Reasons to Trash or Rewrite Your Resume

Lifehacker.com has a great post today on rewriting your resume. Here are some excerpts:

Having a resume begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. Just more fodder for the corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve?

Don’t focus on your responsibilities, focus on what you achieved. […] Most people do not think in terms of quantified achievements when they are in the job, but on the resume, that’s the only part of the job that matters. No one can see that you were a “good team player” on your resume unless you can say “established a team to solve problem x and increased sales x%” or “joined under-performing team and helped that team beat production delivery dates by three weeks.”

(via Lifehacker: Reasons to Trash or Rewrite Your Resume)

PNG transparency test

Examine the test images in the left column below. To determine how your browser handles PNG transparency, find the images on the right that look the most similar.

Not all possible results are shown; there are too many combinations of background colors and shapes of the opaque region. However, I intend to include every result that actually occurs in a mainstream browser. If I am missing any, please let me know.

It’s come to my attention that my images which show how alpha transparency should look are not quite perfect in regard to precisely how transparent they are at various points. Rather than try to modify this page to test gamma correction issues as well, I’ve created a separate test page for that.

This test page was constructed by Jason Summers. Comments may be emailed to jason1@pobox.com.
There are other test pages listed at the PNG web site.

(via PNG transparency test)

Null-Coalescing Operator

While at a rather disappointing MSDN event yesterday, I came across one gem of C# 3.0 candy in the form of a null-coalescing operator. This is basically a short-cut for the oft seen:

string emailAddress = parsedValue != null ? parsedValue : “(Not provided)”;

OR

string emailAddress = String.Empty;
if (parsedValue != null) {
emailAddress = parsedValue;
}
else {
emailAddress = “(Not provided)”;
}

Using the Null-Coalescing Operator
These can now instead be re-written using the new null-coalescing operator as:

string emailAddress = parsedValue ?? “(Not provided)”;

This can roughly be read as “Set emailAddress equal to parsedValue unless it is null, in which case set it to the literal (Not Provided)”.

(via Null-Coalescing Operator)

Stroustrup and Sutter: C++ to run and run | Reg Developer

This is the conference (and super session) I attended last week. It was really cool. =)

Stroustrup and Sutter: C++ to run and run | Reg Developer

SD West 2008 For the second year in a row organizers at the Software Development Conference & Expo West felt the super sessions hosted by C++ legends Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter were worth some ink on the event agenda.

“There was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when they simply stopped advertising C++ sessions at this conference,” Sutter told attendees. “And yet they found a curious thing: every year for four years, C++ was the strongest track at the show. With zero advertising! That says something about the market. That says that there are problems that C++ is solving.”

The duo offered the C++ crowd day-long sessions at SD West. In fact, a session presented last year (Concepts and generic programming in C++0x”) was back by popular demand, alongside an additional day of new material covering the design and evolution of the grandpappy of object-oriented programming languages.

Sutter is the author of several books on software development, a lead architect at Microsoft, chair of the ISO C++ standards committee, and coiner of the phrase “concurrency revolution.” Stroustrup is also an author, a professor of computer science at the Texas A&M University’s college of engineering, and a research fellow at AT&T Labs.

Of course, the Danish computer scientist is best known as the creator and original implementer of C++.

Stroustrup doesn’t like to hear his brainchild referred to as an object-oriented programming (OOP) language, though he allowed that its main contribution was to make OOP mainstream. “Before C++, 99.9 per cent of programmers never even heard of it OOP,” he said during a post-session Q&A. “Those who’d heard of it believed that it was only for slow graphics written by geniuses.”

The Ultimate Office Etiquette Guide

If you’ve ever been sat at your desk, hard at work, trying to finish your report in time for that very important meeting with the Managing Director; you’ll know just how annoying it is to have the wacky office comedian come striding up to you in his Homer Simpson tie, wanting to play his new collection of stupid cell phone ringtones. Welcome to the dark and murky world of Office Etiquette.

I actually made a big etiquette faux pas at my new employer just this week. I was well-groomed, well-dressed and I was polite, pleasant and smiling as I greeted my new co-workers. But as I sat down after making myself a cup of tea, I couldn’t help but notice that everyone in the office was looking at me like I’d just murdered their cat. I’d committed a cardinal office sin: never, ever make a drink just for yourself.

So how do you know what the politics of your office are? Well, like the many different cultures and societies of other countries and continents, it varies from office to office. In England you could be hung, drawn and quartered for not making a round of tea for your colleagues. In Russia however, they’d be more upset if you forgot to slip a drop of vodka into their brew. For this very reason, we’ve created The Ultimate Office Etiquette Guide so that you never again make the mistake of taking a stapler without first asking for permission!

(via justaguything.com)

6 Tips for Perfect Composition in Portrait Photography

The following guest post on composition for portrait photography was submitted by Christina Dickson, a portrait photographer and photography instructor from Portland, Oregon. Her work can be seen at: www.christinanicholephotography.com.

1. Fill the frame with your subject

A portrait is about the person, so don’t be afraid to zoom in close! Remember that zooming in does not mean capturing only face shots. You can also capture “tight”, close up shots of your subject sitting on a stool or leaning into a tree.

2. Keep eyes in the upper third

This is the most natural spacing for a portrait. Try not to divert from this rule unless you are deliberately creating tension. Another exception of this rule is when a subject is full-bodied in the bottom third of the frame.

3. Use framing to concentrate all attention on your subject

Rather than eliminate the environment, use it! Doorways, arches, windows, gazebos are all creative solutions that allow for maximum subject focus and heightened visual interest.

(continued via digital Photography School)

7 Things To Do For Photographers When The Weather Is Bad

What should a Photographer do when bad weather strikes? Peter Carey suggests 7 options and invites you to add your own.

I live in Washington State and it’s winter, which means it rainy and dreary most of the time, with some sun breaks. Right now the weather is telling me it’s a good day to build a fire and stay indoors. It’s a day where I just don’t feel like getting out to photograph, yet I still want to do something productive in the realm of photography. If the weather has you down and you just don’t feel like taking more pictures of your cat indoors, try out some of these suggestions to help when the sun starts to shine again.

1. Clean Your Gear

Admit it, you’re either a constant clean freak or you let things lapse. Most people fall into one of those general categories. If you are the former, then you may joyfully skip on to the next suggestion, but if you don’t clean your gear that often, now is a good time to give it the once and twice over.

(via digital Photography School)

Garfield Minus Garfield

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

(via garfield minus garfield)

Performance and Editor fixes for VS2008…

KB946581 Install

In regard to my previous post, Visual Studio 2008 Is Pretty Damn Slow, a couple engineers from Microsoft have contacted me to let me know that a hotfix has been made public which should address the performance issues I mentioned in that previous post.

The blog entry regarding this hotfix can be found here:
Downloadable Hotfix: Performance and Editor fixes for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008

More info from Scott Guthrie’s Blog:
VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up Available

More info from Rick Stahl’s Blog:
Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues

And the hotfix itself, here:
Connect.Microsoft.Com (DownloadID=10826)

Quote from the MSDN blog linked above (Downloadable Hotfix…):

More

Coding Horror: The Years of Experience Myth

This toxic, counterproductive years of experience myth has permeated the software industry for as long as I can remember. Imagine how many brilliant software engineers companies are missing out on because they are completely obsessed with finding people who match– exactly and to the letter– some highly specific laundry list of skills.

Somehow, they’ve forgetten that what software developers do best is learn. Employers should be loooking for passionate, driven, flexible self-educators who have a proven ability to code in whatever language — and serving them up interesting projects they can engage with.

It’s been shown time and time again that there is no correlation between years of experience and skill in programming. After about six to twelve months working in any particular technology stack, you either get it or you don’t. No matter how many years of “experience” another programmer has under their belt, there’s about even odds that they have no idea what they’re doing. This is why working programmers quickly learn to view their peers with a degree of world-weary skepticism.
Perhaps it’s the only rational response when the disconnect between experience and skill is so pervasive in the field of software engineering.

(via Coding Horror: The Years of Experience Myth)

NirSoft: Freeware utilities, etc…


NirSoft web site provides a unique collection of small and useful freeware utilities, all of them developed by Nir Sofer.
In order to search for a freeware utility in NirSoft Web site, click here.

If you are looking for password-recovery tools, click here.

To view your IP address and other information, click here.

If you have a software-listing Web site, and you want to add the freeware utilities provided by NirSoft, click here.

These utilities are pretty damn cool and remind me a bit of the SysInternals utilities, which were somewhat recently (July 2006) purchased by Microsoft.

Rands In Repose: The Nerd Handbook

Nerds are fucking funny. Your nerd spent a lot of his younger life being an outcast because of his strange affinity with the computer. This created a basic bitterness in his psyche that is the foundation for his humor. Now, combine this basic distrust of everything with your nerd’s other natural talents and you’ll realize that he sees humor is another game.

Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?” Your nerd listens hard to recognize humor potential and when he hears it, he furiously scours his mind to find relevant content from his experience so he can get the funny out as quickly as possible.

This quick wit is only augmented by the fact that…

Your nerd has an amazing appetite for information. Many years ago, I dubbed this behavior NADD, and you should read the article to learn more and to understand what mental muscles your nerd has developed.

(via Rands In Repose: The Nerd Handbook)