I’m beginning to suspect my prior (and to some degree, current) experiences are a victim of the Connector Conspiracy. When I made a new antenna cable using parts salvaged from a defunct cell phone headset, I had much better luck receiving HD signals.
It’s still not perfect; reception drops out every so often and stays that way until I reseat the antenna connector. This makes me suspect that JVC deliberately chose to use a somewhat nonstandard 3.5 mm connector, one that fails to mate well with anything but the connectors on their (overpriced) accessory kits.
It is at least a partial fix, one that’s good enough to enable me to receive the BBC static-free on one of the digital channels of a KUOW. That will come in handy on the next big news day (forget about the Internet when a big story breaks; any streaming programming instantly becomes overloaded to the point of uselessness in my past experience).
To Apply: Please send portfolio URL and resume to [e-mail address deleted]. Subject line should read “Your Name: Backend Developer.”
Really, now? A portfolio? For a back end developer position? Isn’t that about as relevant as asking an electrician or plumber for a set of pictures showing external views of new buildings he helped work on?
This one cuts particularly close to home for me because my last job involved fixing the horrible mess the back-end code was on a site that looked absolutely beautiful when viewed on a browser. Interestingly, this job has been advertised regularly since last autumn, so it seems this employer is having trouble filling it.
(For the non-geeks, Cocoa is the user interface library on the Macintosh. It’s what lets you write programs that use the familiar windows, menus, alerts, and whatnot that a typical Mac program has.)
Part of it is learning a new language (and not precisely a nice, clean one: Objective-C is almost as crufty as C++), part of it is that the innards of the Mac just seem counterintuitive to me.
On the former issue, there are actually alternatives to Objective-C, including as of recently C#, a language which is far more modern and easy to use. Unfortunately, most of those are open-source projects as opposed to things with Apple’s explicit sanction and blessing, and as I’ve said before, shoddy documentation is the Achilles’ heel of open-source software.
Which raises the latter issue: the documentation and design of Xcode seems to be based on an assumption that both Xcode and Cocoa are intuitive. It documentation keeps talking about how Xcode makes everything easy and logical. For me at least, it certainly is not.
However, slow as the process of fighting with Xcode is, at least Xcode and Objective-C are fairly comprehensively documented by Apple. I hate to think of how much more difficult trying to learn Cocoa in C# would be.
Already have one scheduled for tomorrow. So now I get to go through the whole “this might be the one… oh shit, it’s another mismatch” ride again. Eventually it will end, but the odds of it ending on any one interview are not so great.
That’s probably the best summary for the recent spate of shootings (including one of a ranger at Mount Rainier National Park). The suspect was both trained as a killer and then psychologically damaged further by his combat experiences.
Probably the most tragic thing about such killings is that the victims tend to be normal working-class folks as opposed the the ruling elite bastards who started the whole war in the first place.
Biggest accomplishments were escaping Portland for someplace where I can be outdoors in spring without endangering my health, and unloading the condo I have there (which I guess could be regarded as a subset of the first, but I hadn’t actually lived there for some time).
I’m still unemployed, but that’s not a terribly big surprise. Once I had gone about a month without locating work, I pretty much knew it was going to be a long, hard slog, because I never have any middle ground in this regard; gaps between jobs seem to either be inconveniently long or too short to offer any time to recharge.
… when reading a Craigslist job posting titled “PHP Programmer & Fine-Code Connoisseur // $110,000 (Seattle)”. PHP is a textbook example of the hazards of someone who has insufficiently studied language design designing a language. No genuine “fine-code connoisseur” would want to touch PHP with a 10-foot pole.
The unrealistic salary indicates that it’s a pretty transparent example of a sleazy recruiter trolling for résumés. PHP jobs tend to pay less than those using most other platforms, precisely because anyone with enough smarts to be a good programmer doesn’t want to touch the language.
Of course I made a point to listen to (and record) Voice of Korea today. The executive summary of the broadcast is given in the title; the “news” pretty much followed that summary to a ‘t’, segueing from an eulogy of the “Great Leader” to praise for the “Great Successor”.
Unwittingly, the station in that land of shortages and hardship for the vast majority of its people also gave Kim Jong-Il a most appropriate send-off, being interrupted twice by power cuts. At least, that’s what I assume they were because both transmitters went off the air simultaneously each time.
The edited (I deleted the static during the total of 11 minutes and 46 seconds of dead air in the two interruptions) audio may be found here. If for some reason you want to hear everything in real-time, breaks in transmission and all, that audio may be found here.
Note that if you’re not that interested in hearing the two praise songs (one to Kim Il-Sung, one to Kim Jong-Il) that start each broadcast, the main “news” broadcast starts about 7 minutes and 50 seconds in.
Both sides have every reason to lie and make the claims they are making. Admitting Iran did bring the drone down would be embarrassing for the USA, so of course Iran is going to assert they brought it down and the USA is going to assert Iran just got lucky when the drone came down due to a malfunction.
Regarding the latter claim, it’s interesting to note that the assertion US drones are often programmed to land if they lose communications is a statement consistent with both sides’ claims. It obviously lends credence to the US claim, as it explains why Iran was able to retrieve the drone intact as opposed to scoring only a few bits of charred debris.
It also lends credence to Iran’s claim. First, any communications for controlling the drone would obviously be very securely encrypted. Managing to crack such encryption in real time is highly unlikely. That leaves Iran with the option of simply jamming the control signal, by using high-powered transmitters to overwhelm it. If a drone is programmed to land when it loses contact, then jamming its communications link is effectively sending it a command to land. Note, however, that such jamming is hardly (as Iran claims) “sophisticated;” to the contrary, it is rather crude and brute force measure.
The only truly sophisticated technology Iran needs is a radar system capable of circumventing whatever anti-radar measures US drones typically have, so that such drones can be detected and intercepted. Interestingly, Iran claimed to have acquired precisely that capability last October.
At this point, however, it’s strictly a “he said, she said” story. What would definitively lend credibility to Iran’s claims is for a second drone to be captured by them in say the next six months. Such a feat would be more than can be explained simply by getting lucky.
