Archive for the ‘Work’ Category
Dammit, Microsoft
You have to log on to refresh your developer license once a month. This means no more fire-and-forget build servers.
You also can’t run unit tests outside an interactive session, so no unit tests with every checkin.
I still assert Windows 8 is the beginning of the end for the home team. The new tools are as anti-developer as can be, short of having Eclipse corrupt your project randomly.
Reinvent copy reading
First:
You will be our second hire, and will be treated like a co-founder.
Second:
If you are our first hire then email us
Eric Hertz, RIP
I was contacted this morning by someone asking for rights to a photo I had taken, years ago, of Eric Hertz. Eric was an incredibly decent man with the joie de vivre that carried into all interests h had. A former student pilot, I asked about a model plane on his desk; he said it was his plane, and they gave you a model when you bought one. That plane was located off the coast of New Zealand; Eric and his wife Kathy are presumed dead. Horrible news, best wishes for his family and friends.
Loading a plugin for chrome from the command line
Should you find yourself needing to load a plugin without installing it (say, as part of a build process), you should do something like this:
% google-chrome --load-plugin=/path/to/plugin.so http://URL
I’m using JsTestDriver with a headless frame buffer, and google-chrome works fine; you need to run it once with the UI to enable the plugin to load, though. AFAICT google-chrome gives permissions to the complete pathname, so you only need to do this once.
Of note, chromium-browser crashes on load using the same command line; it crashes without the plugin, though, and as installing google-chrome fixed the issue for me, I stopped caring about chromium-browser.
Payrolling.com corporate info
Interesting that the registered agent resigned:
The data provided is not a complete or certified record of an entity.
| Entity Name: | PAYROLLING.COM CORP. |
| Entity Number: | C3129371 |
| Date Filed: | 09/10/2008 |
| Status: | ACTIVE |
| Jurisdiction: | CALIFORNIA |
| Entity Address: | 4626 ALBUQUERQUE ST |
| Entity City, State, Zip: | SAN DIEGO CA 92109 |
| Agent for Service of Process: | ** RESIGNED ON 05/24/2012 |
| Agent Address: | * |
| Agent City, State, Zip: | * |
The previous incarnation:
The data provided is not a complete or certified record of an entity.
| Entity Name: | PAYROLLING.COM |
| Entity Number: | C2128061 |
| Date Filed: | 12/17/1998 |
| Status: | SUSPENDED |
| Jurisdiction: | CALIFORNIA |
| Entity Address: | 4626 ALBUQUERQUE ST |
| Entity City, State, Zip: | SAN DIEGO CA 92109 |
| Agent for Service of Process: | PIERRE EL-KHAOULI |
| Agent Address: | 8333 CLAIREMONT MESA BLVD #109 |
| Agent City, State, Zip: | SAN DIEGO CA 92111 |
* Indicates the information is not contained in the California Secretary of State’s database.
Suspended means:
Suspended or Forfeited: The business entity’s powers, rights and privileges were suspended or forfeited in California 1) by the Franchise Tax Board for failure to file a return and/or failure to pay taxes, penalties, or interest; and/or 2) by the Secretary of State for failure to file the required Statement of Information and, if applicable, the required Statement by Common Interest Development Association.
Payrolling.com refuses to provide W2 forms to former employees
In addition to missing payroll and other shenanigans, they refuse to provide W2 forms to former employees (me, for instance). Read through the yelp reviews; it’s no wonder Qualcomm dropped them as an outsourcing firm. Read the filtered reviews; there are people that are missing months of paychecks.
The best thing about Microsoft Surface
I hate on screen keyboards (OSKs) with a passion; a real, slide-out keyboard is why I own a Droid 2, not an iPhone. The Type Cover, and to a lesser extent the Touch Cover, is the best detail about the Surface; I have no problem typing almost full-speed on a Type, and the Touch is passable when compared to my favorite keyboard. I hope the current batch of problems is just a fluke, and not a widespread flaw.
Then again, I hope for lots of things, like unicorns; Windows RT may well kill the Surface brand before people get to play with Surface Pros.
I need to talk to the Bobs
At its most cynical—though it is also a logically inescapable conclusion—this is best expressed by the Peter Principle: people are inevitably promoted to a position that is just beyond their level of competence. If we accept the Peter Principle, then we must also accept the consequences of that. People who evaluate the performance of their underlings are likely to be incapable of such an evaluation.
Read the whole thing, it’s short and worth it. The most interesting bit is the assertion that one needs to be an expert in order to spot other experts; this seems obviously true in retrospect, but I hadn’t thought of it that way.
Come on, Bing
winternals, sysinternals, process explorer, and this explicit query all came up empty:
Google didn’t have that problem:
Switching my default search engine back to Google.
In which I completely agree with Forbes
#1 worst CEO: Steve Ballmer. Some years ago I heard the gap between Microsoft’s market cap and what it would be had MSFT kept pace with the tech segment expressed in Enrons of destroyed shareholder value; it was two or three at the time, but I’m sure that’s up to a dozen Enrons at this point.
