Tom Printy’s Blog

About two weeks ago I worked a booth at recent Chicago Dice Career fair. There were may 15 other companies with booths there. This fair was devoted towards job seekers who considered themselves technical or software development related. This fair was interesting to me because it gave a real sense about where the economy is and what types of people are looking for jobs and what types of people are not looking for a job. The good news is (based on my observations) is that if you are a good solid software developer you are employed and not looking. Te bad news is that if you are a Project Manager (PM) you are out there looking for new gig and you are not alone.  I must have had at least 80 people in a 4 hour period ask if my employer was looking for a Project Manager.  I would tell them that we are looking for developers or sysadmins and they would frown. I guess they were hearing that a lot.

What does this say about the economy? To me it says that we are in the very early stages of a slow down or  recession. It seems that companies are just starting to trim the fat (Project Management) and have decided to keep the meat (developers).  This also means that there possible could be more fat trimming and even meat trimming in  the near future, and that we haven’t even started to see the effects of this recession or coming recession.

As always keep your resume polished and ears to the ground.

I just finished watching “The Big Lebowski” on Hulu.  Hulu is the best new site to come out in a while. Were else can I get all this content for free and have it be legal? Sure there are some commercials but I can stand a 30 second interruption every now and then while I watch a free movie. There is also a ton of NBC and FOX network tv shows on the site as well.

As this service get bigger it would be nice if they implemented a recommendation engine but at least for now the movie content is small enough that I can figure out what to watch.

If you are looking for something to watch but don’t want to trek to the video store or wait for your next DVD in the mail you can always watch the content on Hulu.

Beaver books the little facebook application that I helped write finally reached 100 registered users!!!!

Yea!!!!

If you have a facebook account give Beaver Books a try and let me know how you like it.

I attended Pycon this year. This is the definitive conference for all things python. This was a one of the larger geeky conferences that I have been to in a long time. I think that there are a lot of developers starting to migrate to the language. There are a lot of very cool things being done with python. I would venture to say that if you are a software development company that python can almost run your whole organization. I saw tools that will allow you to do everything from managing your systems (http://www.zenoss.com/), keeping track of your accounting (http://www.fivedash.com/) to programming windows based applications and mobile applications. This is truely and amazing ecosystem of software.

The main reason that I attended Pycon was to really nail down id python was something that I wanted to explore more and if Django can really help me put some of my ideas into action. I can say without a doubt that Python is something I need to spend a lot more time on, and Django seems like a very usable environment for creating web apps. I was even more excited when I passed by a booth that showed Python running on a Nokia N95.

So will I dump perl? No I don’t see that happening soon as I must use perl everyday to pay the bills, but I see all my new personal projects moving towards python. Once I start thinking in Python I am sure this will be easier.

Thanks Pycon for showing me the light.

On the way into work this morning, I noticed a hand painted sign on the side of the road that read “Google Ron Paul“. I think this is really interesting! This is interesting to me because the sign does not mention that he is running for president, nor does it mention that he is part of the Replublican party. It just tells people that the are number 1 in Google and to go look it up. It is a very interesting way to call people to action. So go Google Ron Paul

For as long as I have been writing software professionally there has always been a need to create reports. I have always found this be be boring but a necessary evil. The basic idea is to query a database munge the data and display it. The hardest part was showing the data to people in a format that they would understand and want to use. I have used different methods from table to graph to create excel spreadsheet. It was always the presentation of the data that seemed to take the longest. Well I think that is all about to change. Last week Google released their Charting API. It provides a nice and easy to use interface to create all kinds of configurable charts. As a developer you specify the url for the browser to retrieve and thier engine does the rest. For example here is the code that I used to generate the 3D pie chart:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:10.0,20.0,70.0 &chs=300×100&chl=Savings|Taxes|Expenses

That was all there was to it. I didn’t have to understand some crazy graphing javascript code, I didn’t have to play with image magic, I just had to load the url. While this method isn’t great for larger datasets this method is perfect for small datasets. I have already thought of a couple cool ways to use this api, It has actually made me excited to write reporting software now.

A couple weeks ago I received a new Garmin Nuvi 250 as a gift. I have been wating a personal navigation device but I decided that I was going to wait to buy one until the Dash.net devices became available. However I have really enjoyed using the Garmin Nuvi 250.

In the three weeks that I have had the PND, the devices has worked as it is supposed to. It show my current position on roads and will give me turn by turn directions to addresses that I either input or select from the POI database. As this is my first PND I didn’t expect a whole lot from it, bit it has mostly met my expectations of a device like this. I continue to be impressed with the POI database that is in the device. The couple of times that I have used it to look up a hotel or restaurant I found the location without too much hassle. Once the location was selected I was guided to the front door without any problems.

While driving around familiar locations the device doesn’t have much value, however I do like the ability of the device to act as a trip computer. It calculates average speed, top speed, amount of time stopped, amount of time moving and total tile. I relaly like this information as it gives me an accurate picture of how long it takes me to drive to and from work.

Another nice feature is that the device has a light sensor in it. As it goes from day to night the device will adjust the map background from white to black to help your eyes compensate. I thought that this was a nice touch and noticed the maps being redrawn when as day turned to evening.

If I had to change something about the device I would make the battery last a bit longer between charges. I can usually go about 4 days (8 hours) before giving it a charge. Also I would let the user disable all the warning screens, they are annoying. Lastly I would improve the satellite search feature. If you turn the device on in your garage then pull out it has a hard time getting a lock on satellites. If you turn it on in the open it locks on right away. All these are minor annoyances and don’t change my opinion of the device.

All in all this is a great entry level PND and I am glad to have it. If you are looking for a basic PND this is great one to buy. With a starting price of about $250.00 you can’t go wrong.

Recently I had cause to setup a new Wordpress blog on a system that was hosted by Hostway. We ran into problems getting the permalinks to function. The .htaccess file that Wordpress generates for permalinks was causing Apache on the Hostway system to through a 500 error or give a 400 error. To find out what was going on I looked at the Apache error log and saw a line like:

Permission denied: cannot read directory for multi

After a bit of googling I came up with the following .htaccess that fixed Wordpress Permalinks:

Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes -MultiViews

#BEGIN WordPress

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Notice how in the options line I turn off MultiViews and Indexes? Once I dropped this .htaccess in place Wordpress and Apache were able to play nice. My guess is that Hostway has Multiviews and Indexes on by default such that you can be lazy about the files that you place on their server. It isn’t a terrible way to go just that I wish they had a document showing what options they have enabled. As a side note I can see what mods they have enabled on the server by looking at /etc/apache2/mods_enabled .

I hope that this helps someone else out.

I may be a geek but I tend to be a cheap geek! This week I acquired my first iPod. A guy at work got an iPhone and had no use for his iPod Nano. Being the cheapskate I am I offered him some money for his unused Nano. I am now a proud owner of a black 1st gen iPod Nano. It sat in my laptop bag all week but I was finally able to play with it this weekend. It works as advertised, it plays mp3 music that I have stored on there. I mostly plan to use it while in the car to and from work. Now I have to find some good podcasts.

I haven’t experienced the euphoria that people seem to over the device but it will be nice to have. For nostalgia here is the original product announce of the iPod from 2001. Boy have things changed since then.

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