Drinkable Chicken

Some developers just can’t develop: Interesting blog post about mistakes made when hiring people, and how to avoid them.

Looking at it from the other side, I seem to have the inverse problem, sort of… I suspect I don’t interview very well. I have a hard time “selling” myself, at least in person or in phone interviews. I may have Python experience out the wazoo, but (as the article indicates as well) many interviewers are impressed by confident attitudes, and that is harder for me to do.

I also seem to have a problem with interview questions about SQL, for some reason. This is pretty weird, since *every* project I worked on professionally had a relational database behind it, and I was always involved in writing and maintaining SQL (sometimes as the sole designer and maintainer). I’ve worked with MS SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, Access, heck, even Paradox… and yet when an SQL question comes up I often draw a blank somehow, like I’m a !@#$ beginner.

So, needless to say, these things are a bit of an obstacles in my current search for a job. :-) I’m not sure what to do about it… bragging about my achievements, or overselling myself, makes me feel like an idiot… and I don’t know what causes the SQL issue, as I am perfectly comfortable behind an SQL prompt.

But who knows, maybe somebody will read this, look at my resume, and contact me for an interview, taking the above into account. ;-)

In other news, _why has disappeared from the net. Most of his sites have apparently been deleted.

Not sure what happened there… It’s not unheard of for people to take a break from the internet, sometimes radically so, but to delete popular sites (like the Poignant Guide to Ruby) and code (Shoes, Hpricot, Hackety Hack, etc) seems odd. So maybe some foul play is the cause; if someone managed to hack his sites, they could have used the same password for his github and twitter account. (On the other hand, you’d think _why would have noticed by now, and appeared somewhere or another to let people know what’s going on.)

I guess time will tell… Right now it’s a mystery (which doesn’t stop some people from jumping to conclusions, by the way… or being a prick about it. :-).

So a while ago I needed an organizer…

Short story: I decided that pen & paper versions are too primitive (and messy when you need to move/delete a lot of stuff). Desktop and web apps are too distracting, and I cannot take them with me unless I take the laptop. Modern PDAs have too many features that I don’t need (for this purpose), and again it’s too easy to get carried way playing with tons of games and silly apps. I wanted something *simple*.

More specifically, I was looking for something to:

• store my appointments (granted, I don’t have too many of those)
• remind me of birthdays
• keep a simple diary (not a blog)
• manage a number of to-do lists
• manage my projects (work and personal)
• keep a contact list with people’s addresses and such

Sooo, I ended up getting an older PDA, the Palm Zire 31.

Many people nowadays would probably consider this a bad choice. Only 16 Mb of memory, fairly low resolution (160×160), no camera, no phone, no wireless, no bluetooth. But you know what? I don’t need all that stuff. I already have a camera, and a phone, and a music player, and game devices… I don’t need my PDA for that.

It was around $65 on eBay (refurbised, but looks like new). It’s pretty, somewhat colorful, and does just what I want. I use the built-in Calendar, Contacts and Tasks apps, plus a few more, like:

• Simple Diary
• HandyShopper (make shopping lists, keep track of expenses)
• MobileDB
• Mr. Mind (mind mapping software, sort of)
• PalmReader (e-book reader)
• Progect (a project manager; allows you to nest tasks, etc)
• Projects (another one; this is more a collection of to-do lists)

These are very useful; I use my Zire to store ideas, keep track of places I applied at (yes, I’m still looking for work; here’s my updated resume :-), keep a wishlist, lists of blog ideas, etc.

There are plenty of games for the Palm OS as well, but I’m doing my best not to install them, otherwise the handheld will become as much of a distraction as my laptop. I couldn’t resist adding a few of them though… There’s Frobnitz (to play interactive fiction), and roguelikes, and Pocket Civ…

There are also programming languages available, like LispMe and Dragon Forth… but Palm OS 5 isn’t exactly the most popular platform to code for nowadays, so I’m not really doing much with them. It’s cool to have a Lisp on the Palm, though. ^_^

(There’s also an astrology program called Delphi for the Palm, which is interesting because it’s chock full of little features and things you can click on. Click on a planet to see the aspects it makes, click on a sign to see the planets in that sign, etc. It makes good use of its little 160×160 space.)

Syncing is easier than when I first had a Palm Pilot (in 1997)… although the Zire doesn’t have bluetooth or wifi, all it takes is to connect it to a PC or Mac with a USB cable, and click the “sync” icon. Installing new software is usually easy too; on my Mac, all I have to do is download it, then doubleclick on the .prc file to schedule it for upload for the next sync.

Overall, I like it rather a lot… There are some minor drawbacks as well, like the fact that it freezes sometimes and needs to be reset. Just remember to carry a paperclip around. :-)

I am currently hacking on the latest incarnation of Liquid. This version is written in D.

(I chose D for various reasons, over languages like Java, C#, OCaml and ActionScript… maybe someday I’ll write more about that. It’s not impossible that there will be another implementation in one of those languages, by the way. But for now, it’s D. D 1.0 to be precise, as I am developing it on an old iBook G3 that runs Tiger. Yes, not the most efficient of setups… but it’s fun! :-)

D is OK as far as statically typed languages go. It has a lot of improvements over C, but is less anal than Java, and less of a mess than C++. :-) It can be low-level if you wish (e.g. it has pointers much like C), but some of the features and library functions are pretty high-level, almost Python-like. It comes with a decent standard library, Unicode support, garbage collection, modules, dynamic arrays, real strings, a foreach loop and much more.

Of course, the static typing bites me every now and then… Often the error messages are actual bugs, but sometimes it’s just the type system being difficult.

I do hope that in the future, I will be able to link with some C libraries… maybe some GUI stuff. Right now everything is command line, which I wanted to avoid, but that’s how it goes. (An implementation in ActionScript would fix this, but it would lack a command line, and would likely be much slower.)

Anyway, I recommend D if you need to use a low-level language that isn’t too painful. =)