The Twilight Report

interviews

Sun, 08 May 2011 13:19:00 GMT

Actually it’s worse than that. At least wide receivers have to run, whereas I can guarantee you, without fear of contradiction, that no software engineer will ever have to write a binary search after they are hired. It’s like choosing a contractor because they know how to forge and cast steel using coal, iron, an oven and a bellows, when they actually need to know a) the address of the nearest Home Depot b) what to do with the steel once they buy it.

I found this interesting break down of technical interviews. Somebody had posted the link on the SlashDot. /. is this really exuberant misinformation farm by and for programmers and technical geeks. Everyone there seems to know everything about everything even though their actual area of expertise is quite limited. These conditions do provide some entertainment though, and every once and a while an interesting news item. I have never seen them post anything about Bon Jovi though. When I do post something I found on /. I usually post the original link though, not the cringe inducing /. posting out of fear of embarrassment.

Why The New Guy Can't Code

I agree with a lot about what he has to say, I have had those “how do you code a binary search” type questions, although not that exact one. I would go further and say that the “how do you code a binary search” type questions inspires the sort of not-invented-here syndrome that tends to waste resources. Annoying Cube Neighbour, for example seems to be trying to reproduce what Google is doing for search at a very low level, while everyone else is trying to fix bugs in a product that isn't in the same domain and needs to go out the door quick smart.

I have had enough interviews now that I have gotten over most of the stumbling blocks. I don't mind wearing a tie or maybe a suit anymore, in fact I have noticed that it gives me a bit of a confidence boost, since I am almost always better dressed than my interviewers. I should give a shout out here and say that this is entirely thanks to Lena. Another huge advantage I have, not really in the interview itself, but in the process itself it are my references. I usually have excellent references. I know for a fact that I was their second pick at s-mart until they spoke to my references, when I became the first pick. Also when I was looking for a place to live, my future land-lady-at-the-time told me how highly my “friends”/references thought of me when she offered me the place. That place in Beacon is still amongst my favourite homes. It's a hard pick between it and the homestead in Wyoming though. Anyway, I have some strengths in an interview, beyond at least some technical competence, but I have never quite got used to the idiot questions that people ask in interviews, although to be fair if the roles were reversed, I am not sure what questions I would ask to determine if someone was actually a competent coder.

At my current position I had an interview question about OO-Perl which made me raise an eyebrow because it was so dumb, and also written in an unPerlish way. In retrospect there were lots of warning signs that were just screaming “we don't know Perl”, but then when I interviewed at The Bureau, Mo asked lots of questions that had me rolling my eyes a little, and I think he is quite a good Perl programmer. I feel like I am sort of in the reverse situation of the one described in the article. Nobody at NetCon seems to be able to program easy to read, reusable Perl code. Before you say “haha, easy to read, reusable Perl code is an oxymoron”, let me just remind you that I was spoiled at s-mart and The Bureau, which were well run Perl shops where the code was 99% easy to read and much of it was reusable. At NetCon they also dabble in a number of other technologies. I'm hesitant to pass judgment on the code quality in those areas as I don't have as much experience. If it weren't for the compensation package, I would be looking for a new job right now. My Plan for World Domination™ is still in effect, I still feel like there is a lot of opportunity here, because nobody has yet learned the way of The Onion (that is a reference to Perl, not the satirical newspaper), but it is going to take me a while to crack the code.

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:50:00 GMT

19 January 2009 08:10am: Forgot the memory card for my DSLR today but remembered my TLR with film.
19 January 2009 03:39pm: With all the dire predictions of web(bubble) 2.0 corps folding in the recession it's nice to work and an unsexy corp with actual revenue.
Yesterday at 03:39pm: It's so cute that to install APC (a PHP module) that you need Perl installed.
Today at 04:35pm: New toy hopefully arrives tomorrow: Nikon D700 DSLR and Nikkor 16-35mm f/2.8 lens.
Today at 05:28pm: Obama got the first five pages of the mX today. Hard not to feel the excitement even on the other side of the world.

twitter.com/plicease

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:15:00 GMT

5 December 2008 08:58am: Day 3 of "don't have to go to work for three days" conference. Internets and my notebook. I'm too shy to boot my notebook into windows here.
5 December 2008 11:57am: Talk on Klingon programming (in Perl) was surprisingly entertaining.
6 December 2008 04:53pm: heading off to the beach wheeee!
6 December 2008 10:31pm: I am bored of the Internets, but I keep clicking anyway.
7 December 2008 10:18am: I had my twitter hyjacked accidentally.
7 December 2008 10:25am: I am glad it is only 24 today after it being 30 yesterday.
Yesterday at 09:30am: Pancake and pear sauce with fresh squeezie orange juice for breakfast. Was raining but now stopped. Pretty good start for the day.
Yesterday at 03:04pm: I'm frustrated by how difficult it is to find film and equipment for film cameras now a-days.
Today at 10:51am: I'm happy to report that at least one of my MF Nikons appears to be back in working order and the other will be within ten days.

twitter.com/plicease

lp0 on fire

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:03:00 GMT

I wonder why they bother teaching concurrency in computer science. There is this funny problem they teach you, involving n philosophers and n forks and a big pot of spaghetti which, if you solve it wrongly, could cause n philosophers to die of starvation. It's a well understood problem, and there are tones of tools to address it properly, most of which have been around for decades on every platform imaginable.

When I was working on parallel abstraction and timing at The Company, I went to a lot of effort to make sure that it worked concurrently. This put me in conflict with people who were too lazy to make sure their code worked properly in parallel. I even tried to make tools to make it easier for them to make code parallel safe, but no, that was too much effort, even though it mostly amounted to using a different class with the exact same interface.

In my current job at s-mart we use a locking mechanism which has an inherent race condition. Which means if something goes wrong it might corrupt data. Admittedly, the odds of that are quite low, but I don't understand why we don't use proper locking (ie. flock), which isn't conceptually any more complicated than the "simple"^[1] locking scheme that we use. In my last job at Company 2, we had a similar locking scheme, but it was hand coded, they didn't even bother to re-use the "simple" locking scheme provided by perl for systems that don't have flock^[2].

I found this list of the The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time. I can't help but wonder if a bit more time thinking about concurrency could have kept some of these from happening often enough to make the list.

read as: broken
and even Windows perl has adequate flock emulation now, so why is anyone using this again?

Kim

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 04:42:00 GMT

Today right before I left work I asked Kim how her vacation was. Not good, she answered. Not enough excitement, she said. Only one amazingly beautiful sunset, she said. My instinct was to point out that some people live their whole lives and only get to see one amazingly beautiful sunset if they are lucky.

I was leaving (mentioned) and I was just trying to be friendly. The America in me wants people just to answer in short positive statements regardless of actual mood. The rest of me doesn’t like that, but it is hard to deny that it is there.

SOAP::Lite is like a mule. You can often coax it into doing what you want it to do, but not without a lot of headache. SOAP::Lite reminds me that designing good APIs is not easy. The Perl community, despite a lot of good work, has unfortunately produced some turkeys; there are warts everywhere. Boxing Day this old lady declared that if everyone just did as she said then the world would be a better place. I think anyone writing an API is something like that: either arrogant or deluded. Usually both.

Needless to say I spent the whole day coaxing SOAP::Lite

new job

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 21:13:00 GMT

New job starting next Wednesday. I have a good vibe about it. In the interview they were asking me the right sort of questions about Perl. It involves working with Perl in a Linux/SQL/Apache environment which makes me feel like a fish in water. The pay is good too. I will be working hard for the next few months.

I have to think up a secret code name for them. I never really cared for Company 2 as a codename. Nor for the company really.

tucson “snow storms” and december in the southern hemisphere

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 23:57:00 GMT

In four years in Tucson, I remember it snowing exactly once. Actually I don’t even remember the snow itself, but reading about it the next Monday morning in the Wildcat, because I had slept through the snowing (and immediate melting) and it having snowed was newsworthy enough to be on the front page. Not that the front page had to be terribly newsworthy when it came to the Wildcat. Although I think the Wildcat probably had more content and journalistic integrity than mX does, and I always pick up a copy of mX if I am going through Town Hall station at the right time of day. The price is right.

I have been rewriting bits of my website in PHP in order to improve my PHP coding skills. It’s painful because Perl (on which most of my website is already written) is about a million times more powerful in almost every regard. It’s sticky to configure I guess, and is horrible to maintain if written by someone who is unskilled in the ways of the Perl. This is why companies that do OpenSource web development tend to stick with PHP, which bundles itself with everything and dumps everything (including kitchen_sink_faucet_on()) into the same global namespace. Hence the need to brush up on PHP and the loathing of said PHP.

I have also been introducing Tristan 賢 to some of my music. Some of it seems to be taking. I have this dream that he won’t be as conventional in his approach to things artistic as my dad is. He has to figure out what he likes on his own though, and he will do that, but it is fun to show him things that he might not otherwise see or hear :)

let’s face it: bears are scary. and they want our honey.

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 02:28:00 GMT

Today Tristan was asking me about Transformers again. This pleases me because this is the list of the things that I am somewhat expert in (no particular order):

Transformers
C/C++
Star Trek
Perl
Doctor Who
Photography
Thursday Next
Never Being Confused

Anyway, he was asking me about where the Transformers came from and I told him about Primus and Unicron, the gods of the Transformers. This is sort of how it went:

me: Primus and Unicron are the gods of the Transformers. Primus created the transformers to battle the evil Unicron.
Tristnan: Did Unicron create the Decepticons to fight the Autobots?
me: No, Primus created both the Autobots and the Decepticons
Tristan: Why did he create them just to fight each other?

I really love the questions that Tristan asks. Now, granted we are talking about a mythology that nobody believes in, but you could easily recreate this exact same conversation using a number of “real” religions that I can think of, and this is exactly the sort of abstract thinking that should be applied to the subject.

commerce without morality

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 01:19:00 GMT

So forever ago, Smitha wrote in her LJ something about spelling alphabets and never being able to think of countries to associate with certain letters. What do you use for X? Anyway, that got me to think that defunct empires would be a good spelling alphabet to use, not because it would be easy to understand, but because I suspected that I could design it to be pretty hard to decipher. For example, when I got to H I chose “Holy Roman Empire” and for R I chose “Roman Empire.” Although it isn’t ambiguous, unless you were paying attention you might get lost.

So I finally wrote a little web app to give you the spelling alphabet spelling for a number of different alphabets. Some of them (NATO, LAPD) are actually in use. Some of the others (defunct empire, etc) I just made up for fun. I made defunct empire the default because it seemed to be the least useful.

www.wdlabs.com/twilight/lingua/alphabet

(btw- if you can think of a country that starts with X let me know. I will accept historical, currently nonexistent countries, but not fictional countries, as I am currently using the fictional country Xanth for X because I couldn’t think of anything else. I also need defunct empires for W X and Y; the current X is actually the capitol of an Empire, not the Empire itself)

I also have a new management policy for my website, so make sure you read that and agree to all of the terms before using my website. It is also available in latin if you English isn’t very good.

A quotation

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 02:39:00 GMT

Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.

—Larry Wall in 1992

things that we don't like, and later do like

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 21:49:00 GMT

For me, perl started out as this programming language that I didn't like because schallee liked it. I had a boss in my summer-job days who liked perl though, so I was forced to use it long enough to realize its power, and now I sometimes joke that English is a second language to my first language: perl (yes, I am a computer dork).

TWiki was introduced to me as this web application that I had to get working ASAP on doublethink, because they fired the only person in The Company who knew how to keep it running. At first I didn't want to use it any more than required to in order to get the job done. Now it is an integral part of the way that I plan and keep track of tasks, and bits of information which needs to be taken care of. I can't imagine living without it, frankly.

(incidentally, TWiki is written in perl, so these things that we don't like at first but come to like tend to build on each other)

There are a lot of things like this, but now that I am looking for work I am actually thankful that I got stuck with TWiki in my last year or so at The Company, because it gives me something concrete to talk about when people ask me certain kind of IT related questions now that I am looking for a job. It really was a good experience, though it didn't seem like it at the time.

Now I am seeing other things that I'm supposed to know that I am sure I will be extremely resistant to adding to my tool set, mainly because they will be some amount of work to learn and (ironically) they aren't perl or TWiki or one of the many other technologies that I already know. Which ones will I later be glad that I know?

I put Photoshop, along with dark room experience and studio lighting on my resumé in part because I had some of that kind of experience, but mostly just for fun, because I couldn't imagine possibly ever using that in my job (which is a pity). Today I actually gave my resumé to someone and he was like "oh, they would actually like someone who knows a little photoshop in addition to all this computer stuff."

Software

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 14:55:00 GMT

I was researching Wikis using (appropriately enough) Wikipedia just now to see if I could harness the technology for HVOC. While I was at it, I came across a reference to the hacker and free software advocate Richard Stallman, also known as rms. My friend, Richard Ess, also has the same initials; and only a few people know this: the M. in Richard M. Ess either doesn't stand for anything (as in "J Robert Oppenheimer") or it stands for "middle".

Anytime Stallman's name brought up it summons in me a feeling of low intensity rage. If all politics are local, and you live in the world made up of software known as the Internet, which is by its nature global, then you may come to appreciate that the world of software is in fact political. If this is the case than I think it could be fairly said that if Bill Gates were the Rush Limbaugh or Pat Buchanan of software, then Richard Stallman would be Ralph Nader; although I think this is being unfair to Nader, as Stallman is petty and childish (If you believe this to be true of Nader, then maybe it is not unfair).

One of Stallman's pet peeves is that people insist on calling Linux Linux. You will find that I am one of these people, because 1) that is what it is called and 2) even if it weren't I would probably not call it that other name simply to spite Stallman. I won't repeat what he calls it, but I will say that he wants credit for Linux because his software plays a part in the success of Linux. Instead of being happy that free software is being used, he is being petty and demanding credit. This causes divisiveness in the free software community, which if you use my political analogy to software, you can see is prevalent in American politics too.

The other charge is that he is childish. I won't go into too much detail but I read an article about him where the interviewer described an episode where Stallman flipped off a building that was named after Bill Gates. In another episode, he was invited to talk at a conference for free software that was sponsored by a number of free software companies. Instead of being a positive voice, he took the opportunity to attack the sponsors, all of which make money from free software. It is, to an extent, a "free country" so he is free to express himself thus. If I were to analyze his behavior (which I am), I would say that he is resentful of the fact that these companies are making money off of, and getting credit for free software, including free software that he wrote.

If you view that companies are doing a bad thing by exploiting free software commercially, or that they are not being "true" to the free software spirit, or more to the point that they are not properly reverent to Stallman, then this is a limitation of the Copylefted license that not only did he use to release his software; but he even wrote the license and invented the term Copyleft. I actually don't think this is a limitation of the license, although I do think it is a limitation of individuals when they believe that all software should be distributed under the same copylefted license.

Stallman resents the fact that when the PC was born and gave rise to the commercial software industry as it exists today, it lead to what he saw as a decline in his hacker community. I think that everyone in the free software community should recognize and appreciate what commercialization of computers has done for society. I can't think of too many people who like Bill Gates, or his henchman the Microsoft Word Paperclip, but even I have to give him credit for turning the PC into a commodity, and making it widely available. I would argue that a big part of the reason that PCs are so affordable today is that Micro$oft, along with others, such as Apple, have made computers accessible to regular people. The creation of this enormous market has consistently driven the price of PCs down, while at the same time the speed and quality of hardware goes up.

Just to give you an idea, I gave Tyler Tron 2.0 for his birthday, and picked up a used copy for myself on half.com. If you have seen the original 80s movie on which it is based you know that the graphics are limited and simplistic. Those scenes were rendered in a batch process; meaning each frame did not have to be rendered quickly enough to be displayed real-time. This game, by contrast has much more sophisticated graphics and thanks to 3D hardware acceleration, all the frames are rendered real-time.

This is something that free software, which existed long before PCs, and long before Stallman claimed to have invented it, could never do. Free software is good for many things, particularly for constructing server software and for niche application development, and I will quite often choose a free software product over a commercial one based on quality rather than price. On the other hand, there are certain commercial software applications that are hands down the best available, and far outperform their free software equivalent. From my own point of view I would say Micro$oft Word and Adobe Photoshop fit this description. The free software community has put together some good WYSIWYG editors, but with the exception that none of them include a talking paper clip, they just don't have as rich a feature set as Word. As for Photoshop, while The GIMP is quite good, and was adequate for my needs for a long time, it is simply not good enough for professional photographers, and after having learned how to use Photoshop I realize that The GIMP just isn't good enough for my need either.

Fortunately, in this world of extremes, there are also moderates. People who exist somewhere between Bill Gates and Richard Stallman who see the benefit of both free software, the commercialization of free software, and fully commercial software. The best examples, I think, are Linus Torvalds original author of the Linux kernel, which serves as the core of the Linux operating system, and Larry Wall, the original author of Perl. I think people like these have so much more to offer the free software community than the zealots do. I think that it is telling that these two characters still play a major contributing factor to the projects that they created, while Stallman has delegated his coding responsibility to others for a life of advocacy. Those who can, do; those who can't, tell other people what to do.

Administrative

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 23:10:00 GMT

Here is what a computer geek I am: while I was waiting to go over to brad's house for the Festivus last night I coded up a search engine for my web site using a SQL database and some perl. I don't really need one, I can grep for anything I want since I direct access to the files, and I don't get enough traffic to make it useful for anyone. It just seemed like an interesting thing to do. It may also have to do with the fact that in the winter months in New York, I don't really like to be outside when it's dark and cold.

See that little box up there by the twilight icon at the top of this page? Put in some text and type <ENTER> to find what you are looking for. For example, if you put "bradstock" in there you will find everything I have written about the annual back yard bash on my website.

I am going to go find something useful to do with myself.