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Helping People Find Jobs
At Codebelay we work with a number of recruiters who have helped secure jobs for a lot of our friends. Right now there are two recruiters who will loyally work for you in your corner.
If you have expertise with Javascript, especially jquery, or SQL Server, or PHP, these are the folks to talk to.
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Why I Joined the Long Now
I’ve been reading the book, Anathem, as well as siding with the idea that the calmest and most rational way to lead life is with the long view. I am not saying that there is no magic to being in the now. Personally, modern society is too focused on the now and the near future instead of the long view.
That’s why I joined The Long Now Foundation.
Anyway, as a member, I get this cool looking, stainless steel card, preferred seating at seminars, and access to their videos. Kinda sounds like a pr0n site. lol.
I think it’s great to support an organization that has debates about biotechnology, and future upcoming crises, e.g. the environment, food and energy shortages, and historical forces.
If there’s one emotion that’s colored my entire year, it’s been anger. I’m doing my best with the hand that I’ve been dealt, but I’m realizing now that the man I dreamed I would be just might not ever happen. It’s making me pissed.
Let’s start off with things that I just haven’t learned:
- controlling my emotions and impulses
- how to trust people — i pretty much don’t
- live in community and forge good relationships
- how to organize for positive, social change
This pretty much makes my life a solitary hell-hole. I’m working on learning these things, though.
Now I’ll reflect on those things that I should’ve been taught by school or my parents but wasn’t. This is stuff I’ve learned on my own and often with the help of strangers, and I’m glad that I learned these things.
- communicate well
- how to meet the women I want without using the Internet
- manage financial matters
- code for a living
- do practical things, to clean, cook, make, repair, grow food
- be good mannered and know etiquette
- accept responsibility
- deal with grief, loss, and suffering
- clicker training dogs
Now that I look at it, my college degree is pretty useless except for down economic times when some HR stooge has to choose between someone with a degree and someone without. I really think my parents short changed me because during summers they would keep my locked up in my house, and I never really learned how to socialize or keep friendships. That really makes me and my dog, Niles, really similar because his previous owners locked him up in a yard, too, and that’s one of the reasons he’s messed up.
What do you wish your parents or school taught you but didn’t? What did you learn on your own, and were glad you did?
I’ll be heading off to ROFLCon this evening. It’s a geek event where Scoblian passionates will gather in a secret power cabal and plan the overthrow of the non-passionates.
LOL
I’m really there because the creators of ICanHasCheezBurger will be there talking about what it takes to harness the wisdom of crowds to make the funniest and cutest site on the Internets.
I’ve got some reading to do. 2000+ more posts to go, and I’m done.
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Fun With GDB, Gnu’s Debugger
Here’s a pretty compact version of strcmp:
int bstrcmp(char *s1,char *s2) {
while(*s1 == *s2++) {
if(*s1++ == 0){ return 0; }
}
return (*(unsigned char *)s1 - *(unsigned char*)--s2);
}
The source that I used for compiling and calling this version of strcmp is here.
Compile that code using:
gcc -o strcmp -g strcmp.c
Fire up the debugger using:
gdb strcmp
You’ll get the gdb prompt:
(gdb)
Set a break point at the start:
b main
The debugger will echo something like:
Breakpoint 1 at 0x80483d5: file strcmp.c, line 6.
(gdb)
Then run the program:
run
The debugger will print out something like:
Starting program: /home/somedude/bin/strcmp
Breakpoint 1, main () at strcmp.c:6
6 {
(gdb)
If you type n a few times, you’ll eventually get to some variable assignments.
(gdb) n 8 char s1[] = "better"; (gdb) n 9 char s2[] = "better than"; /* than this";*/ (gdb) n 11 int i_result = 0; (gdb) n 13 i_result = bstrcmp(s1,s2);
If you want to the values of these variables type:
p i_result
You get back:
(gdb) p i_result
$1 = 0
To step into a function, type s:
(gdb) s
bstrcmp (s1=0xbf86b469 "better", s2=0xbf86b474 "better than") at strcmp.c:26
26 while(*s1 == *s2++) {
(gdb) n
27 if(*s1++ == 0){ return 0; }
(gdb) n
26 while(*s1 == *s2++) {
(gdb) n
27 if(*s1++ == 0){ return 0; }
(gdb) n
26 while(*s1 == *s2++) {
(gdb)
At this point you can type things like:
p s1
p *s1
p s2
p *s2
And you’ll get back the value of the pointers and what’s in memory.
Next time we’ll go over how to do this with PHP running single threaded on debug mode on Apache.
This is a real rant from a techie who works for a company in San Mateo:
Recently our CTO (who also is a word class fool) promoted a guy to the position of lead product architect. I would like to mention that the product whose architect he has appointed has never contributed any work worth mentioning.
If you take a look at the only feature he has managed to make and he was the only resource assigned on that feature so I suppose he had all the options to take his decision and come up with a word class implementation, comprises of one file only. Yeah just one file and this one file contains tons of classes which have methods reaching 1K lines.
So you can imagine where the focus is. It clearly shows that this guy has never programmed under a good leadership. He is so worried about getting this fact disclosed that he managed to convince the CTO to not allow anyone to even see his code let alone suggest improvements. That’s one of the reasons I call the CTO a fool too 🙂
God knows what more is to come from this word class duo.
— source an anonymous lead engineer in San Mateo
The first thing that struck me is this. Why is this guy telling me this? Why isn’t he telling the CTO? One of the mythologies that Hegel pedals is the idea that the status quo is a result of a life and death struggle with the result being a great inequality. The time for talk has passed long ago, and what we have is this:
[O]ne is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is the master, the other is the slave. (Phenomenology of Spirit, s. 189)
Hegel’s way out for the slave is the work that the slave does on things. Hegel characterizes work as “desire held in check, fleetingness staved off… It is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own… having a ‘mind of one’s own’ is self-will, a freedom.” (s. 195 – 196) Through service and discipline the slave makes herself stronger. The slave working on her work sees herself as essential and the master as unessential. This sets the stage for the slaves escape to freedom or possible domination of the master. In Marx, this is when the workers rise and take over all ownership of the means of production. The unessential, i.e. the owners, are done away with or made into workers themselves. Nobody is any longer master nor slave.
On the PHP Meetup list, I asked the question, “Have there ever been coders who have coded their way to freedom?”
I was given two examples, neither of which answered the question, and show that yes, a lot of coders do falsely believe that coding leads to freedom.
1) John Gilmore, a founder of the EFF which is an organization I support with donations.
2) Richard Stallman.
I’d say neither is free because although Gilmore made a fortune at Sun, coding didn’t lead to that freedom as a necessary condition. There are coders as good as Gilmore who don’t have that cash. The fact that EFF had to be founded points to the un-freedom of coders.
As far as Stallman goes, I admire his work. I use a lot of GNU software. However, I don’t have enough fingers to count the companies that close source GNU software and try and re-sell it as their own.
So, as you can see coding isn’t enough. Yet coders feel their coding makes them qualified to call CTOs fools. Ya, I can see that putting 1000s of lines of code into one file can be dumb. I can also see that promoting a bad coder is a bad idea. Good coding allows you to see this, but this guy in San Mateo has bought into the idea that he can’t talk to this CTO, that somehow the solution to the problem is technical, i.e. better code.
If you’re a coder, my advice to you is that the time to talk isn’t over. It hasn’t been settled in a Hegelian life and death struggle where the inequalities are currently fixed. If you talk, you still have a chance. Email your gripes now, and you might even be surprised.
In my next post, I talk about the prejudices that managers have towards coders.
To make flowcharts Web 2.0 style check out Gliffy.com.
Looking for a To Do list that works off-line as well as on-line? Do you also need to send your To Do items via SMS from your cell phone?
I love Remember The Milk just for this sort of thing.