AGILE 2005
I’ll be in Denver for Agile 2005 next week. Will you be there?
Continue Reading July 22nd, 2005
Posts filed under 'All'
“Great” error message from Microsoft Outlook 2003
Yesterday Outlook provided one of the least useful and most humorous error messages I have seen in a while.
Continue Reading 1 comment December 22nd, 2004
Comment Spam
Not that I’ve been posting so much that comments have any importance, I need to turn comments off due to the huge quantity of comment spam that this blog has been getting. While WordPress lets me moderate comments, as far as I can tell it there is no way I can tell it to disallow comments on entries that are more than n days old, which is what I would really like to see.
I’ll leave comments on for a few more days and then turn them off.
Continue Reading 3 comments December 7th, 2004
No Audiovox SMT5600 for me
Boy am I jealous of those on AT&T…
Continue Reading 1 comment October 28th, 2004
WordPress and Windows XP SP2 Woes
A few weeks ago my weblog and some others stopped working (with at least NewsGator, IntraVnews and SharpReader). I was busy with other things so I hoped that the problem would somehow sort itself out, but it didn’t. After many hours of research (and deleting any possibly offending XML from my blog), Pete from http://pete99.net and I figured out that it was a result of my upgrade to Windows XP SP2 couple with a bad header being generated by WordPress. (See http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/afontes/archive/2004/10/15/28726.aspx for one of the many descriptions of the problem.) So those of you running WordPress 1.2 should change “Last Modified” to “Last-Modified” in wp-blog-header.php.
Now I have to go and add all of my deleted old posts and links back. Of course I no longer remember the original post dates so old posts may look like they are new.
Continue Reading 3 comments October 23rd, 2004
I will never buy a Sony product again
Horrible support seems to be the norm at Sony.
Continue Reading 1 comment October 23rd, 2004
Automatic Amazon.com discount
Scobleizer (comments here) asks about experiences with a9.com, amazon.com’s new search engine which provides results from google, augmented with book searches (via amazon.com), movie searches (via imdb.com), history of previous searches, etc. It also provides a diary mechanism to let you annotate web pages and a centralized store for your bookmarks. (Personally, I’m going to consider using del.icio.us for bookmark storage. Joshua keeps coming up with really cool ideas!)
Scoble misses the most important part of a9.com: if you sign in, it gives you an automatic pi/2 discount on your amazon.com purchases.
October 23rd, 2004
The hazards of keyword-based advertising
Keyword-based advertising: an article on the problems with Kryptonite locks contains advertising for Kryptonite locks.
Continue Reading October 23rd, 2004
Defer outgoing mail with Outlook
How many times have you hit the send button only to realize that you really shouldn’t have sent the mail? Doing this even once can cause problems… Fortunately there is an easy solution if you are using Microsoft Outlook (I’m not sure which versions). See Charles Srisuwananukorn’s post for details. I first saw this method in jaybaz’s weblog but it looks like it may have originated at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010549791033.aspx.
Continue Reading September 23rd, 2004
Essential XML Quick Reference PDF released
The news is that DevelopMentor and TheServerSide.NET are providing a free PDF of the book “Essential XML Quick Reference, A Programmer’s Reference to XML, XPath, XSLT, XML Schema, SOAP, and More” by Aaron Skonnard and Martin Gudgin.
Continue Reading September 23rd, 2004
Breach in Olympic Security?
Did anyone else catch a breach in Olympic security this morning on television?
Continue Reading September 23rd, 2004
Where are the candidates? or Where do you find your employees?
Heather’s blog alerted me to a BusinessWeek online article in which they talk about increased competition for Monster.com. This, of course, was on the heels of the announcement of eBay acquiring a minority interest in craigslist. (See Craig’s personal take on this here.) This reminds me of an article I read last December on how Monster was launching a new ad campaign so it could try and remain the market leader.
During the last couple of years, I’ve hired for several types of positions including developers, technical writers and quality assurance analysts. Given the downturn that we had in the economy, I assumed that there would be a plethora of candidates, ready to pounce on any job postings that we put on Monster.com. After all, shouldn’t there tens of thousands of saved searches that would find all positions with titles of “C++ Developer?”
Well, the results of using Monster.com were disappointing to say the least. We did receive some qualified candidates, but they were few and far between. It shouldn’t be surprising that the vast majority of the applicants were not at all qualified for the positions posted; what was surprising was how few page views the job postings ever received. A couple of statistics that I collected earlier this year:
Number of page views for job postings on Monster.com:
| Posting date | Job title | Page views |
|---|---|---|
| April/May 2004 | Senior C++ Developer | 636 |
| April/May 2004 | Junior – Mid-level C++ Developer | 1160 |
What’s going on here?
- Was the job market better than we thought?
- Have many candidates left the market for other careers?
- Do folks who are currently employed assume that the market is so bad that they don’t bother to look for other positions?
- Has everyone left Pittsburgh and no one wants to move here?
- All the above?
I really wish that I had collected better statistics along the way. I do know that a QA position we advertised had significantly fewer page views than the developer positions and that an ad that we posted on Dice.com produced few candidates at all and none of them were qualified for the position.
We also posted these job ads to the Technology Council website. This is a free service to member companies and is very low cost to non-members. The results:
Number of page views for job postings on Monster.com:
| Posting date | Job title | Page views |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 2003 | C++ Developer | 1579 |
| April/May 2004 | Senior C++ Developer | 153 |
| April/May 2004 | Junior – Mid-level C++ Developer | 334 |
Why is there a huge drop in the number of page views in the span of 4-5 months? Did the economy improve that much?
Even with only a quarter of the page views, the number of qualified applicants was significantly higher than when I used Monster.com. From now on, if I am recruiting locally for a technical position, I’ll keep my $300 (or whatever it costs to post on Monster.com) and advertise for free. Of course I’ll also continue to work my own network to find good candidates—Pittsburgh is a small town…
September 23rd, 2004
SMART objectives and performance evaluations for software developers
I head up a small software development group in a small company, with fewer than 25 employees. I am struggling with coming up with good performance objectives for the folks in my group. We often face rapidly changing business conditions; a situation whose impact on the day to day activities of the developers I try to minimize. The upshot of the changing conditions is, however, that I find it very difficult to come up with SMART objectives that aren’t trivial or frivolous.
I’ve looked at Joel Spolsky’s view on performance reviews and I agree with him only to a point, He blasts performance reviews in general. I believe that if one sets good (aka SMART) goals, the problems he raises would be alleviated.
How do you set goals for your development teams and how to you measure performance against these goals?
Continue Reading 3 comments September 23rd, 2004
Microsoft Windows XP SP2 Install
Seems like everyone is blogging about their Windows XP SP2 installations. Scoble is even soliciting feedback which is why I am writing this entry.
Several of us at our company have been running RC versions without major issues; the biggest problem we had was that running Symantec AntiVirus (V9) with RC2 slowed things down significantly when using BoundsChecker. We actually had to disable the anti-virus software to get our tests completed. Fortunately, we don’t have to go through that again for another month and hopefully any kinks will be worked out by then.
Installation was slow (which I should have expected) but I haven’t had any problems yet. My VPN connection still worked which was my area issue of concern. The litmus test will really be when our customers begin to install the upgrade. While we tested compatibility with our application, there may be other factors at play at our customers’ sites. Since our customers are typically not bleeding edge (many of our customers are still running Windows 98 on slow machines with minimal memory, for example), I expect any issues to crop up slowly over an extended period of time. Stay tuned…
September 23rd, 2004
Lookout email search for Microsoft Outlook - Lookout Software
I know that thousands of folks have already written about this, but if you have a ton of email and/or files (currently txt, doc, html, xls, ppt) that you want to quickly search, head on over to Lookout Software. They were recently acquired by Microsoft, but version 1.2 of their product is still available for free.
This product has already saved me huge amounts of time trying to find old data.
1 comment September 23rd, 2004