Blog archives for March, 2004

Google - driven by what’s inside

Some time ago there was a Fortune story on Slashdot about some analysts considering Google mismanaged badly, since they arrived at their office and couldn’t figure out the hierarchy and who was working on what project. Of course, the story is impossible to trace, since Slashdot search engine is mismanaged equally badly and a search for Google would show up gazillion stories, all of them from yesterday. But here’s an interview with Eric Schmidt, where he explains the hiring principles inside Google, Inc.

The principle that Google operates under is to hire very, very strong-willed, sort of driven persons. We have relatively little management and the management is very, very thoroughly vetted. They both have the intelligence and the history of working in high-tech and they want to work, they want to change the world.

PeopleAggregator - Mark Canter’s open source network

When Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Zaibatsu and Tribe.net just don’t cut it, meet PeopleAggregator, an open-source, PHP-written, FOAF-based social network. There’s the site and there’s the source in case you decide to launch your own. I found out about PeopleAggregator reading this interview with Mark Canter on Read/Write Web today.

Visual Studio 6 Service Pack 6 is out

Service Pack 6 for Microsoft’s Visual Studio 6 is out. This will probably be of more interest to the C++ developers than VB, as Microsoft had made tremendous attempts to switch VB people to their .NET offering, while leaving Visual C++ with the Cinderella status in its new product family.

List of changes in Microsoft Visual C++ 6 Service Pack 6:

230332 Cvtres.exe program error may occur when a large resource script contains custom resources
266713 BUG: IDispatch::GetIDsOfNames() may return E_FAIL when successful
304497 BUG: _wsetlocale is not threadsafe
305586 FIX: “Could not execute” error message when you attach Visual C++ debugger to a process
305601 MS01-060: FIX: CRT string format functions may underwrite buffer
310649 ISAPI DLLs that are built with MFC static libraries are vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks
310787 Visual C++ debugger stops responding on Windows 2000 when running on multiple processor computers
313237 FIX: ATL container implementation does not allow access to ambient properties
313631 BUG: Debugger does not expand variable of C structure type
316971 Pack level is not preserved when you use the #import directive
320739 FIX: No error generated when accessing non-static member in static function
320742 FIX: STRFTIME returns the wrong strings
322127 Empty base class or structure assignment operator may corrupt data
327146 FIX: VCSpawn fails during build
327246 FIX: Nmake returns success (0) in failure condition when you use targets in multiple description blocks
329594 FIX: Visual C++ 6.0 Optimizer may generate code that experiences access violations
331969 FIX: Visual C++ 6.0 MFC ActiveX control property pages in debug builds do not function in the Visual C++ .NET dialog editor
810640 FIX: The Visual Studio IDE quits unexpectedly with no warning message
814308 FIX: Access violation when you use ios-derived type in multithreaded applications
815235 FIX: Call to _set_se_translator in DllMain may cause a memory leak
817234 FIX: Rc.exe error when you build a project that has more than 100 INCLUDE paths specified
821436 FIX: Inline functions return incorrect results when you specify the /Gx and /Ob1 compiler options for optimization
822856 FIX: “Cannot save file” error message in the Visual C++ IDE

Why Topix.net is different - John Battelle tells

There’s a story today in John Battelle’s Search Blog on why the new service, Topix.net is different from the others in the field. Its apparent goal is to focus on the local news, and become your local paper, so to speak. It does a pretty remarkable job. For example, while on a large scale I consider myself living in Spokane, WA, technically we are not served by Spokane post office and thus are known to the world as Veradale, WA. And would you guess that Topix has a separate news page for the events related to Veradale, WA (warning: local news from my area are pretty boring and are generally Spokane-related anyway).

An interesting discovery from Battelle’s blog was that Topix does its own crawl of about 6,000 sources. I always thought they were getting their data from Moreover or someone similar. No, they have their own technology, so kudos to them. They have an RSS feed for each topic they cover, and I have about 2 or 3 plugged into my RSS reader. Moreover, its topical pages are more interesting than its local pages and are much more widespread than Google News - they have Computer Science, KDE, and peer-to-peer specific pages.

Feed search engine from Microsoft

joshp has screenshots of Microsoft’s experimental Blogbot.

How to prepare for a career in software testing

The blog Five Testers from VC explains:

Test candidates right out of school rarely have formal test training. The experience level is also limited to personal code and maybe a few small group projects. This gives us the challenge of identifying those candidates that have a rough talent for “finding bugs” or “breaking things” along with a way to navigate through a product and identify where priority bugs may hide. We also look for people who can adapt quickly and apply techniques ‘just learned’ to new problem areas.

It’s an eBay economy

When ACNielsen conducted a survey among small businesses, they asked the question on the planned growth. Turns out 70% of small businesses operating on eBay were planning to grow, while among the normal businesses only 58% responded positively. So it’s the economic climate, right? Well, while 7% of regular small businesses deemed overall economy as important factor in their own business development, only 2% of eBayers cared about the latest data on jobs, dollar/euro rates and what not.

CBS Marketwatch writes about a new class of businesses starting up because of eBay. Hartford Financial Services Group is selling surety bonds. For 1% of the sale amount the buyer and the seller can purchase assurances that no one will pull out of transaction. Also, Hartford Financial knows both the buyer and the seller, so if you’re selling some expensive items, at least there’s a guarantee that the person on the other end is not involved in some kind of scam.

Another interesting factoid from CBS Marketwatch article above: $78 mln worth of goods and services is sold on eBay daily.

Why is the terminator 0×0d 0×0a on Windows but 0×0a on Unix?

Anyone who’s ever done any string manipulations beyond the ones provided by an API library has probably wondered why is it that all the Windows files have 0×0d 0×0a internally as line terminators. Whereas if you download the stuff from a Unix server, it’s generally 0×0a, and that’s called the newline character. (Note: they are called carriage return and line feed in Windows and many other worlds). Raymond Chen explains.

Job requirement: be an American

Thanks to RussPundit for pointing it out: there’s a booming job market in Moscow, where low rent, good work environment and high concentration of big money attract Americans.

The key to securing a spot? “Being American,” Bierman laughs. Native English speakers are in high demand in Moscow, with its thriving multinational business community. “A lot of work we do is in English, either working with American companies, or German, Dutch, Japanese. It seems to be the language that everyone can come together on.”

Mommy, where do icons come from?

Wireless icon for WindowsIn case you ever wondered where the Windows icons come from, justsean has an MSDN blog explaining the icon creation process. He’s been involved in designing the new wireless icon, while also providing an example of what was there before - a forked antenna icon for wireless connection in general, and a radio tower for wireless access point. I am ashamed to admit I always thought that radio tower icon was a depiction of a human, you know, the type you would see drawn on men’s bathrooms in Europe. Interesting to see how many man-hours were spent on designing a single icon.

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