I’m not sure if all recruiters work off some hidden cosmic rhythm, or if they share information.. but I find it amusing, that a bunch of them call me around the same time every month. Anyway, in the past 3-4 months I’ve been underwhelmed, and frankly offended by these email recruiters.

In light of This article by Nick Halstead , I thought I would throw in some experiences from contractor/job seeker side. I’m glad to see that these recruiters aren’t horrible just to the recruitee, but also to their paying client, yet disappointed.

Actual Conversation (this happened last week):
Recruiter Email and immediate phone call: Looking for web designer with over 10 years of experience in Adob (that’s how they pronounce it), photoshop, html, xhtml and css.
Me: I haven’t used photoshop since photoshop 3, I suck at design I learnt that in high school, i’m not fit for this position.
Recruiter: So how many years of Adob experience do you have? I have your old resume on file and I don’t see any.
me: Yes, because the last time I messed with photoshop, was when System 7.5 was out, and I had a pirated copy of it on our high school computer. I am not interested, and more so, I am not qualified for this position.
Recruiter: Ok do you think you can add photoshop to your resume and send it back to me?
me: ……. …. .. ..

This happens a lot, and I hate to say it, the recruiter is always some guy from India.

Now, almost all of my contracts I’ve found have been through recruiters, there are some really good ones out there, but finding the good ones shouldn’t be so hard. Recruiters are necessary, I’ve been on this one contract for 3 years now, this contract was found by a really good recruiter in Chicago. These guys were so good and ethical, that they haven’t tried to recruit me away, or use me as a way to get other candidates through the door, though I do know some other contractors that have started working there via them.

PS: To the recruiters reading this, this is not an invitation to solicit me. I’m just venting, I’m sure the good recruiters out there, have some horror stories of bad candidates themselves, I’d love to hear them.

So, twitter is down again, all jokes aside, I know a lot of people say the problem with twitter is that it’s built on RoR, is it really? Is ROR really the problem? Or is it bad infrastructure? Could it be that twitter as simple as it is, is actually innovative in what it’s trying to do? Or is it doing something very simple, in a very foolish manner?

For the people who say the problem with Twitter is RoR, I’d like to ask them and possibly bribe them, into building a clone of twitter, in their language of choice.

Why? Because, I’m curious.. is it really the language, or the framework? or just poor architecture? is the architecture poor due to the framework’s limitations? I’ve thought a little bit about what Twitter is doing, and I can’t think of any other application that does the type of notification, except financial sites, and stock tickers.. but they usually claim the 20 minute delay.

I haven’t done any real research on twitter’s problems, I’m a consumer so I didn’t feel like trying to figure out where their blog is, or who is actually behind twitter, so pardon me if my question is dumb to some of you.

Every now and then you see someone do something with technology that makes you go..”duh, why didn’t I think of that?”. I happened upon one of these moments, when a friend of mine showed me Awesome Highlighter. The concept is simple, it’s like bookmarking with comments, but where the comments are easy to add, and relevant. People send me links all the time, they tell me to check out a specific page, or a story, but I don’t always get the joke, or the point they wanted to make to me. Now, with this tool, I can see what they thought was relevant. I can remember specific steps I had to follow when I bookmarked a page. As a developer, I can send this to clients, or copy editors, who can pinpoint the errors on the web pages more easily to me.

This is the natural evolution of delicious, let’s see if they can keep up.

For the framework fans out there, the site is built using PHP5 with Code Igniter.

If you read my blog, chances are you are aware of this new fad called the internet, and this new language called PHP. You’re also probably aware of things like MySQL and SQL, and the importance of data to visitors of your website. So, keeping that in mind, I’d also like you to know about backing up this data.

As I grow my business, the number of clients I run into that do not do backups, astounds me. I’m not talking about end user laptops/desktops, but rather backups of their SugarCRM database, or their file server, or even their company website, which is powered by Drupal/Wordpress/CMS Du Jour. When, not If, the database is corrupted, or the disk fails, they have no idea what they would do then. They just hope that it doesn’t happen to them.

So I did some thinking, and decided I should write a post, and make available to the world, a simple script, which I believe will at least give you onsite backups. This is what the script does:

• Backs up each mysql database into it’s own little .sql file.
• Makes a tar ball of the .sql files.
• Copies this tarball to a remote server of your choice. (optional/requires more than editing a few lines)

The script is available to download/view here.

Change the configuration options at the top of the file, make sure everything works, and then put it in your cron. Feel free to post questions/comments in the comments section.

This is a great description/view point of frameworks and the framework crowd out there. It’s funny, and like frameworks, isn’t always the answer.

A lot of you may already know this, but I am willing to bet there are more that don’t. I’m talking about the tee command in the bash shell, and in MySQL. For our purposes, we’ll talk about the tee command in MySQL.

Problem: You have a series of SQL statements whose results take up a few screens worth of output, and you need to take this output and send it to someone else (A DBA, MySQL Support, your mentor). You could just do a copy/paste from your terminal, but what if you realized in the end that your scroll back buffer isn’t as large as you thought it was?

Solution: Tee. Apparently, the mysql client comes with tee.

mysqlshell> tee mysqlog.sql ;
Logging to file ‘mysqlog.sql’
use dbname;
select foo from bar;
….
mysqlshell> notee;
quit;
bash> cat mysqlog.sql

This could be filed under “my bag of neat mysql tricks”

PS: Sorry for the K.T Tunstall song reference/joke.. I heard it on Saturday and it’s not leaving my head.

Alex Netkachov has an interesting post on his blog, giving tips on writing less code. It’s an interesting post, because this is something is very subjective.

First, you want to find out why you want to write less code, less code for the sake of writing less code is dumb, if you really don’t want to write code, then that’s a completely different thing, hire me, or the countless other guys who like writing code :).

What are the benefits of writing less code? Does it make the code run faster? Does it help you save disk space? I’m not really sure.

Tip #2 says use ternary operators.. this is a pet peeve of mine, I really can’t find a good reason why these operators still exist, or are used in high level languages like PHP, but I personally think the use of ternary operators in 99% of the situations I’ve seen, is just the programmer thinking he’s being clever. Eventually ternary operators make code less readable, but again that is subjective, not authoritative. I find lots of things unreadable, but they’ve made the best seller lists, so.. what do I know?.

Tip #3, I really don’t see a benefit of using for vs while, again this is subjective, I think it boils down to what one puts more priority on, one line of code, or more readable code.

He does make the comment about writing better documentation in your code, but I really don’t see why the two have to exclusive..

I think S0enke put it best in the comments.. “Writing less code is not about writing less lines. It’s about avoiding copy-and-paste programming and no formatting-paradim but more a question of programming skills.”

If your code is executing faster because you have fewer lines of code, than you did in version 1, you have a bigger problem than you realize.

A while back, I had talked about the issues I had with my
EVDO express card purchase and my macbook pro, a lot of you asked me to sum up my experiences with the card, and to comment on whether the speeds are worthy of being a primary connection or not, so here’s my answer.

Definitely, maybe.

I know, such definitive answers make me sound like a politician don’t they? Well.. politicians would probably skirt the question completely..
Here are my experiences with the Sprint USB card since late June 2007.

EVDO/3G data cards and plans are the most liberating technology ever sold. Seriously.

I am no longer confined to the house. I am no longer confined to starbucks and other places with stable wifi (Panera) (usually).
I can work, or play anywhere (more on that later). This technology allows one to connect to the internet from anywhere, with connections much faster than some DSL connections I’ve seen. The advertised speeds of “average download speeds of 600 kbps - 1.4 Mbps and average upload speeds of 350 - 500 kbps.” are not false. If you happen to be in an EVDO Rev A area, you will be close to advertised speeds. I’ve downloaded software at about 300K/sec before, and I’ve uploaded photos to flickr at about 80-100K/sec.

Nothing earth shattering, but I was in a hotel in McAllen, TX where the wifi of the hotel was $9.99/day and only worked in the lobby.

If you know me personally, you know I work remotely. I “tele-commute”, if you know me well, you know I’m rarely at my house. It’s not because
I’m on location or “on site”, but because I have this sprint card, and I can work from anywhere. Example:

I was one of the crazies that stood/sat in line for the iPhone, I got in line at 7:30AM, but I took my laptop and power cord with me, while waiting for the phone to be ‘released’, I actually got about 6 hours of billable time in. Work was happy, as they didn’t lose me for a day, I was happy as I could bill, while I was in line.

.

Without the card, I would’ve had to call in sick, and I wouldn’t have been able to make money that day. So, enough of the “anecdotal ad” for the EVDO cards.

So, how does the card fare up to travel and regions? Well.. since I bought the card, here is a table of places I’ve been, and what a standard wifi connection would’ve cost me.

Since I use a MacBook Pro, my development environment goes with me. I have PHP 5, Python, Apache and MySQL all installed
and with test data on my laptop. I wrote my PHP Gallery script and uploaded it to my server in McAllen, TX. Yes, I’m a nerd.
This also helps from a non nerdy perspective, I’ve been able to look up things to do, movie times, and alternate routes via google maps, though with the iphone, I don’t need the laptop to do any of those tasks, except maps when I need to get birds eye view of the city I’m in.

I’ll be in NJ first week of November, Vegas in December, El Paso in January, I no longer have to worry about connectivity anymore, I can choose to be as connected as I want to be.

For those who think this is just encroaching more and more into my life, or their lives, the technology isn’t bad, it’s your lifestyle. I have no problem defining when and where I do not want to be contacted, and the people I work with respect the boundaries I set. The card doesn’t make you a slave to your job, it doesn’t force you to check and respond to emails, it’s you.

Also, the reason why I said definitely maybe earlier, is that this connection as fast as it is for work, is not ideal for gaming, and is no where near as fast as the fiber running to my home, downloading songs and shows off iTunes is not the fastest thing on these cards, I can download songs from iTunes in about 3 seconds, on the card, it takes me about 2 minutes.. not terribly slow, but 1:57 .. I could’ve heard an entire song in that time.. :).

A thing to note about Wifi hotspots, sometimes they do not allow you to establish PPTP VPN tunnels (Panera), so working from these places is impossible if you need to connect to the corporate VPN.

Apple announced, as expected, a release date for Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. The date is October 26th, 2007 in case you missed it. Since everyone on the internet is a guru, and therefore, so am I, I will give you plebes reasons to upgrade to Leopard. But, first let me qualify myself worthy of such preachery (gurus can make up words).

1. I’ve been using Leopard since January 2007, since I’m an ADC Member, and I have early access.
2. I’ve been using it on my primary work machine since September 2007.
3. This is the internet, and somehow you found this post to read, therefore you don’t know any better..

I’m going to assume that the build shipped to us ADC members, has been updated and will not be the build that will be released to the masses, there are still bugs in my release, but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of the August release, and very close to stable.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, here’s my list:

major features missing on the Leopard page
I’m not sure why, but Apple didn’t mention these things, and came up with a rather lame list of “300″ new features (seriously, mentioning Tabbed Terminal 3 times doesn’t make it 3 separate features).

1. PHP 5.2.4 : Tiger has shipped with PHP 4.3.X for ages, and I always had to upgrade manually, no more.. But.. this build of PHP doesn’t come with PDO MySQLi drivers.. it’s weird ( The PHP Info from Leopard ).
2. Apache 2.2 : Comes in handy with PHP etc..
3. Python 2.5.1: This list may be getting too geeky for some.. Sorry. I don’t remember if I installed Django myself, or if it’s part of the OS though..
4. Subversion: Yes, Subversion (1.4.4) is now part of the CLI .. not Finder yet, but it’s a start.
5. Mail.app : Apple’s mail client finally supports the ability to subscribe to individual folders on your IMAP server. warning: This is buggy in my release, but the functionality is there.
6. iCal: It’s better, hard for me to put my finger on this, but it’s definitely better.

major reasons for me to upgrade.

1. Speed: Even in beta, Leopard is considerably faster than Tiger on the same hardware. Full 64 bit FTW.
2. Spaces: Virtual Desktops make it to OS X natively, albeit 10 yrs late, but they’re finally done 99% right in OS X, I still have 2 gripes.
3. Network Sharing: If you thought sharing drives in Tiger was easy, Leopard makes it stupidly easier.
4. Quicklook: This is again a simple thing, but it’s done very well and it’s very fast.
5. User Management: The ability to change a user’s home directory, and unix group etc, are much easier than in Tiger (right click the user’s name easy).
6. Spotlight: It’s much faster, and works as an app launcher just as well as Quicksilver.. no chaining though, so I still recommend QS, if you use QS for more than just an app launcher.
7. VPN on Demand: It finally works, this never worked for me using PPTP..
8. Notes and Todos: The built in Notes and Todos feature of Mail.app makes me wonder what will happen to all the GTD apps out there, I don’t see a need for them anymore. The notes can be made into Todos, which can be given due dates, which automatically puts them in calendar..

My list of things that can still be improved upon

1. In Spaces, give me the ability to send a window to another desktop by right clicking the title bar, and sending it, not invoking spaces fancy pager.
2. Make the PHP distribution better.
3. Safari / Keychain need to support x509 certs better..
4. GPG should come as a default install, and Mail.app should have it.

Basically, if you need a job, or hate your current job, and have time to commit, and if you’re a professional, or just disciplined and care about every little thing you do..Or, if you just want to work with me.. :

Geneva Data, an Internet Security company is looking for PHP developer to work on a unique project in San Antonio, Texas.
We’re open to a full-time, part-time, contract, consulting or project work. We just want the most innovative local PHP programmer available (with experience.)

“Experience” means you can show us proof of your work … whether you have been in the workforce for 6 months or 60 years.

“Innovative” means that you’ve never encountered a problem that you couldn’t solve. We appreciate individuals who experiment with new technologies on personal projects. Creativity is a plus with us.

• MySQL and/or Linux proficiency is a further plus.

• Experience with Internet Security is a HUGE plus (you know how to use tcpdump etc).

• Local (San Antonio) or in-state (Texas) candidates preferred.

So, if this sounds interesting to you.. please contact me vid at phpcult dot com.