All posts by MattK

About MattK

I like you.

This week in review

Week.In.Review

At work, we have a full build process working now, thanks to Jiho the new guy and the msbuild task in nant. If you are trying to get vsto to work under nant, that seems to be the only way. We’re into some of our final testing now, it’s very exciting.

My sister’s sweetie John isn’t doing well. His health is rough and his dad just died. If you want to get in touch and wish them well, let me know and I’ll give you their contact information.

Sam and I are on the lookout for a house/apartment to buy. If you’ve got any good leads or advice, we always appreciate it. Sam has also decided to teach our cats to crap in the toilet, which should make for some amusing and terrible experiences in the coming weeks.

Installed Cygwin and rails under cygwin so that I can be more flexible in making a switch at home from windows. Very easy, not as harrowing as my past linuxy experiences have been. Then again, it’s always the hardware that’s the real hassle. Sam has generously donated to me the laptop I donated to her a few years ago for my ubuntu project.

The shotgun approach to recruiting is counterproductive

Get.rich.quick, Hacks, RubyOnRails, Spam 
> Hi Matthew,

>

> I'm very impressed with your rating/experience.

> At the current time, I have a few clients that are looking for experienced

> Ruby Rails developers (both contract & permanent) like yourself. There

> is

> lots of room for creativity and growth at these places.

>

> So, my contacts are below if you're still looking. Also, if possible, can

> you pls forward me

> your current resume?

>

> Thanks much!

>

> Leslie Doan

> ******************

> Managing Partner

> MINDSPHERES, INC.

> 2570 North First Street

> Suite 200

> San Jose, CA 95131

> C: 408.386.7246

> E: leslied@mindspheres.com

> W: www.mindspheres.com
Hi Leslie Doan,

I know it's tough to be a recruiter.  Cold calling is difficult and much

of recruiting is a volume game.

But you aren't doing yourself any favors with this email.

You're starting this relationship with me by lying to me.  You say you've

looked at my working with rails profile and been impressed.  But that

can't be true.  I've never worked on a real rails or ruby project.  I have

no ratings or experience, so how can you be impressed.My resume is also clearly linked from my working with rails profile.  If I

can't rely on you to know that, how can I trust you with my career?  I've

worked with a lot of recruiters, and I know that high volume folks treat

you like a tiny number. They are usually more interested in getting you

hired anywhere at any price so they can collect a commission.  I smell

that big time in this email.

If you show any level of familiarity with who I am or any of the many

links on my profile, I'm so much more likely to work with you.

Hope this helps you, and good luck in the recruiting game,

Matt

p.s. To make this letter worth my time as well as yours, I'm putting it up

for my pals on my website.  Don't worry, I don't have a very high

readership.

As you might imagine, I haven’t gotten a response from Leslie. I don’t think she’s interested in investing time in my career.

First Spam!

Hacks

When you have your own domain, you can set up mailboxes on it. Since I own MoreLightMoreLight, I’ve been using it to track spam sources and have been lucky to not get any spam until today. Any time I can avoid giving someone my email address for a signup, I do. If I can’t, I just give them their domain name @ MoreLightMoreLight. That way if they get scraped for spam I can kill that particular service and email address.

I signed up for the Ziki social network because they allow openid logins and it’s supposed to be the next linkedin. I’m not very impressed. Servers are slow, nothing seems to be responsive, and they got scraped for my first spam ever.  I’m elated and unhappy at the same time!

Spam is after the jump

Continue reading First Spam! →

Week in review

Lit, Week.In.Review

Oh, the things I’ve done.

Found the excellent Website Baker – a simple content management system. Probably what we will use for Gina Mauro‘s new site. I’ll be meeting with Gina on Saturday to help her buy a domain and get started.
Wrote an article on how to generate your resume in multiple formats with Zoho. It fixes problems in the google docs version.
Learned about polyphasic sleep. Seems like it’s a pipe dream for now. The basic idea is to compress your sleeping time to just REM sleep and do it on a strict schedule. I’ve read alot of the literature on the web and the common theme seems to be that it sucks to take a nap every 4 hours if you don’t have to.

The FilthI’ve started reading “The Filth“. I can’t really tell the difference between it and “The Invisibles” yet.

Saw the “Bourne Ad Infinitum”, where Jason Bourne tournes into an indestructible superhero. You know, you could really have stopped after the first few times he survived a paralyzing car crash.

More VIM love. I’m wondering how long until I’m faster with VIM than I am without it. Where’s the crossover point with VIM? More to the point, when I can I remove the vi/vim cheat sheet as my wallpaper?

Major achievements this week: Oh, I don’t know. How about celebrating 4 years of awesome with Sam?

Also, I scored major good son points with a perfect birthday gift for my dad. I bought him a picture of his boyhood home from the New York tax photo archives. I got the best thank you call ever. I’m still beaming.

This week in review

Hacks, Software, Week.In.Review

So much happened this week, without even getting into the tornado that hit Bay Ridge.

On Saturday I met with my ex-neighbor Gina Mauro – she needs a better website for her art. I think Sam and I should be able to provide one. The big part of the project is taking her requirements and picking a Content Management System off the shelf that she can use. I was playing around with Drupal and Mambo, but I think she basically just needs a styled and themed version of Gallery2, plus a contact and about page. That’s it. My biggest worry is making sure that I don’t underestimate the work involved.

Started learning to use VIM again on Monday. I just think I can get more done with it. I need to get better at it. So I’ve started trying to use it for all my basic text editing needs. Within one week of use, I’m getting pretty decent at using VIM. It seems like it encourages you to write text like a programmer, thinking about how to minimize steps as you take them.

Sent out an improved ipc batch script to my coworkers and introduced them to the wonders of autohotkey. No one really seems all that enthused by the possibility of saving some time, but we’ll see if a little prodding helps it catch on. Next week I may tell them about launchy!

The big news is that I managed to reform Ryan Stewart’s PDF Wallet into a class and an edited version of ezpdf. I’ve got the first wallet from this new page in my pocket right now and I’ll be working to migrate Ryan’s stuff with him this weekend. Most of the work was done on the subway to and from my job. All of the work was done in Vim. More on that next week!

Next week I plan to put more effort into getting Gina an estimate for her website and then trying to knock it out in my spare time.

No progress on Spanish. I haven’t given up on it yet, but if I don’t do some more learning, I’ll start forgetting.

Sam and I took out the stitches in my foot together. I’m walking fine and everything seems to be working.

Next week I plan to put more effort into getting Gina an estimate for her website and then trying to knock it out in my spare time.

Work next week should be much quieter, one of the louder folks here has gone on to a new job. I wish him luck and more happiness!

Paper Wallet Generator

Dev, Hacks, Software

I was very excited to see Ryan Stewart’s paper wallet pdf generator a while ago. Excited, but frustrated. It was good, but had some flaws. I got in contact with Ryan, and he invited me to help out with fixing the problems.

Some of the issues are in the underlying ezpdf code for PHP, so I thought I’d go over them. Ezpdf and the pdf class underlying it have some bugs with handling rotated text, which I think I’ve fixed. It’s rough, but I’ll be putting it up soon, and then I’ll submit the changes to R&OS for inclusion into ezpdf.

Should be going up sometime this week.