Month: February 2006

One of those twenty-first century moments

I had one of those moments today that made me realize I’m living in the future. I sat down to write for this freelance project I’ve picked up, and realized that my audience consisted of people in need of particular business services (asset-backed financing, bridge loans, business process management consultants) and search engine crawlers looking for relevant content.

That is, my writing is designed for the reading pleasure of machines. Apparently this machine audience enjoys the frequent repitition of keywords.

Oracle Bones

Peter Hessler’s forthcoming book Oracle Bones begins with a story that might as well be a historical footnote. During the US campaign in Yugoslavia, US bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three. The US claimed it was an accident caused by the use of an outdated map. China claimed it was deliberate. There were protests and marches. Then, slowly, it all blew over. Later, stories leaked out that the embassy was the only target selected by the CIA rather than the Pentagon, that the three people killed were probable intelligence officers, that the Chinese embassy had been assisting the Serbs.

What was really happening? Hard to say. The rest of the book ranges from the earliest archeological findings to special economic zones and Falun Gong, but I think that first anecdote really captures Hessler’s method. He attempts to understand what’s happened, but he acknowledges his limitations, and the limitations of his methods and sources.

In many ways, he seems to say, our efforts to understand the present and the past are as incomplete as the predictions of the future that ancient Chinese made with the oracle bones that give the book its title. They give us some kind of reassurance that we know and control our environment– but it’s not complete by any means.

Hessler’s details and adventures are sometimes touching and sometimes hilarious, but always fascinating.

Build a network so you become the inside candidate

The conventional wisdom is that most companies don’t post job listings on their websites or on job boards to find candidates. They do it to pretend they’ve looked beyond the inside candidate they plan to hire anyway. An announcement that the job exists fulfills EEOC and INS requirements, and it’s nearly impossible to figure out who’s cheating and who’s not.

Of course, nobody admits that they do it intentionally– that would be both wrong and illegal. And of course many companies actually do mean it when they post job ads. Many of them get so many submissions they can’t possibly respond to or review them all, and just review as many as they can until they find someone acceptable. Others do have inside candidates but check them sincerely against blind submissions. Anyway, the point is that at least some job listings are just for show, but that it’s nearly impossible to tell how many, and which.

One way to identify an insincere job posting is that it lists required skills that are irrelevant to the job description, or which an impossibly small small number of people have– say, experience with an in-house software program.

Another indicator is that the contact information on the jobs page is an invalid email address that returns a bounce/failure message.

That’s what I got today, although I suppose it’s also plausible that their email system is broken, or that they recently fired their HR person. Like I said, it’s hard to tell.

I find it easier to assume that all of my job applications are merely cries in the wilderness. That way, my life becomes an absurd comedy, rather than a series of pathetic please to people whose carefully reasoned opinion of my resume and writing samples is that they should just hire the VP’s idiot cousin instead.

Design Philosophy

Checking out the 37 Signals website, I came across this little gem:

We believe software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much to learn. We build web-based products that do less, work smarter, feel better, and are easier to use.

I was immediately reminded of Dan Winship’s post from earlier this month about Novell Linux Desktop 10 and the software design process…. and of course about the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, and how they begin with “Design for People.”

And that brings me all the way back to what I think are the origins of GNOME’s successful focus on simplicity and ease of use: the sad, cautionary tale of GNOME window management systems. The story, as I remember it, is as follows:

There is an individual program which controls the size and placement of windows in an operating system, and it obviously needs to interact with other processes: the ones running the applications themselves of course, but also the ones controlling menus, help systems, screensavers, desktop backgrounds, and so forth. For quite some time, it was believed (don’t ask me by whom) that Linux users would appreciate the ability to select different window management applications based on their preferences. Linux users are, after all, quite sophisticated and particular in their preferences. Some want to be able to drag windows to the edge of the screen and have an entirely new expanse of screen pop in to greet them; others demand obedience to what is known as Fitts’ Law. Some want only the barest edges to their windows, others the flashiest possible. Some wanted windows to wait for a click before appearing.

So, the GNOME desktop was designed to allow users to pick from a variety of window management systems. The most popular seemed to be Enlightenment, and as it added users it also added features. With each feature, it got more users, many of whom offered suggestions for new features. With each feature Enlightenment also got larger and slower and more complicated. Ultimately, it split off from GNOME to become its own ultra-customizable desktop.

In the mean time, someone wrote a new window management tool, called Sawfish. Sawfish was fast and simple and rapidly supplanted Enlightenment. The thing was, it really needed just one more feature. Or two. Just a couple options. A year or so later, Sawfish was became the same morass of dialog boxes and performance-sapping gewgaws that Enlightenment had been, although it did have a lot of the features individual people wanted.

Eventually, the code became so complex that only one or two people were capable of dealing with it, and even they had trouble. Bugs were incredibly difficult to track down, since they often appeared only with certain combinations of options. At one point, someone found a bug in the way that Sawfish interacted with the Linux kernel when using certain models of IBM Thinkpad– and only when the computers had been turned on while plugged in, but then unplugged (or was it the other way around?)

Finally, Havoc Pennington and a few other good people put their feet down, and built what everyone hopes is the last window manager for GNOME: Metacity. One key advantage is that it has fewer preferences. It is clean, fast, and effective, and Havoc and the rest of the people who work on it aim to keep it that way.

The moral of the story can apply to a lot of problems inside and outside of software: too many options can be as bad as too few; simplicity can be as desirable a feature as complexity.

Some people, of course, will always demand the maximum number of options. That’s fine. They know where to go.

Y Combinator

The Times today has an article about Y-Combinator, a hatchery for technology startups. I’m hoping I’ll find some potential employers among its offspring.

However, I was particularly amused to see that the bio of co-founder Robert Morris on the About Y Combinator page states that “in 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public.” That’s something of a roundabout way of confirming that he is the Robert Morris, whose use of the buffer overflow discovery inadvertently brought the nascent Interntet to its knees and made him the first person indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.

Up With This I Will Not Put!

The unemployment website is broken today.

However, I’ve gotten an email from someone asking if I want to make up to $100,000 or more! The initial email was vague on the nature of the business, but invited me to an interview in Woburn.

The company has no website. I wrote back to ask what they do– they claim to sell insurance to small groups and individuals. Vault.com surveys indicate that they’re a multilevel marketing scam.

Which really makes me wonder, how hard did they read my resume before inviting me for an interview? The obvious keywords of “Woburn,” “sales,” “dupe,” and “sucker” are totally missing. What keywords are they looking for?

Cheney Jokes

I’m tempted to compile a list of the best Vice-President-shoots-some-dude jokes I’ve seen, but with the exception of the one about Ted Kennedy (“Sure, I’ll go hunting with you, but I drive”) and the one about gun control (“You know, you’re right, no gun control law will stop dangerous criminals from getting guns”) the vast majority are over at Tod Goldberg’s site, which features the perfectly aimed one-liner “Say what you will about Dick Cheney, but shooting a lawyer in the face is a strong message about tort reform.”

Of course the Daily Show clips are priceless, but that goes without saying, doesn’t it?