It's so nice...

... watching someone ELSE become a new father (again).

A family with a daughter close in age to our own is expanding - the wife went to the maternity ward tonight, and they dropped off their daughter, N. She and our daughter are in the living room, tucked into sleeping bags, engaging in a shush war. I just went upstairs and said "Girls, you need to be quiet."

Now I am really a father.

Best filesystem laugh today.

Via Slashdot's Ext4 Advances As Interim Step To Btrfs article, I got curious about Btrfs and looked it up on Wikipedia. Then I started laughing, from this:

Btrfs is still in heavy development and many basic features are still missing (like detecting when the disk is full, as of May 2008).

Yes, I am such a geek that I thought that was funny.

No, I am not such an arrogant geek that I look down on the Btrfs developers for omitting that. Writing a filesystem is a seriously big undertaking, and one of those really scary pursuits - you are writing code that stores everything important on a hard drive. That is just wow.

Just tickled by that omission.

Ok, back to work...

For once I picked the right horse

Ajaxian » jQuery finds its way into Microsoft and Nokia stacks, via Hacker News.

I used jQuery on recent projects, and it is an amazing Javascript library. Simply a joy to use, and it does everything I need. Nice to see two large companies coming to their senses, especially Microsoft. They have the longest way to go toward client-side web usability.

No Bailout!

Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek says it best:

• Why the 1930's "New Deal" was Hopeless.
• Why there should be No Bailout.

No bailout!

Python recruitment failures

I thought Python programmers were supposed to be smarter than average, so why the screw-ups for these Python employers?

• Connecticut telecommute-only employer

  • Hires a recruiter in Atlanta to find them some good Python developers. Advertises nowhere that I can find.
  • Recruiter emails me. Ignores my response. Emails exact same message a week later. I call him. "Oh, I guess I didn't read my email." And you are recruiting technical people?
  • The recruiter cannot understand basic code syntax. As I read him my answer to the six questions the employer wanted, he keeps asking "Is there a space before the equal sign?"
  • The company expects people to work an average of fifty hours a week. Average.
  • The company has a "bonus" structure based on individual and team productivity, on top of a "base" salary. The "base" salary is low, but hey, some programmers earn double their base in bonuses! Based on what? Recruiter does not know.
  • The company will not talk directly to job applicants until at least two rounds of talks with the recruiter: the clueless one, the one who has a LinkedIn: PyAtl badge but does not understand basic syntax.

• A well-known open-source company, most of their global workforce telecommutes

  • I applied for three jobs over a three-month span, had four phone interviews, and not once received a timely response.
  • Their COO begged developers to apply to their company, but rejected good developers (that would be me) because I "did not have large-scale systems experience." Exactly where the f--- am I supposed to get that EXCEPT AT YOUR F------ COMPANY? And oh, would you mind putting that requirement in your job ad?

• A California company with a local office

  • The owner, who conducted the first telephone interview, requested emphatically that I contact them if I chose another job, so that they "would not waste resources pursuing me." Guess what they did after my second interview, which I was told went well? No response, no notification, nothing. A few weeks later they advertise for the same position again.

    So I should expend the effort notifying them if I choose another job, but they are free to ignore me after they make a decision?