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
Read the rest of this entry »
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
Read the rest of this entry »
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
Read the rest of this entry »
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
Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes there's no reason to keep a giant directory, so you can use hdiutil to compress it and then a folder action to automatically mount it. OSXTips shows you how.
Note that it made my finder take a really long time opening the folder the first time (when it mounts). So your mileage may vary.
technorati tags:
osx
cbbtr
Just an Airport Extreme N base station. After a few small problems, I hooked it up to the network on one side and to an USB hub on the other, and it's doing great. It's nice not to depend on the desktop machine being up to share the drives and printer.
technorati tags:
osx
mac
network
Read the rest of this entry »
For Unix and Linux users, OS X is more of a lateral move, thanks to OS X's BSD underpinnings. Unfortunately with all the market-speak it may drive some smart engineer-types away from trying it out, since all of the every day things you live with is either buried deep in the developer documentation or behaves strangely out of the box.
I haven't found a document that covers this all together, so here it is, the basics to get comfortable if you're a command-line type of guy:
technorati tags:
osx
unix
linux
Read the rest of this entry »
I wish it wasn't true, because I like it better when people share, but WiFi security in Mexico is very good. Every household seems to have its network secured. I see 7 or 8 access points whenever I open the laptop, but no open ones.
Dang. And I needed to get some e-mail done with the office. And of course this blog posting will have to wait until I'm at a cybercafe as well 
Actually, I found a new mall that has an open WiFi on its food court. Slow, but sweet.. Now where's the Tacos al Pastor?
technorati tags:
wifi
mexico
I seemed to always have a problem with the unread bit getting "forgotten" on Mail.app. I thought it was a bug on Apple's product but apparently the bug is actually on the GPGMail bundle. Here is how to fix it.
Read the rest of this entry »
These are pretty funny..
Novell releases Get a Mac spoofs
The first video plays off the Win/Mac rivalry and pokes fun at how the industry often ignores Linux and its surprising (to some) user base size. The second video is arguably funnier, as it does a great job of poking fun at the way MS and Apple market their products while pointing out open source software's advantage of being a community effort. [digg - tech news / apple / dig]
technorati tags:
funny,
linux,
mac,
windows
Read the rest of this entry »