Hackerdude

I am now using Twitter again. I am hackerdude, of course. Come join the fun!

En Consumer.es, Alexey Pazhitnov (creador de Tetris) dice que El software libre sólo es una rebeldía estéril, y se pone a opinar acerca de capitalismo versus socialismo.

Creo que reducir esto a "socialismo/capitalismo" es una reacción que sobresimplifica un asunto que es por naturaleza complejo, tomando prestados temas de política para crear miedo, con la idea probablemente de proteger su mercado (como hacer pipí en los árboles si eres canino), y demuestra un problema de entendimiento tanto de los sistemas de libre mercado como de los sistemas socialistas. Me explico:

technorati tags:
software
open source
economics
business

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Here are some thoughts on success by Steve Jobs, prompted by a question asked at the D5 conference where he had a joint interview with Bill Gates. The whole thing is worth watching, or listening to, or reading the transcripts but this is relevant if you work in this business.

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I set up instiki locally for my own notes and I needed to get it to start automatically in a proper way. I found an excellent tip on how to create launchd items using the property list editor. Works like a charm.

Now I even made a web clipping dashboard widget with the homepage of my instiki on localhost. Awesome.

I do consulting and sometimes I deal with different clients/projects. This requires a bit of compartmentalized thinking, but I still like to do it fast without having to endlessly tweak my setup. By now I have evolved a way to set up a new customer (when I get a whole new project) on my Mac. This discusses my filters, calendars, and other programs. So this is basically my cheatsheet.

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I do love my iPhone. But.. I'm writing this while commuting on an underground train, of course without a connection. And of course there's Airplane mode. Being out of the country. There's a million reasons to need to use the iPhone disconnected.

You just can't tell me that, since the programming model is fully on the web, that I cannot use my apps when not connected. People's brains just don't work like that. It's a major cognitive dissonance that of the 12 main menu options on the machine, 5 don't work unless you are connected at the time.

So a "real" programming model, with a rich language and apps that get downloaded to the machine and store their data locally simply makes sense.

I mean, this machine has 8Gb of storage, for crying out loud.

At least my Blackberry was smart enough to know when it was disconnected and would save the request for when it connected again (so it could show me the pages on the message viewer). I missed that today.

Interviewing is difficult. Technical vetting is even more difficult. You only have an hour to determine if the person knows his/her salt.

I've been doing a lot of these lately, and I seem to be getting slightly better at them. In my worry to make sure we don't hire the wrong people, I eventually settled with this as a way to break the ice and start talking difficult problems. I call it the mind map method of technical vetting, or the Mind map approach to interviewing.

The problem

Basically, you only have an hour or two to completely technically vet someone on what may be 20 years of experience. Even if you yourself are very smart, there's simply not enough bandwidth in the world to guarantee a level of competency. And certifications are usually no help, because none of the stuff in there tends to relate to real world experience for your particular type of position.

The other problem is that the candidate is likely to be nervous at their best and sometimes plain scared out of their wits - even if they're the perfect candidate. Not exactly conducive to your best thought processes. You don't want to skip someone just because they're nervous or the shy type.

So what to do? A little workshop with a mind map.

I thought about this originally when I interviewed a now-coworker. So he helped me test-drive it. Maybe part of the success is that it worked the first time I tried it? Anyway, I've been using it for a little while now on the technical vettings and it seems to have worked so far.

technorati tags:
interviewing

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After my nightmare with Quicken I decided to try many different financial packages. I ended up deciding on iBank 2.3.2. I have been using it for a little while now and here are my impressions.

technorati tags:
finances
osx
mac

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Caching and concurrency management are tricky. If you have a cache that lives in memory but you have updates to the database that the objects originally came from, how are you going to make sure that the cached objects still reflect the contents of the database?

This really depends on what type of data you are dealing with. Data types that are mostly read (news, notices, articles) probably benefit from whatever caching you can provide, while areas of data that change a lot (shopping carts, server status records) probably won't benefit from caching at all.

Here are the concurrency strategies on hibernate caching explained:

technorati tags:
hibernate
java

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Is it too much to ask for a decent personal finance software package for OS X? I have used Quicken on PCs since 3.0. MS Money is also nice although I never really used it for more than trying it out.

I had heard Quicken for Mac was not as far ahead as the Windows version. But I thought, "the Windows version is so good, how bad can it be?" Boy was I wrong.

The app looks and feels like it's put together in a rush, with no attention to detail, by people who got their first course of OSX development about a week ago. It is BAD.

technorati tags:
osx
finances

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