Of course typing with a real keyboard is going to feel great. The problem is that it's just field typing. On most of the apps, tabs don't work to move from field to field, and the PageUp/PageDown keys on the small apple bluetooth keyboard (Fn and Up/Down) are not wired in at all.

All the media function keys, however (from the brightness controls of F1&2 to the media and volume controls on F7 through F12) work fine. Which underscores the idea that this is a media consumption device more than a production device.

Dear Madam/Sir,

According to our records you have downloaded a version of WebLOAD Open Source. We would like to reiterate the following:

-WebLOAD Open Source has been declared End of life (EOL)

If you still have a version of the product we remind you that under the EULA, any distribution of the product or using it to service third parties is strictly forbidden.

What are the options available to you?

For a limited time RadView offers a competitive upgrade to WebLOAD Professional. We encourage you to contact a sales rep in your region quickly as discounts are set to expire.

Yada, yada, yada marketschpiel

Here's my response:

Well I'm glad I ended up staying with jmeter for my load testing needs then.

You may want to take a look at how your community is seeing you. This is not exactly the best way to acquire new clients or even retain your existing ones.
http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/5922

Now I will go out of my way to recommend any competition to you (even commercial, fully closed source) because at least I know what I get when I purchase from them instead of getting what seems like a bait-and-switch. I don't have time to deal with dishonest people, I have software to write.

It's not like there's no alternatives.

Maybe they hired a Music lawyer as their marketing person?

And honestly, did they really think nobody was going to blog about this??

"Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?"

-- Alan Kay, "Computer Software", Scientific American, September 1984

Fantastic!

I have traveled to Mexico with the iPhone on business a few times now. I get the international data global plan for 50Mb and disable all automatic checking (but keep Data Roaming on), and I also get the Mexico calling plan (not sure of its name but it makes the phone part cheaper). Then I enable Wifi and enable the phone asking me to connect to wifi signals.

The next step is to just be conscientious on the use. For example I open the laptop in the morning and get rid of all spam, etc, on the laptop so my inbox stays tidy throughout the rest of the day. I also use some server-side mail rules - procmail in my case - so the inbox doesn't get clogged with mailing list stuff unless I want to see it. Resetting the counter I haven't done but it's a good idea so you can keep tabs on your usage. Even with that I still get an overage of about $100 on top of it for a two week trip, which I arrange to expense with my company.

In Mexico there is a system called Prodigy Movil which is similar to T-Mobile's Wifi. Most airports have it, and a lot of restaurants and other public places do as well. If you have a friend with TelMex as their provider you can have them arrange for their monthly unlimited plan for $22 (or if they have TelMex broadband but no laptop, maybe they'll be nice enough to lend you their credentials because this service is free to their Broadband users).

My hope is that with the iPhone going international the phone companies will start taking a closer look at the data plans which are a complete rip-off as they stand today. If they end up with all you can eat plans throughout, maybe we will be able to pay for a month's worth and then not worry about it?

First, you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing. And the reason is that you have to work so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up. And you have to do it over an extended period of time. So if you don't love it, you're not really have fun doing it, you don't really love it, you're going to give up. And that's what happens to most people, actually, if you really look at the ones that ended up being "successful" in the eyes of society and the ones who didn't, the ones that are successful oftentimes loved what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that didn't love it quit, because they're sane - who would want to put up with this stuff if they don't love it? So it's a lot of hard work and a lot of worrying, constantly and if you don't love it you're going to fail. So you have to love it and you have to have passion, and that's the high order bit.

The second thing is you have to be a really good talent scout. Because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people. And you have to figure out how to size people up fairly quickly, make decisions without knowing people too well, and hire them and see how you do and refine your intuition and be able to build an organization that eventually can just build itself. Because you need great people around you.

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

• iCal: I add a calendar named Clients:ClientName for color-coding their appointments (and hide/showing).
• Mail: I try to practice Inbox Zero. For this I use MailTags and I try to do something with an e-mail within 2-5 seconds after scanning or reading it. Mail Act-On is crucial for this. So I do the following:
  • Add a Mail folder ClientName under Clients
  • Add an Act-On rule for the client's initial letter that will: Set MailTags project to ClientName, Move E-Mail to the Clients/ClientName folder
• Finder: Under Documents/Clients, add a ClientName folder. Using Mercurial, "hg init" the folder, or do whatever you do to put it under version control.
• OfficeTime: Add a ClientName project
• iGTD: Add a ClientName project

If you already use this, all of this takes less than 10 minutes, and it's only done once per client. Finger-memory takes care of the rest, because all your other clients work the same way.

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.

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

Mind Mapping an Interview

Basically the idea is to create a quick mind-map, based on circles, of the technologies you can ask good questions on (not necessarily of the ones you actually know yourself, you just need to know enough to ask questions, even if they're just "tell me about X"'). Your mind map may be different values to mine (indeed mine seems to be different every time I write it down).

Here's a very small example, just to give you an idea (I use many, many more circles than these, including "Database" and "OOP" circles, put "rails" off ruby, that kind of thing):

Note there's not a lot of logic to it. You're not writing an outline here, just a map. Even the thinnest association is probably fine.

So you start with small talk, what they've done on their last position, let them get comfortable. Depending on how comfortable the person seems with eye contact (some geeks are actually less comfortable than others - you can gauge it usually within the first couple of minutes), stand up and start the mindmap, asking them to continue telling you about the position (it's amazing how quick you can get at these once you did it once - it's probably one of those "memory recall" features). If not, wait until the end of that question then stand up and start it - if they're the hyperactive type they can join in as soon as you create the first couple of circles.

What you will instruct them to do is simple. They are to stand up next to you and put a dot with the red pen on the stuff that she feels very comfortable in, a green pen on the stuff he feels okay in, and leave blank the stuff she'd rather not be asked questions about. Also she can feel free to add circles for stuff you may have left out, or help you finish the map.

If you don't have two markers, ask her to do a big dot, a little dot - in fact some people have spontaneously decided to use several sizes of dots, and sometimes it has actually work better than colors if you leave large spaces on the mind map circles.

What this seems to accomplish, in my experience, is the following:

• Gives Suzie Dev a feeling of initial control over the interview process, reducing stress. After all, she helped decide on the topics to cover!
• Gets her standing up and interacting on the whiteboard on something simple. So it sets the tone for feeling comfortable standing up again (in case she feels like coding along, drawing diagrams, etcetera).
• Provides you with a quick map of how they actually feel about the technical vetting, greatly increasing how much ground you can cover in such a short time. The resume may be bunk some "pro" wrote or have stuff that they used so long ago that it's useless to try to get them to answer questions anymore, etcetera.

Inquisition Time

Now to asking the questions. This is up to you but basically (depending on the confidence of the candidate) I like to "go for the yugular" on difficulty and then step back. I try to concentrate on API usage and knowledge. If they know a lot of APIs and classes and what they're for, and then can describe their usage and maybe write something on the board (java code, XML config stuff) that is more or less correct, I figure they've done it before.

If you are following this approach, be upfront about it, letting them know you go for difficult questions first then work backwards, and they should not feel self-conscious about their ability to answer. It's important not to let the tension build to a point where now they feel like they don't know anything and clam up due to nervousness.

Why do this? Questioning in reverse difficulty order tends to make it so they have to understand the building blocks that you would normally ask afterwards. This has the effect to accelerate the interviews of the "very smart people" and slow down the interviews of the "not so much there". Within the first few minutes you are likely to get a feel if the person has what it takes to put up with reverse questioning, and it helps avoid the candidate flipping the Bozo Bit on you if you start too simple for their taste.

So what you want to do is start with the stuff they branded themselves as most familiar and go to the stuff they're least familiar afterwards. If you notice them having trouble, jump around questions in their different areas of expertise (keep looking at the map and you'll remember to go back to the original line of questioning).

What I have found, more often than not, is that I can use this method to cover enormous swaths of technology with an okay degree of confidence. They also feel like they got a real workout, no matter how experienced or inexperienced in a specific technology they are.