Ramble On

It is no secret that I think that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is a gigantic piece of crap. It hasn’t been significantly updated since 2001, its security problems have cost customers millions of lost hours of productivity, it gives web developers headaches galore. My life has probably been shortened from the stress it’s caused.

Well, IE7 is out. And maybe, just maybe, it’s not quite crap anymore - at the very least, the major CSS bugs have supposed to have been fixed - and there’s now transparent (alpha-channel) PNG support, and numerous security fixes. I’m a Macintosh guy - but every windows machine I have or even tacitly support will be going to IE7. And that will be my forthcoming response to every problem in IE. “Problems? Have you upgraded your browser yet? Please do so.”

IT shops should be upgrading in droves.

Give Microsoft a second chance - stop supporting the craptastic IE 6 browser.

of URL’s I need to read tomorrow (and have our devs read)

Can you guess one of the problems we are facing? (hint, filesystem/pstore based sessions are really cool - until they aren’t)

• Using memcached for Ruby on Rails session storage
• Sessions N Such
• HowtoChangeSessionStore
• Memcached

At the moment, I’m partial toward Roll your own SQL session store

So, after 14 years of being hired, watching peers get hired, being in interviews for peers, interviewing and hiring people myself, I’ve more and more come to realize that the interview just really doesn’t work out. I consider myself a relatively experienced judge of character (work character at least), but I’ve been burned more than once on someone that interviews absolutely fantastically, but just doesn’t end up working out - the biggest issue it seems being work ethic - which is incredibly difficult to judge in an interview.

I also think that the interview isn’t all that fair to technical candidates - because most of the problems that systems and software people solve are best solved when you have time to sit back, look at the parts, search around a bit, and come up with a whole (or find the hole). And trying to ask technical questions that have to be answered on the spot doesn’t really judge much except the ability to be self-reflective enough and not be afraid of the answers “I don’t know” or “I’d have to think about that a bit” - which is all well and good.

I do, though, work for the State, so there’s not much chance that I could contract someone for a few days of work and see how they work out. But I do think I could give a quiz - or more - a questionnaire (as long as I give it to everyone).

However, I’m somewhat at a loss to start with that. The only ideas I have are:

• Ask them what feed reader they use. And what their favorite blogs are (if you aren’t using a feed reader, then you likely don’t have the other skills we need either)
• Give them a list of the actual tasks we have open and ask them how they would prioritize them
• Give a problem or two that we have *right now* and ask how’d they work through it (this is much more fair with some time with google than trying to answer it in an interview)

Other suggestions? If you are on the giving or receiving end of one of these - is it a good idea? What would you ask? Or want asked of you?

This commentary (linked to by Jeremy Zawodny) is pretty fascinating - on all kinds of levels.

One - the tastyresearch blog is pretty cool in and of itself. Two, I absolutely dig the subject matter. The fact that there are broad linguistic differences in the United States is a pretty interesting subject. ( I’m fascinated by the vocabularies we invent in our fields to communicate amongst ourselves in medicine, computing, animal sciences, etc. ).

But really is interesting about this is found by digging deeper. As I started looking at the generated graph - two things stood out:

1) the North Carolina data is pretty interesting.

2) I’m intrigued by the blob of Soda around east-central Missouri and south-west Illinois.

I started trying to rationalize why this might be. Missouri/Illinois I could understand from emigration to St. Louis.

But North Carolina’s data was just weird. Could that be because Pepsi started in NC? Throwing off our southern Coke heritage?

So I went looking for the data.

The site linked to by TastyResearch is the source. It’s an older (pre-2002) internet-only self-reporting survey.

In other words, not very accurate science. At all. It’s entertainment and general trends. It probably does reflect general viewpoints pretty well.

But when you really look look at the data - that’s when you begin wondering about things - can ~3300 responses from NC build an accurate county-based view? I’ve forgotten all my statistics, but I’d say for most of the counties, no, the margin of error is too great. However, it is language, and you might have to assume that good data in one county probably likely correlates well with the neighboring county (at least for words like these). But it’s still really entertainment.

At the end of the day though, I really love this kind of data view - especially working in Extension. And would love to figure out ways we can begin to do these kinds of things, and find more accurate data reporting.