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Let me tell you a bit about my christmas. My parents has been divorced since I was a small kid, so for as long as I can remember I've actually enjoyed two christmas eves: One on the 23th and one on the 24th. Every other year I spend the "real" christmas eve with my fathers family and vica versa. This generally add up to a lot presents, so I don't complain!
My christmas is usually a traditional danish one. It's very focused around the dinner, which in my families consists of both duck and roast pork. I've never been a big fan of roast pork, so I stick to the duck most of the time. Next to the meat we have cooked potatoes and red cabbage, and sometimes also caramel potatoes or spinach, but that's not my taste either - and then of course lots of gravy!
Is it just my family where people always has to argue about whether to go around the christmas three and sing songs, or to completely skip it or go directly to the presents? Well, in my opinion it's a vital part of christmas eve, and although most of us probably feel a bit stupid holding hands with a relative we only see twice a year and singing we can only remember the first verse of, it's still not real christmas without it.
New years eve is always a cold affairn here in Denmark, so as I've mentioned earlier I am happy that I will be spending that particular evening on a cozy warm island outside the coast of Africa. Looking forward to that indeed.
Have a nice christmas!Current Mood:  ecstatic |
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I got my laptop back from repair and thought that everything was good for a couple of days. Wrong! It started freezing up, rebooting or boot insanely slow, so I thought I better format it and reinstall Windows. Oh well, it also booted during Windows XP setup, so I figured there was probably something wrong with the hardware. At first I thought the hard disk hard started dying, but then I noticed that my laptop was sometimes convinced that I only got 32 mb of ram (and XP runs extremely slow at 32 mb ram!), so I finally figured that the ram was probably defect.
Now the laptop is back for repair, and as usual I have no idea about when it will be back, and how they will try to charge me for it after wards, even though it is still covered by warranty.
Except for the usual laptop frustrations things are going pretty well; I'm starting to get the hang of working as a consultant, and since today is pay day I've also seen the first fruits of my increased work effort - and I like it :)
Tomorrow December kicks in, and when it comes to christmas it seems like surprisingly many people actually don't like christmas very much. Maybe it's because they don't like their families, but I mean; there is still the gifts and the food! Just after christmas I'm going with the girlfriend, her parents and sisters to the Portuguese island of Madeira to celebrate, hopefully, a fantastic new years eve.Current Mood:  bored |
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It's been while since I've posted, but I've got a few excuses for that. Three to be exact.
First of all; my laptop has been out of order, and I use my laptop for everything. It's been terrible not be able to use it, and it has been 14 days that way now. The initial was that my power cable seemingly broke, so the laptop didn't get any power. It then took almost two weeks to get a new power cable, but when it finally arrived, I realised that it was actually the socket that had a loose connection. So for a few happy hours this friday I had my laptop running with power and everything. Then it suddenly shut down, and I haven't been able to turn it on ever since. I even have to wait untill tomorrow before I can send it to repair, as someone has to get their ass to work and assign and RMA-number to me, that I can put in the box with the laptop. So it will probably be at least a week more without my laptop *sigh*
Second; I've been spending almost every hour awake on a school assignment. In groups of four, we have been writing a report with objectoriented analysis and design of an IT system, with usability tests and a running prototype written in Java. So it's been tough, but we ended up delievering 84 pages.
Third; I have to admit something: I'm not entirely faithful to this page. There is ... this is hard for me to say ... but there is another weblog in my life. And it's in Danish ... it's nothing personal, I mean; I've really enjoyed writing this weblog, and if you still wants this relationship to continue, there is no law against writing in two weblogs at the same time. But it is of course always hard to share your time, attention and ideas between two weblogs ...I will probably steal some ideas from my articles here and use them on the other weblog, but there will also be new subjects; I'm writing a little a unit testing at the moment, and there will probably also come something about source control.
You want to now the name and address of my other weblog? Well, it's not entirely mine. It that company I've become a part of; Kraftvaerk, we have a weblog on our website. It's instead of posting news, a weblog seems a bit more humane. You can find the weblog here:
http://www.kraftvaerk.net/Current Mood:  frustrated |
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So it happened. Just like I was afraid of, the Americans let their decision on who should be King of the World be controlled by fear instead of common sense. George W. Bush, a man whose favorite hobbies are war far away and corruption at home got four more years to make World War 3 inevitable.
I understand the Americans. I’m not sure if I myself would have the guts to put my immediate fear behind me, and vote for a man who could represent a long term solution to terror. Bush wants war because he himself and his family and friends makes loads of money from it, but you all now that, so why do I even bother to repeat it. It doesn’t seem to matter to most Americans anyway.
When I was a kid I had a dream about moving to USA. It seemed liked the country where everything was possible. Now I have realised that what most Americans calls patriotism, are really just selfishness. It’s sad to live in a country that aspires so much to USA, and I understand why many people around the world doesn’t like USA and the Western world. We are all Bush’es.Current Mood:  depressed |
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At my home, christmas has already started. My girlfriend put the first christmas cd on on October 29th. If she had as much time as I have, our small apartment would probably already be wound up with all her christmas decorations. As of now, I just hope I can keep it at bay until the middle of November at least.
As for the headline of this entry; "Learning Linux", it's related to a new subject in school; "Operating Systems". It has required us all to install Linux on our computers so we can mess with operation system by writing C applications, and so I have been tossed into the foreign and strange world of Linux.
Lucky for me, I've been using computers long enough to have a solid experience with DOS, so the console concept is not completely new to me. Besides the command line, there is also several GUI's to choose from, and I have installed Mandrake Linux with KDE. I'm running it on Virtual PC since I wasn't really up to letting Linux getting it own partition, and I also like the concept of just having Linux in a sandbox in my good old Windows XP. |
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One of my favorite job functions in my nearly 5 years at the Danish portal site Jubii was the one as recruiter. There was no common HR department at Jubii, so the departments had to hire people themselves, and once I started acting as a lead programmer, my boss at the time also thought I should hire the people I was going to be working closely with. In the beginning we were both together at the job interviews, but soon we decided to split up, so that the applicant had to “get past me” in order to get the final job interview with my boss.
It was not easy to get past me, and I am going to tell you why. To me, a job interview with a programmer isn’t just going through the resume and talking about this and that. The applicant has to be more than a nice guy with an IT-related education and some business experience; he also has to prove that he thinks like a programmer, so I created a series of small tests the applicant had to go through during the job interview – I will get back to them.
I am fascinated by the significance of the first-hand impression at a job interview. I would like to be able to say that I didn’t judge the applicants by the very first glimpse I got of them, but I have to admit that it was unavoidable not to do it. The first-hand impression always gave the applicant a slightly better or a slightly worse starting point – it’s impossible to stay neutral. I can’t really control what I look for in a first-hand impression, but I think it comes down to this:
- Does the applicant look like someone I could have as a friend?
- Is the applicant wearing the expected “working clothes”? (A programmer doesn’t wear a suit in my mind, but rather relaxed jeans and a t-shirt with a funny logo.)
- Is the applicant nervous or relaxed?
It’s extremely unfair to judge applicants by questions like these, so my point with this is; that if you are recruiting someone, you should be aware of what you are looking for in the first-hand impression, and then try to control it.
Back to the tests. Most of the test I “created” are actually stolen directly from Joel Spolsky’s excellent article; The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing, and the whole structure and focus of my job interviews was also heavily inspired by that article, so I can’t encourage you enough to read it. For the job description “ASP and ASP.NET programmer” I chose to use the following tests:
- Programming on paper: Reverse a string.
- Questions about object orientated programming
- The design question
- The impossible question
- The LEGO assignment
I won’t dig to deep into the first two tests, other than saying that it’s actually rather hard to find a programming assignment that can be solved in 10 minutes using nothing but pen and paper, and it’s even harder to think of a small assignment that will show if the applicant understands object orientated programming. Try it.
Both the design question and the impossible question are explained in Joel’s article, so I won’t do it here, but just give some examples. My favourite design question is this:
“The first skyscraper in Copenhagen is being built for renting out as office space, and you are the designer of the elevators of this 50 floor building. How will you design the elevators?” Remember that the primary focus of the design question is out-of-the-box thinking.
My favourite impossible question is this: “How many litres of milk did the Danish population drink last year?” I’ve got answers all the way down from a couple of million litres up to several billion litres, but the important thing is that I have no clue about what the real answer is. The impossible question is all about watching the process of the applicant reaching his answer.
The LEGO assignment is my own invention. Joel has his mantra that a programmer should “be smart, and get things done”, and I think that’s a great guideline for hiring programmers. However, I wanted to be able to test the “get things done” part, and the LEGO assignment is my attempt to do this. The applicant gets a huge box of mixed LEGO bricks, and then he gets three minutes to solve the assignment: “Build a transport vehicle that has to the following characteristics:
- It must work on land, in water and in air.
- There must be seats for at least four persons
- It must have a parabolic antenna
- It must have front lights, rear lights and warning lights
- It must be blue”
Three minutes is of course not enough to build anything that actually looks real, but it is indeed possible to incorporate all the characteristics if you make a couple of compromises and prioritizations. And that’s were the real benefit of this assignment comes in; the talk about the vehicle and the decisions of the applicant after the three minutes has passed.
Oct. 24th, 2004 @ 12:51 pm
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| » Zoolandish |
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I was at the Copenhagen Zoo last week, and I of course had to try out my new "digital camera", that is; my phone. SonyEricsson claims that the K700i model, which I am the proud owner of, is both a phone and camera. Well, all I can say is; that it's not both, and it's a good phone... but nevertheless, I'll post a couple of pictures from Zoo right here:
When browsing through the fifty-something pictures I took that day in Zoo, I realised something: Digital zoom on the K700i doesn't make any sense. The max resolution of the camera is 640x480, and the phone also has 4 x digital zoom. However, when you take pictures in 640x480, you cannot zoom at all. If you move down to the resulution 320x240, which most of the pictures above is taken in, you have 2 x digital zoom. Only if you move down to stamp-size; 160x120, you have 4 x digital zoom.
I took a picture of the ice bears above first in 640x480, of course with no zoom, since it not possible in that resolution. I then thought to myself: "Aha! Now I want a closeup of the bears, so I'll goto 320x240 and zoom in!" So I did, and the result was the picture above. If you compare the large picture without zoom with the small picture using zoom, you realize that digital zoom doesn't make any sense! Try it.
Oct. 21st, 2004 @ 10:25 am
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| » A visit from Jutland |
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Denmark is a quite small country, but we do have different provinces divided by water. In fact Sealand, where Copenhagen (including me) is located, is just an island, like most of Denmark. However, the biggest province in Denmark - Jutland - is connected to the mainland, to Germany.
My girlfriend are from Jutland, in fact; she's just moved over here to Copenhagen a couple of months ago. I guess that's my fault. This weekend we have her family on visit here in our small apartment. We've snatched a picture of them with my brand new and super cool Sony Ericsson K700i:
Oct. 14th, 2004 @ 09:59 pm
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| » What’s new? |
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It’s been a while since my last entry in this web log. I can’t really claim that I’ve been more busy than usual, because I haven’t. I also can’t claim that I haven’t known what to write about; because I have a whole list of subjects I would like to dive into in this web log. So there are really no excuses other than that I haven’t felt inspired to write. Or something like that. Good thing I’m not aiming to be a journalist. I can hear professional writers fume: “Inspired to write! Ha!”. Anyway, today’s subject is not really on any particular issue, I would like to tell about a few things that has happened in my life.
Let’s take the most exciting news first: I’ve got a new job. (Quick brush-up for newcomers: I’ve worked as programmer at Jubii for close to 5 years, and I’m also studying full time). I can now officially call myself it-consultant - whatever that means. My employer is a Danish start-up called Kraftvaerk, and I’m supposed to do .NET programming for Kraftvaerk’s clients 15 hours a week. Looks like my first client will be – surprise surprise – good old Jubii. I would like to explain more about the firm and the job, but the truth is that I really don’t much yet. I’m starting at Kraftvaerk at November 1st, and I don’t really have a clue about how it’s going to be, as I haven’t worked as a consultant before. All I know right now is that my colleagues at Kraftvaerk seems to be both nice and skilled people.
In other news; I’ve bought a new mobile phone. The old one was not bad, not bad at all, but it at some point it just got too bad functioning, especially when it didn’t receive the sms’es people sent to me. So I’ve bought a SonyEricsson K700i – and no, it’s not because they have been advertising like hell in Denmark the last couple of months, I don’t give a shit about their “phone meets camera” catch phrase. It’s more that … it’s just a really nice phone. In many ways it’s similar to my girlfriend: Nice surface and finish, fantastic user interface, a great personality and able to place itself right among the top models of the market. Well, they also both has to recharge every night, but I can live that in both a phone and a girl.
Oct. 12th, 2004 @ 10:37 pm
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| » Firefox is a better browser |
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When I started using the internet, Netscape Navigator (I’m writing this in Word to get spelling- and grammar-checking, and I think it’s rather large of Microsoft that “Netscape” is included in the standard spelling dictionary) was the hot thing. Netscape 3.0 had just been released, and everyone who was anything in web industry rambled on about the fantastic this features of the browser. And it really was a great browser at the time, no doubt about that.
Meanwhile, Microsoft had been sleeping in the class, and hadn’t really come up to speed with the whole “internet-thing”. They’d only just realized that they would a need browser at a tremendous speed to compete with Netscape, so they had released Internet Explorer 1 and 2 during the past year, and those browsers where really bad. I mean really bad.
Shortly after Netscape’s release of Navigator 3.0 in 1996, Microsoft released their third version of Internet Explorer. IE 3.0 was not better than Netscape 3.0, but it was the first to support cascading style sheets (CSS), a very new and advanced standard on how to define the design and look of webpages. IE 3.0 came bundled with Windows 95, so it gained a fair amount of users although it wasn’t superior to Netscape 3.0.
Then Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0 were released within a few months in 1997. BAM! The browser wars were on, and the rest is history. Internet Explorer 4.0 was a far better browser than Netscape 4.0, which suffered from a lot of bugs, and IE 4 had the most comprehensive support for CSS and Dynamic HTML ever seen. As a 15 year old geek, I was immediately fascinated by the power of IE 4 – I even went into some of the DLL-files to snatch out DHTML-snippets I could use in my own code.
Microsoft improved Internet Explorer further with 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0, and since there was an IE integrated into all versions of Windows 98, IE was had soon won the browser war. Today, virtually everyone is using Internet Explorer, even though no new releases have been made for the past three years. But now it’s time to switch again. Just like IE 4 was a far better browser than Netscape, Mozilla Firefox is a far better browser than IE 6. However, Firefox does not come bundled with Windows, so everyone will have to make the hard decision of switching browser by them selves. Let me make that decision easy for you.
The three most important features of the Firefox browser to me, is tabbed browsing, ad blocking and the Google search field. You have probably already installed Google bar in your Internet Explorer, so you already have the ad blocking and the search field. But you don’t have tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing is great! My favorite example for the benefits of tabbed browsing is looking through Google search results: You perform a search (using the integrated Google search field, of course) and then you simply click the links on the search result page that looks interesting, while holding down your Ctrl-key. This will make each link open in a new tab, while focus stays on the tab with the search results. This way, you can have plenty of pages loading in other tabs, while you continue to browse through the search result, or start looking the first pages in the other tabs, that has loaded by now. “I can achieve the same thing by holding the Shift-key down and opening new windows in IE” you might say. Believe me, it’s not the same thing. New windows steals focus, and you can’t see if they are still loading, and the clutter up the process bar for no reason. Tabbed browsing is much better.
Another great thing about Firefox is the extensions, the download manager and the themes. Everyone can write extensions to Firefox, and the best ones are published on the official Firefox extension website. A very simple, but also very much needed extension when switching from IE to Firefox is IEView, which allows you to open any page that displays strangely in Firefox (and some of those written very specifically for IE does) in IE just by right clicking and selecting that option from the context menu. For web developers, the extension Web Developer is an essential tool when developing new web pages, and if you like to use LiveJournal for your weblog; Deepest Sender is the perfect extension – I’ve never posted a weblog entry through the LiveJournal webpage – I’ve used Deepest Sender every single time!
The download manager in Firefox is far better than IE’s, but that’s not too hard to achieve. It can also be extended, so downloads for instance is showed in the status bar of Firefox, instead of using a separate window. Themes, the look of the browser, or skinning if you prefer that expression, are not very important to me, but also here the support for themes in Firefox is far better than the one of IE. I can recommend the theme Noia 2.0 eXtreme.
Still not convinced? Then take a look at the article 10 Reasons to use Firefox – or why not try Firefox for a week? Give it a chance – your browser experience will be greatly enhanced! Remove all your shortcuts to Internet Explorer so it gets really hard to start IE up, put a link to Firefox in your quick launch bar, and make Firefox your default browser – then you are ready for the one week Firefox challenge! Happy browsing!
Download Mozilla Firefox
(Link broken? Try this instead. )
Sep. 28th, 2004 @ 03:42 pm
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