Wow. I was checking my old yahoo mail and found a daily report from the slashdot news relay:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=19662&cid=0&pid=0&startat=&threshold=-1&mode=nested&commentsort=0&op=Change

you know what? From 2 stories I just revisited, story comments back in 1999 seem to amount to less than 200 and the user id numbers never went past the 100000. If you browse at 2, you'll see lots of the 10000 range uid's and 1000's too. Which brings a question, since I was a newb here back then: When exactly was the 100000th ID mark broken? The /. bot email was dated June '99 but I didn't see posts of the 100k newbie crowd there at all, like we tend to now (the post 600k'ers). I joined slashdot sometime before June that year after seeing an empty Solaris workstation in our lab that had loaded it. I wish I knew who used it and how they came to hear about slashdot back then in our comp sci dept.

Speaking of slashdot popularity, since we think ourselves to be such a large site-crumbling force, how safe would it be to mention /. discretely to an IT coworker and see if he's in here too? How do you push it on them safely without alienating them, if they're only slightly versed in the Tech Way(tm)?

I had another interview on 2/2/04. Don't remember if I mentioned it here yet: the one that was set up 1 day after I cold-dropped my resume. Came in synch with my email checking, resulting in a surprising instantaneous RSVP :)

They also liked my resume because I used resume paper, and mentioned that it was really nice of me to wear a suit and that I made a great first impression. I am starting to assume that all my interviews go really well but the job is still given away. [I just decided against posting detailed interviews here.] You know that only 1 person will fill that position if you don't convince them of being the BEST.

The interview result will be known tomorrow^H^H^H later today and they mentioned that the other candidates were sort of unavailable and running out of time, so I'm probably getting this part-time job.

I'm getting another interview soon. The ratio of incoming-job-calls to emails has definitely switched in favor of the latter after my last interview. Employers can call my local number, but seem to want to save time, impose ground rules and demand an updated resume --and save saliva thanks to email scripts, all at the same time.

You know what? I've followed suggestions and started bugging IT divisions directly. Although the staffers are often clueless about their hiring queue... they're AWEFULLY NICE: They'll release names and numbers of their bosses and quickly relay your resume (!) I even got through to a director who ran a simple interview on the spot, and was quickly impressed enough to talk to the boss about opening up a new vacancy. But the point is that receptionist members of IT services seem to be there for us, at least in college labs.

Why do I bring this up? Because the start of a job search is frustrating. People in the job market's waters eventually realize that most online jobs refer to individuals with 3rd-party positions who want a quick buck, often without letting newbies know that they aren't who you think they are or that internet solicitations overwhelm 3rd party-headhunters in ways that internal HR depts can handle. Also consider how many hierarchical layers below (or above?) your contact the actual job lies:

Unlike a direct contact with IT on a slow afternoon, HR contacts will rush to dismiss you for trying certain things. However, it still is recommended that you ask NAMES, befriend nearby staff members and ask about wether your info "went through" to get your foot in the door to ask further things ... even make a personal impression on people who can root (sic) for you if HR is adamant on looking away --trust me, I've had the chance of helping the decision making process, and sometimes the boss is blind to something or hypersensitive to other things. When I see "HR" instead of direct contact name, I try to walk over to IT and inquire for Techs who'll give me an easy head start unofficially. You should too. HR is too busy hiring people doing the "traditional jobs" to deal with us. They'd rather think we already "know better and should use email or faxes" instead of the post and the phone --NO THANKS! I don't wanna be digitized for easy access to their /dev/null job queue (sic).

I've painstakingly edited this JE to death. That could keep going, but I need to leave for the weekend. Hope this helps or at least gives you a nodding spree. Later!

This is refreshing... I just checked an email account I use only for prospective employers. It turns out that the Spam folder had a single message, and it came from someone whose email address is name.surname@host.domain and now I know the name of someone in HR.

Isn't that cool? It was a sideeffect of the Novarg.A@mm virus, according to Yahoo's attachment scan. I know now that I've made it into the victim's Outlook Contact list long after my application there. They had declined a previous app and mentioned I made it to the top, but it didn't get me an interview. What do you recommend I do? Maybe I'll go contact an IT member in person, instead of HR, to see what's cooking in their lab, but should I mention this little "incident" as a way to pull 'rank' directly to IT as a prospective candidate?

For testing purposes, I sat on my MacOs system to see if I could wake up the PC from sleep for networking tasks. After that, I decided to check out my ol' Netscape browser, since It's not installed in my Windows or Linux setups.

Then the sad truth came up: Yahoo Mail works with netscape throwing FIVE javascript warnings per email message I check, no doubt because of standards that it doesn't support --it's an old Netscape. Then I tried to see if I can touch my hotmail account to avoid the monthly expiration, and it just said I wasn't supported.

What has become of the web? I can imagine poor countries being unable to guarantee their systems will run the newest banking webapps and transaction systems, and old computers getting slower just because they DO have the newest software. One of the reasons I never upgraded to Netscape 6.

Well, someday my old mac will be unable to access the web. In many ways, it already is, but I use iCab and other small but working current versions. I wish they'd only support CSS better...

Offtopic: Hey, I'm a geek! Hey, I can cook! Hey! I'm not female!
Take that, other geeks! ;)

It's late at night, I'm trying to get some stuff done and print it out, and it turns out that my special paper is the root of all printer evil, again. For about 3 months, I had lacked the kind of paper I am trying tonight, and it really sucks because I HAVE to print stuff or the backlog of "to-print" documents is going to hurt me for another 3 days or more.

It really sucks in today multitasking world when you can't get things done because your computer refuses to complete an order that you thought was already taken care of.

On unrelated news, I saw LOTR. Cold. Haven't read the book or seen the previous movies, but I knew many of the premises because of contact with other non-geeks. It really feels like you ARE missing out when geek material makes it into mainstream and you're the last geek can't talk about things like that to other ppl.

xdesk seems to be slowing down my system. It may be because I left several documents open for 3 days in one of the hidden desktops. It seems that Linux is more forgiving, though. I use Mandrake 9 and no swapfile, and it takes a lot before it begins warning about ram hunger.

[Posted on thread http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/14/0158228&tid=]

I certainly get 75% of that much daily spam (an email address from 1997). In part, it came from college forwards and my naive signing up for those "funny" sites that forwarded jokes and random personality tests.

Mostly on freshman year, as I realized what was happening and began to ignore forwards. My college address, well known by my friends, was not as badly affected but around junior year it started showing signs of spam, but the Signal to noise ratio was pretty good. When I started seeing my college domain faked, I realized it was a bad thing. Coincidentally, all my email forwarding from the college ceases today, and I'm relieved and hopeful that at least some emails will stop dead halfway at the expired address.

I am guilty of having placed my address up on geocities back in 97 where the spambots got it for a good year or so. Other than that, I always obfuscate it or don't list it at all.

You know what? I have an unlisted address that gets spam. How? it's a 5 letter [screename --sans the domain] combination. My yahoo one is [edit: 7] letters. Lots of spammers use dictionary attacks and brute force generation. Verdict? I should place numbers and underscores [and use longer screennames, like my /. nick here]. In yahoo I can see mass mailings CC'ed to dictionary "attackees" right before and after my own name. Yup, it's annoying. Another problem is if you ever list your addy in a jobsearch site. Monster.com got me "job spam" quicker than real email to my newly published, monster-only address. I know there's lots of fake "employer usage" accounts that could do real damage because spammers can get more data about a user by posing as a hiring source to job sites --and get your real name, phone, college name and all sorts of ID theft information based on your well-crafted, employment-hungry information disclosure thru online resumes and cover letters.

Just a thought for anyone who might benefit. I'm glad I could find the exact thread to post this.

I found this after holding for a year on my search of this useful Linux functionality. Thought you might like to know...

xDeskSoftware has a copy of xDesk, which has a two versions: the 3.8 something, which expires in 1-2 months, and their freeware. I got their freeware.

Just a tad later, I found this sourceforge project "Virtual Dimension", which I'll try later on another user's unsuspecting system. Dad's will do ;)

On unrelated news, I have compiled my pet project requiring OpenGL within Borland C++. I used a copy of the folder I used for Mandrake's GCC successful compile, the one with all my recent code fixes required for GCC to build the Mandrake version of it. After fiddling with Borland's own warnings and weird but insightful moments of "whoa, how did this code ever compile before this syntax error got detected?" heck, this sentence is too long and will be lame in syntax... Ahem! After stuff happened, the code compiled and ran and "drew stuff" up to the point where I'm stuck. Either the STL::iterator code is doing something weird just in Borland, or stale pointers are haunting just my Borland code. The code has been successful in Solaris, Rhide + Allegro for Windows 95-2000, Linux Mandrake and Mandrake, in that order. (I like porting, someday I'll do some official community-minded OSS code work.) Windows 2000 is about to work, but I'll have to do some deep digging on the Borland bug forums.

I just got mod points. It gets annoying sometimes. I'm busy! Must... click off... willing to moderate setting ... for a while. Another thing: If you need wallpaper on varios kinds of themes, go to deviantART.com. It's been a while since I first stumbled upon it. You guys can find your scifi or anime wallpaper or whatever. They tend to run at a 1024 width. Alright. I'm Singing off... after previewing this JE. Quality Assurance (tm) :)

A special Thanks for your recent appreciation of my JE links goes to MsWillow, and then to all of you who also follow them. It's a nice use of the /. journals that I myself benefit from all the time.

Cool. I have been messing around with some Glut code in Borland C++ at the same time. I believe it's a step in the right direction

Here's a basic start from opengl.org

Here are some more links .. never too redundant:
Site 1

Site 2 (brazilian portuguese)

Site 3

There is also the obligatory www.opengl.org for the specification documentation in PS. There's a PDF file version somewhere but I think they weren't the direct source. Sgi.com turned up in my searches but on a quick check there were no GL files except example code.

I just had a power fluctuation here in NYC at 2:25pm (Sunday 1/11). Any fellow NYorkers feel that? It was a mere blink but reset all my lights, TV, phone base station and VCR. If it didn't make voltage go all the way to zero, it went below all low consumption devices and I'm resetting clocks. Almost all! The only thing left in order was my old answering machine, which has a bit of a flash saving feature or something

Thank God for Opera. It didn't lose my browsing session. I was gonna post this:

Make google your default search page

There's a safe REG file for windows IE.

I'm reposting my recent reply to valuable advice to a Journal entry by Lumpish Scholar where I'm nicely told about getting off my digital-philiac butt and strengthening networking efforts instead of job site dependency :) . In mine I replied about my difficulties, which I admit are not that reasonable and indicate I need a bigger effort. I'm working on it!

On another topic, I still owe you guys a brand new JE about being an Old Version Jerk / Luddite, and a better explanation of our cultural problems with nerddom --but I probably won't post that now that I have reposted the JE and finished reading this article on Nerds vs. Popularity from Fortnox's journal and the ensuing thread replying to it. Also, I have a bunch of JE stuff on hold but am currently delaying my Borland Tutorial as well. I'm editing the heck out of this intro.

I'm reparenting the thing as a JE before it leaves the 24-recent-comments spotlight, disappearing into obscurity:

(Around Monday January 05 2004)
=============BEGIN COMMENT REPOST================

I hear you. I have a difficult time with the network factor because Computer Science is not very compatible with my family's culture (I'll explain) and also the friends that I have are not very computer savvy. Even in my own career few actually had any clear career idea when the degree came. Those will go on to get a Masters in CS and then a job, or they want to get certified to repair computers in some mom-and-pops multiservice store, rather than do programming or even helpdesk (this is my bias) and get company benefits. I am not a guru either. I was trained at two different schools and none of my slashdot- level savvy friends is in my personal network anymore -Hmm, I do know one living about 30 miles away. It's been 3 months, since the last email, but thanks for the brainstorming session! I got (net)work to do ;)

The overdue explanation about the comment's start:

The issue with my family is that they are eager to get me a job by default, so much that they will advertise me without knowing what I can do and what is beyond my markettable training. This is a side effect of our immigration from outside the US, where "Informatics" (IT per se) is a nascent college major and "Computer Science" never was. So people don't know what my degree entitles me to. They have seen me fix software and troubleshoot hardware more than they have seen me code, and for the most part our culture does not even have a word for "geek" or "nerd" -only the expression "socially inept" which doesn't hold their english language semantic value of *knowledge* or *computer-ness* at all.

I'll reread this since it seems like I'm rambling. What I mean is that I've had to work pretty hard to let my relatives know that programming requires no solder iron and implies debugging, loss of social life, and very specific employment guidelines - even relaxed job dress codes, for God sakes! I feel a bit at a loss when a relative or friend wants a resume for me to fix 2 private business computers (I'm not an A+ technician yet!) and then do (sub-CS salaried) office work when I want to do phone troubleshooting or design LANs or databases and graphics.

Sorry, in spite of all the talking, I have a few friends who can help me network, just as I try to help them when I find their stuff. I just wish I could say "i'm a doctor, or lawyer or excercise trainer" instead of the First-world-centric "programmer / information scientist" slant that they have a bit of trouble explaining to prospective employers, thereby hurting my chances of success by making it harder to market my qualifications when I can't help 'em. Thanks for listening. I think I'll archive this in a JE.

=============END COMMENT REPOST=================

1. should we apply to anonymized companies that automatically matched our profile/resume?
2. how do you guys deal with the constant letdown of enrolling in the Nth and "final" monster.com-like directory ... to discover half the Contacts only link to other sites where a NEW application process is required? (I'm beginning to lose track of my registered logins. :-P ) Do you STILL follow the link if they suggest going to their smaller site but give you minimal contact info like fax or email?

A useful tip: If you see a local Job Agency listed on the anonymized post rather than a company, it is probably best that you GO in person. Don't even call --they'll just queue / dehumanize you through the email system or fax machine. Agencies refuse to admit over a phone that you are a good match (based on their point by point requirements) even if the employer wants you hired 'yesterday' and the headhunter website says they've been itching since 6 months ago. So a good first impression counts a lot.

I did read that August Time Magazine article about the recent Harvard grad seeking entry-level for a social science field. It was about a long job search that was made impossible by current online databases and automated resume scanners, when the grad's personal charm and ability would have been enough to catch someone's eye when their lacking / scattered resume couldn't pass any recruiter's version of a resume "lameness filter". By the time the article was print, though the person had finally been interviewed and hired.
Thanks. Your posts are very valuable !

Working with old C++ code from 2001 and GCC 2.6, I'm getting closer and closer to compile my old Solaris App in Linux. Some weird stuff gets in the way, like warnings and errors that pop up when my code had already compiled under Solaris, so it weirds me out that every time i port the code to a new platform, the current versions of GNU at that time will give different complaints. I ported most of it to Windows by fixing trivial errors like adding explicit != definitions for functions where the == was there, and stuff like removing a certain #includes should not have allowed a compiled program years ago, in the first place. Signs of the Shroedingbug again! (look it up)

This CS14 link from February 2003 (wow, I should start using the prase 'last year' eh?):
https://www.cs.ucr.edu/pipermail/cs14/2003-February/000414.html

Solved my inquiry about what the heck the
parse errors were in "list::iterator = " basically the C++ Standard requires me to declare a "typename" in front of every line of that kind. At that point I feel like replacing my command line compiler from the default in Mandrake 9.0 to the old school Solaris 8 one that maybe lagged behind what should probably have been standard as far back as the year I coded the program. But even my reference materials don't mention this problem a lot. Go figure. I still can't code with GUI's in C++, and this program's use of Mesa and GL is as close as I can get for now.

On another point, it looks like my latest frantic messing with Mandrake settings and Linuxconf has revived Konqueror's ability to connect to the web. I tell you, my computer seems to have mood swings in terms of what can access its Network card. Good thing Galeon and other programs worked in the meantime. Now, Win98 is the disabled OS. Too bad. Mandrake and Win2k are ok for now, and after all the recent articles about KIOslaves for Konqueror, I was eager to give my Konqui a spin and see about all its other addressbar tricks

I've done more coding in these holidays than a person should ;)

Happy New Year!

Spent a bunch of time for the past two weeks designing a database schema to hold my job search data. Wonderfully, I'm playing with Apache and PHPMyAdmin to access it from the rest of the home network.

Meanwhile, you too can check out Devshed's tutorials on mySQL and PHP. There's a page there for job search admins who are trying to create an online tracking system. I am doing the opposite.

For those who are wondering about my government offer, it seems like they hired a different candidate. Today was my limit on waiting for the 2 week reply. Well, I'm still looking for PHP DBA or Helpdesk or entry level LAN Admin positions in NYC. Keep me posted!