha` | Dave: have you asked your current employees who they know? It's better sometimes to search your network than to pick someone up cold off the street. When I was unemployed, I would often send my resume to the person or email listed (with a brief one-or-two paragraph sales pitch), as well as use the automatic tools on Monster. The reason being that I did not know if they thought like you did (automatic tools = lazy = no hire) or whether they wanted all their resumes to go to one account (not using automatic tools = doesn't do what we asked = no hire). The other disenheartening thing was to fill out pages and pages of 'who are you' registration forms without any guarantee or belief that anyone would ever see them. If you do choose to use Monster, please make sure to indicate: * real people, no agencies * send me email with cover letter (no automatic tools) Also make sure each applicant gets a response that you recieved and will see their resume (preferably in a way that doesn't seem autogenerated). Fri 26 Sep | Clutch Cargo | Flipdog?? The jobs there are pulled from websites by a spider. There are jobs listed for any number of companies that went out of business a year ago. Applying for Flipdog listings has to be the least effective way to find a job. Fri 26 Sep | Dave | Alyosha` Great feedback, thank you. I have informed our staff that we're looking to fill the position, and they're keeping their ears open. I did specify on the Monster ad that a) send a cover letter, resume, and completed questionnaire, all in Word format, b) no agencies or sponsorships, and c) we will not review resumes in plain text format or automatically submitted via Monster's tools. Dave Fri 26 Sep | Dave | And I'll have to work on getting a response out to people--the hard part is not making it seem like it's automatically generated. Even if I manually replied, I'd likely copy and paste, so it would be difficult to get back to everyone. However, since only a small percentage actually follow directions, I could probably get back to those who do, in fact, submit all three required documents. Thanks again, Dave Fri 26 Sep | www.marktaw.com | Sounds like these tests I heard about in high school, and I think I actually took one. 'Carefully read all the instrcutions before you begin the test. 1. Do not fill out any questions, you will fail if you answer any of the questions. 2. Just write your name at the top of the page and fold your hands.' Sun 28 Sep | Dave | I'm looking for those people who either got it right the first time, or never forgot the lesson. Dave Example of Optimizing to a Performance Metric | Fri 26 Sep | Ray Just found this article that talks about the timers at a Burger King drive through and how in order to ensure the staff that was working would measure up the writer as a customer was asked to do something that didnt make sense to him... Just another example for the argument against performance metrics. Onces there is a measuring stick in place, people will optimize their behaviours to it in any industry. Fri 26 Sep | Ray | Sorry, should have included the article. D'oh! http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2003/commentary030926ram.htm?source=mppromo Fri 26 Sep | Passater | Great article, thanks. Fri 26 Sep | Dignified | We had one of these at a Taco John's (regional Taco Bell competitor) when I worked there in high school. We *never* asked a customer to pull ahead on an order, unless the customer behind them had their food ready. That being said, perhaps ours was less sophisticated. It just kept an average of all times on an LED, and then at the end of the shift, the manager recorded them. So, before we left, we drove on and off it a few times. A bunch of 1-second times drops that average like a stone! ;) Fri 26 Sep | Nick | I don't think that providing one example of an abused performance metric means that all performance metrics are bad. And believe me, I've seen plenty of examples of misapplied and abused performance metrics. But I have seen many more examples of well applied performance metrics that are tamper resistant. Performance metrics are best applied when the process that is being measured can be standardized. I've worked in manufacturing and my wife works in mortgage underwriting. Both are environments where standard metrics can be applied with good results. Software development, on the other hand, is much less standardized, and therefore performance metrics can be difficult to apply. But that doesn't mean they're bad in all cases. Fri 26 Sep | Philo | 'I've worked in manufacturing and my wife works in mortgage underwriting. Both are environments where standard metrics can be applied with good results.' Yeah - witness the growing trend of bankruptcies filed, to the point that the banks lobbied to make bankruptcies harder to get. Yep, those loan worksheets work like a champ! Philo Fri 26 Sep | T. Norman | True, not all metrics lead to this kind of behavior, but most of them do when the particular metric's importance is allowed to dominate over the rest or can be faked. Like using lines of code to measure productivity, while ignoring bug rates and maintenance effort. Or using budget compliance as the primary measurement of a manager's success, resulting in decisions like laying off the $85K expert instead of the $60K average guy because that makes this year's budget numbers look better. Sat 27 Sep | Julian | Performance metrics are often counterproductive. For example, focusing on bug counts leads developers to argue whether something is a bug, leading to unnecessary hostility and discouraging people from filing bugs. As another example, increased standardized tests in public school lead teachers to drill students for months about how to do well on those particular standardized tests. In both cases, aiming for overall quality, without objective metrics, would generate better results. Sat 27 Sep | Nick | 'Yeah - witness the growing trend of bankruptcies filed, to the point that the banks lobbied to make bankruptcies harder to get. Yep, those loan worksheets work like a champ' Actually, this underscores my point. My wife works as an underwriter in the non-conforming (higher credit risk) mortgage business. Many of the companies that have entered this market in the last few years are flight by night operations sweeping in to capitalize in the low interest rates. Most also don't have standardized processes for ensuring the quality of their loans. Sure, they have underwriters that underwrite to guidelines, but the quality of the underwriting is not as important as the turn time and volume to most of them. But, back to my main point - these companies don't bother with performance metrics, whereas my wife's company has been very solid on this front. Her company has used the loan default metrics to go back and adjust their rates, guidelines, and training where necessary. Looking at the past two year's worth of data, their monthly deliquency rates have gone steadily down from 0.8% to 0.6%. I am a firm believer in performance metrics. If you want to improve something, measure it. It may not apply to all areas of performance or all types of businesses, but it does to a lot of them. I understand why many people have a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to performance metrics. I've had my share of piss-poor metrics mandated upon teams I've been on. But overall, the main problem with performance metrics is not whether they should be used, it's with how they are used. Sun 28 Sep | Philo | The problem with metrics is that we're not robots. So you will always fuck people who don't conform to the metrics. So long as you don't have a problem with screwing random strangers, this is not a problem for your business. But I've met a *lot* of people who swear by the system until they get screwed by it personally (DA's that become defense attorneys, credit underwriters who become credit repair counselors, IRS auditors who become tax attorneys). I'll bet your wife budgets her credit in such a way to maximize her credit score - not because it's the best way to manage credit, but to game the system (it seems like a *lot* of loan officers keep 2-3 credit cards and make purchases on them regularly, then pay them off in full - why not simply keep one card and pay in cash when possible? Because that lowers your credit rating). In other words, she optimizes to a performance metric. Philo Sun 28 Sep | Ray | I have to say that I agree with Nick. The metrics aren't the problem, it is how they are used. In the Burger King/Taco Bell/ example it is obvious that the 'time per customer' metric is being used to either punish the staff of a particular shift or as a way of ranking staff or something like that. Since the measurement of the metric has a direct impact on some aspect of the staff's lives like compensation or employee of the month or whatever, the staff has incentive to optimize for the metric. If on the other hand, the metric is a short-term thing used to gather information on customer service times and then look for ways to optimize the overall proceedure that the staff follows or to detect trends in what time of the day certian foods need to be closer to being 'customer ready' then the staff wouldn't have a need to optimize to that metric. I think the bottom line is if the metric is going to be used in any way that affects the employee, it will be optimized for and an info you gather from the metric will be meaningless. Web servers cluster : where do I store web files ? | Fri 26 Sep | Olivier B Hi Im planning to build a 2 web servers cluster to make my web application more robust. Everything is ok (load balancing, failover, session management, ...) but Im not sure where to store the web content (asp, php, jpg, gif...) ! Each server must access the same files to provide the better quality of service. We change the files many times a day, so we need the directories to be synchronized in permanence So, many solutions are available : Storing the files on a third server, using microsoft file sharing system (\\server\folder) and a lan 100 mbps connection. It works quite well... but the processing times of the pages seems to double (and worse) 150ms for local files... means 400 ms of a distant server Replicating the files : we need big hard disks on each front server (ok, its not so expensive). The main problem is to find a way to have perfect copies of the files in permanence (is the expression in permanence ok ?) using Windows DFS means having an Active Directory system, with a Domain, a domain controler... things we do not have for the moment... but we can use if its a good system. Buy a scsi hard disks bay...