How do you interview?

Nice points over at Fiat Developmentum » The Technical Interview Secret Sauce, but maybe a tad bit informal to be comfortable for everybody.

I have been on both sides of the table & my thoughts; first get the guy who will be working with the candidate have a very technical conversation followed by the person who will be mentoring the
candidate (personally I don’t like the word “lead”) on things like problem solving, aptitude etc. apart from the technical things. Have a last round to weed out the not so obvious anti-socials & the covert serial killers. Long interviews I don’t mind but I don’t like the many numerous rounds that some companies have, but that’s just me.

But most importantly have the guys who really care about who they work with participate. This is more important in bigger companiesthan in smaller shops where everything is more tightly knit. You know the guy you approve of will end up working with you.

Re: Subscribe buttons on WordPress

I had blogged about the “Show Image” thingy you need to do to show the images in the links over at the right side.

Wakao ! » Blog Archive » Subscribe buttons on WordPress

That option is not there anymore. Now you have to use the Text Widget thingy to get it done. I was looking all over for the “Show Image” option . Google doesn’t show anything up in it’s top results so the ‘ol Google-fu didn’t help much. Finally found it after mucking arounf in the forums. Not that I’m complaining, I think the Widget way is much better

OT: Check out http://clustrmaps.com. I am really interested in knowing which part of the world actually looks in here not the actual numbers!

To WordPress with love

Well now that you can get a wordpress account without an invite I got one ! But I would like to move all my posts from blogger to here (not that there are lots ). I guess this should be a default feature for all services that are launched nowadays. I mean the whos-who of the blogosphere are already blogging and if you want them to switch to your service, then there should be a “import from service”. I read here that it was a planned feature, hopefully we will see it soon

Giving up on JRoller

After a long hiatus I was back to blog @ JRoller only to find my older blog entries missing and my categories gone. So it’s decided Blogger it is. I will add the site feed to javablogs just to keep the java connection

JRoller or Blogspot ?

Hmmm … now this is a tough one. I like Blogspot a lot as the templates and the look and feel is really nice !! But JRoller relates more to my content … If only I could sync the two automatically ……..

JNDI on JServ :)

While the rest of the world seems to be getting high on WebLogic, Webshere or atleast Tomcat I’m still left low and with no-go on JServ!! Even the developers abandoned it like ages ago but the customers don’t seem to well “if it is, it is” – Karma what else can I say. What sucks the most is all the “cool” features like pooling, JNDI, EJB …. to hell I can’t even write JSP’s on JServ (not counting GNUJSp …. What the !!).

So now that the time has come for me to fix the connection pooling in my application, I  thought I will reuse the pooling provided by mighty Oracle themselves. But what sucks is that I don’t have JNDI and without that all the coolness seems to fade . So I went around looking for independent JNDI implementation. I thought http://jakarta.apache.org/ would have one in their http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/ but alas it’s still stuck in Tomcat. I did not want to wade through all the dependencies to get that one working.

Looking around I found a couple of them(to be exact).

1. http://www.osjava.org/simple-jndi/ Simple JNDI
2. http://oocjndi.sourceforge.net/ OOC JNDI

The first as it says is quite simple. The author mentioned that it was used for unit testing, but me being me thought what the hell … lets get it working on a production environment (just kidding), but I did try and it did work. The problem in this JNDI lies in the lookup. Every time you do a lookup it creates a new DataSource. So the whole point of pooling is shot!

Movin on without much hope tried the OOC … but hope lives!! This thing almost seem to work for me. Has a decent xml configuration …supports all sorts of Sources and Factories too. But the only 1 thing missing is the shutting down of the pool as the container is not going to do it for me. I’ll have to write my own configuration reading and shutting down logic . Then I might as well read the configuration and bind the datasources manually. Might be a good exercise for me or should I delegate ;P ???

Gmail galore

Been using gmail for sometime … well mebe … I’ve not given the id to many people around cuz I’ve been using Yahoo forever … one of these days mebe I’ll make the switch. For now I’m using gmail for my Daily Dilbert and all my Yahoo Groups mail.

But I don’t think I’m gmail’s biggest fan , I got my complaints. For one I like to move my messages around to folders. I would have luv’d to have an option to label it to move it … well you can’t have everything. But you gotta give it to them it’s light, very usable and lightning fast

Was prowling around in Gmail Forums found some cool tools to play around when I get the time( whoever had all the time they needed!!)

GTray
GetMail for Hotmail
G-Mailto v1.3
PGtGM

Only a Thumper for me

Been a long time since I last posted … well nothing much has been happening around here (I guess). Had a bought myself a Royal Enfield Machismo 350cc , drinks gas like the tank had a hole in it gotta tank it up every now and then. But worth every drop of it looks like a real beast sounds like one ! and finally when I let it rip, it was a devil at around 80 .

Where to put ‘em constants

There’s a religious war goin on if you look this up at the sun java forums. Some say it’s a matter of preference, while some say they don’t like to use the <class>.<const> format(what!!) but clearly there seemed to be no answer. This javaworld article however seems to me the most clear one and makes me partial to putting them in a class with a private constructor. I also personally like the practice of <classname>.<const>, this generally clarifies the context of the constant , what this means is that if you have constants for UI and maybe you would specifically say UIConstants.MAX_MESSAGE_LENGTH and in another place you would use NetConstants.MAX_MESSAGE_LENGTH. This is just a personal preference, which I feel nice about .

What was the best part of this article however was this important bit

If you expose the strings, they get compiled into clients. If you then change them, it has no effect on the clients unless you recompile them. If, on the other hand, you use access methods, the new values immediately propagate to all of the clients.

I had never thought of this and initially dismissed this as optimization made by an older version of the compiler(the article itself was written in June 2001) but it’s still the case with the 1.4.1 compiler! Another one of those rare gotcha’s

Back to books

Getting back to the reading habit, picked up a copy of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and got half way through yesterday. With a story like that I knew it would be controversial to say the least, so did some google’s on the topic and whoaaa . Whatever the truth or lore this book makes one helluva reading. Of course I looked up The Last supper (you have to you know!!).

It’s been quite sometime since my last “thriller” genre novel. Am predominantly into Oriental themed novels. Love Eric Van Lustbader. Read his entire Nicholas Linnear series an more. Bout 6 months ago started reading James Clavell’s series. Trying to read it all in sequence Shogun, Tai-pan, Gai-Jin. The last one was a OK, Tai-Pan being the best among ‘em. Planning on getting King Rat and Noble House (both by Clavell) when I got time to kill. But still like the Lustbader style where he fuses pat and the present oh so believably .