resume formats…

word of the wise to job applicants: it does you no favour when you apply for a job at Sun Microsystems and you attach your resume in Microsoft Word .doc format.

1 comment February 7th, 2006

the most painfully annoying flight booking experience ever

omfg. i finally understand geoff’s pain. this is possibly, the most retarded flight booking system ever, and here’s why:

• there’s no quick and easy way to just see one airline’s flights. i don’t care about US Airways, Sun Country, or any of that. just show me American Airlines & United
• morning != 5am. maybe morning is 5am to some people, but not to me. when i select “Morning”, i expect to see flights in between say 8am to 11am.
• while i appreciate that San Jose is in the same general geographic area as Oakland, it’s not at all convenient for me to get there. so please, for f*ck’s sake, stop telling me i should fly out of SJC.
• (this one is from eric) “your SunID is unique” with no further explanation is not an acceptable errour message.

please, just provide me a convenient way to list all flights in one day going from OAK or SFO to MSP on American Airlines. is that so hard? i know it isn’t.

sigh.

to anyone who is considering outsourcing your company’s travel arrangements to someone, i, as a frustrated American, strongly and Expressly urge you not to choose our partner who must not be named.

Add comment November 22nd, 2005

it’s a vera wang LIFE

while wendy and i were doing some grocery shopping, we took a 10 minute break to sit down, have some coffee and read. she picked up a wedding InStyle or something, and i couldn’t help but see some of the ads as she flipped through…

Vera Wang perfume … Vera Wang wine glasses … Vera Wang paper ….

???? what’s next? Vera Wang chainsaws??

I can just picture the ad:

“Vera Wang chainsaws. For when your marriage has just gone horribly horribly wrong.”

11 comments November 12th, 2005

changing history

While most of my time is spent doing the OpenSolaris source deliveries, my side project I’ve been working on the past couple of weeks has been trying to get comments and deltas into the source browser. Right now, you see something pretty bland. It’s marginally useful since it tells you what’s changed between source drops/builds - but not at the level of detail like the putback logs give you.

I want the source browser to show all that. How cool would that be?

Anyway, I’ve been working on it… and I think I’ve got something that works. The legal issues are what’s annoying… we can’t show comments older than 5 years (meaning anything before June 14th, 2000 @ 8am PST) has to be removed completely. And we can only show code deltas for post-launch revisions. This means a lot of combing and filtering. I had everything working this morning, and running (albeit, slowly) on a sub-tree of usr/src/uts/common. Everything looked good until it hit a file which had (and I kid you not), revision 1.34 newer than revision 1.35, but older than revision 1.36. URRRRGH.

4 comments October 21st, 2005

random musings from my commute on BART

the south hayward station has a disproportionately high number of cute asian girls, compared to the rest of the BART stations - at least the ones on the east bay. why is that? CSU hayward/east bay? or do they just have better looking asian genes in south hayward.

i get into the union city station around 7:40 since i have to get to fruitvale BART by 7:15 to get parking. the Sun shuttle doesn’t come until 8, so this leaves me 20 minutes of time to kill. lately, i’ve been watching all the migrant workers, and all the asian general contractors/construction guys who pick them up in their trucks. it’s been kind of interesting trying to figure out the seniority/pecking order among the workers. for the most part, it seems to be a FIFO queue - but every now and then, there are people who for some reason or another (designated senior migrant workers?) who get to jump the queue and go ahead of others. the other funny thought that occured to me was if you were some random dude who just happened to be going to the union city station to pick someone up, and you pulled up in your truck - and two random hispanic guys just jumped into your truck mistaking you for a contractor. would it be weird? awkward? freaky?

yesterday, i took the bus to BART instead of driving - so i got to union city @ 7:30. 30 minutes to kill, so i figured i’d go grab a bite to eat at McD’s across the street. a sausage/egg mcgriddle’s (yeah yeah i like ‘em, deal with it) is clearly labeled as $3.69 for the meal. the cashier rung me up at $4.88. i gave her a $5 without really thinking and she gave me 12 cents change. after about 10 seconds (while i was waiting for my meal), it occured to me that $1.19 tax on something that is $3.69 is insanely high (i’m slow in the morning). i pointed it out, and she kindly pointed out that i had gotten coffee. i kindly pointed out that coffee and a hashbrown are included in the meal. she less kindly pointed out that it was due to tax. i less kindly pointed out that i didn’t believe Union City had a 32% tax rate, and that a more realistic rate was probably around 8%. she quite rudely pointed out that her computer was down. i, just as rudely, asked how she had arrived at $4.88 if her computer was down. she spitefully claimed that she did this every morning, and that a $3.69 meal came to $4.88 after tax. i thought about explaining to her how percentages work, and that .08 of 3.69 is not 1.19… and how you can make it simpler by just rounding .08 to .1, and taking 3.69 and shifting the decimal point, etc. etc. all these neat little shortcuts to estimate percentages. instead, i took the easy (less work) way out and pissed-offed-ly told her maybe she should brush up on her basic math skills … to which she gave me my breakfast, gave me a $1, and then told me “whatever.”

sigh. all this for some processed breakfast sandwich combo meal. on my way out, i handed her a piece of paper on which i had calculated all the various meal prices for the 10 “extra value” meals with tax.

“extra value” my ass.

3 comments October 20th, 2005

i’m a retard

let it be known, thou shouldst tread carefully when messing around with MySQL and the DROP command.

sigh.

yes. i deleted my blog.

yes, i really am stupid.

yes, i intend on trying to recover it tonight from a backup.

3 comments September 12th, 2005

HP’s Fink offers a challenge to IBM and Sun

HP’s Fink offers a challenge to IBM and Sun | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Bash it all you want Martin, but I would first ask - what exactly do you dislike about the CDDL? Why do you dislike it so much? I can think of reasons why I dislike the GPL, and they are all addressed by the CDDL.

Add comment August 10th, 2005

switchin’ to xfce

alright. i tried. i realy did. maybe JDS/Gnome on S10/x86 is faster/more stable. i dunno. but after having gnome-terminal hang on me and losing a build for like the 10th time, i give up.

pkg-get -i xfce4

yes. i switched my sparc workstation (a SunBlade 2000, so definitely not a shabby machine) to XFCE, and it’s so much snappier. i also switched back to good ‘ol xterm. i’m still a GNOME fan (running it on my laptop with FC3 right now), but it’s just slow on SPARC. nothing major, but little collective lags here and there that you don’t really notice until you try something faster.

that, and having all your gnome-terminals freeze on you just sucks. the whole one-process thing is not that hot when it hangs. (and yes, i know about –disable-factory, but then it takes like 3-5 seconds to start a new terminal, and that’s just lame).

Add comment July 27th, 2005

our recent crime wave…and debating with my councilmember

my neighbourhood has been hit by a recent crime wave that’s getting really out of hand. some of the recent problems:

• 100+ cars had their windows shot out by 3 idiots with BB guns, and way too much time on their hands
• two neighbours robbed at gunpoint, one of them in front of her own house
• countless cars stolen (i recall at least 6)
• people shooting guns

a bunch of us have been petitioning our councilmember, Jean Quan to do something. if you read the Oakland Tribune article above, you can see her quote:

“It doesn’t appear to be a crime wave statistically,” she said. “I just think awareness is up.”

oh. my mistake. our awareness is just up. that’s all. does this mean that this crime is not any different from previous crime. was i just unaware of the last time 100 cars in my neighbourhood were shot up? was i just oblivious the last time my neighbours were held up at gunpoint?

this is getting ridiculous and out of hand. in an email exchange i had with the councilmember asking to get more frequent police patrols in the neighbourhood temporarily, her answer was:

we will begin to get new officers out of the academy in the fall and through the next two years the number of police will increase.

uh. great. that does NOTHING for me now. i’ll be sure to politely ask all the thieves holding my neighbours up at gunpoint, shooting guns on my street, stealing cars, and damaging our neighbourhood’s property to please come back again in the fall, or better yet… in 2 years time.

4 comments July 22nd, 2005

hatred for bonobo

not the gorilla. the object layer in GNOME.

i either hate it, or i have ADD. i’m not sure. maybe i should take the test erik mentioned.

seriously, all i want to do is query bonobo and see what song Rhythmbox (my mp3 player) is playing. this should be a relatively simple piece of C code. i know it’s simple in Python-Gnome. but for the life of me, i can’t figure out how to do it in C. and no, doing:

system("/usr/bin/rhythmbox --print-playing");

doesn’t count.

all the sample bonobo code I can find on the ‘net is circa 2000. sigh. annoying.

3 comments June 22nd, 2005