Mikel Berger: January 2005 Archives

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January 31, 2005

Savings Accounts

With purchasing the house, I've really been reviewing our financial situation.

David mentioned Emigrant Direct and their 3% savings account last week. Today I ran across two reviews of the account.

Probably not enough of a difference from ING to make me switch, so I'm just stashing the link here for later - along with a link to Virtual Bank

Posted by mikel at 10:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 27, 2005

Hiring the top 1%

Joel makes some interesting points about hiring the best. At some point we are going to need to hire someone. I am both looking forward and really dreading that day.

In fact, one thing I have noticed is that the people who I consider to be good software developers barely ever apply for jobs at all.

On the other hand there are people out there who appear to be applying to every job on Monster.com.

I think the whole monster.com and job fair thing is way over rated. I used to go to all the job fairs Purdue offered. It just seemed pointless so I quit going. How can they possibly learn anything about me in 2 minutes? Every job I've had except one (technology related or not, full time or part time) I've gotten through a personal referall. The one job I wasn't referred for wasn't through a job board or job fair either. The company didn't even have any open positions. I needed to live in Hailey, ID for a summer so I emailed my resume to every company remotely related to information technology (trust me, it didn't take that long). Two got back to me, one offered me a full time position which unfortunetly I couldn't take and the other agreed to take me on because I agreed to work for an insanely low wage and do pretty much whatever they wanted (sys admin, HTML, learn PL/SQL, etc).

My resume is so out of date it probably hasn't been updated since I applied for that job in 2001. Maybe I started my own company just so I wouldn't have to update my resume. Hmm, there's worse reasons to start a company.

I hear this from almost every software company. "We hire the top 1% or less," they all say.
Could they all be hiring the top 1%? Where are all the other 99%? General Motors?

I had to laugh extra hard at this one because Jessica's uncle works for EDS which does most of the IT work for GM.

Posted by mikel at 05:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CPT 355 Student Projects

Descriptions have been posted of student projects from last semester's Software Development for Mobile Computers course at Purdue. The students again had some really neat projects. You can read about them and download the Yahtzee project by Ben Caruso for your Pocket PC. All the projects are written in C# for the .NET Compact Framework for the Pocket PC.

Posted by mikel at 08:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 24, 2005

New icons in VS 2005

Visual Studio 2005 will ship with new updated icons. This is probably the least technical but one of the most important additions to VS for professional software development. Having a great app with crappy looking icons is a sure way to drive away potential users.

http://weblogs.asp.net/Somasegar/archive/2005/01/23/359124.aspx

via The Daily Grind

Posted by mikel at 06:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 23, 2005

Auto Show and Michigan Basketball

Jessica and I went up to visit David in Ann Arbor this weekend. We hit the auto show in Detroit and the Wisconsin vs. Michigan basketball game. Pictures

Posted by mikel at 04:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 20, 2005

Ads on this site

I added ads to this site over the weekend. They come from Google and I get a little bit everytime someone clicks on those links. My brother and Mattern have had decent success with the AdSense program so I figured I'd give it a try. So far its not much money but it was easy to setup and I don't have to do anything else. So I just go on like normal until my account gets over $100 and Google writes me a check. If I'm lucky it will counter-balance the money my company gives to Google for advertising in their AdWords program for Swoosh.

I also added Google's site search feature. I also get paid someone clicks on an ad on that search page too. But I'm more excited about having a search on this site that is faster and more relevant than the builtin Movable Type search I had before.

Posted by mikel at 08:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Disadvantages of OOP

Richard Mansfield has a somewhat interesting rant on the disadvantages of Object Oriented Programming. While I agree in general with quite a few of his arguments, he's a bit dated and goes a overboard. Almost to the opposite end of the spectrum from the OOP fanboys. One quote I did like was this.

but one can reuse code without OOP—often by simply copying and pasting.

I think that's probably the most popular type of reuse. Of course, if you are strictly copying and pasting then your doing something wrong. But most often you need to do something similiar but not exactly like you've done in the past (or someone else has done in the paste and posted online).

http://www.devx.com/opinion/Article/26776

Posted by mikel at 08:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 13, 2005

January 11, 2005

Social Security

By the time a worker in his mid-20s retires, the president said, "the system will be bankrupt. Think about a system that will be flat-bust."

http://money.cnn.com/2005/01/11/retirement/bush_townmeeting/

Just give me my money and let me decide what to do with it. I'd be really upset if I were a lot closer to retirement age and I had (forcibly) invested all that money and wasn't going to see any return for it. I guess the only solace is that its the generation's politicians that screwed up the system that is getting hurt. But that's also why I doubt they'll really do anything to fix the problem.

I know I don't expect there to be any money in social security by the time I retire, so the more money I can get now and invest on my own the better. Basically, I don't see why younger Americans have to pay for a system that the generations before us broke.

It'll be interesting to see what the DBFN has to say about this topic.

Posted by mikel at 09:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 09, 2005

Word of Mouth Advertising

Yes, more and more money will go into making a great customer experience, and less will go into shouting about the service. Word of mouth is becoming more powerful. If you offer a great service, people find out.
--Jeff Bezos

The interviewer then follows up with with...

In the magazine world, we rely on ads. Should we be terrified?

Jeff tries to not scare him totally but he does basically say that yes, traditional advertising should be scared. To prove that Jeff's right, just look at this interview. Amazon doesn't need to buy advertising space in Wired Magazine. They spent time making a great product and so Wired gives them free space in their magazine (and in the form of an article instead of an ad which more people will read).

The same thing happened when Google was on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago. Part of the story was how Google has done no TV advertising. Why advertise on TV when 60 Minutes will do a 20 minute piece on you for free.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bezos.html?tw=wn_tophead_5

Posted by mikel at 01:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 08, 2005

January 05, 2005

.NET CF Versioning

More reading for CPT 355 deployment lectures.

http://weblogs.asp.net/stevenpr/archive/2005/01/05/347353.aspx

which is a Part 2 to this post

http://blogs.msdn.com/stevenpr/archive/2004/06/30/170289.aspx

Posted by mikel at 11:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Landing Pages

A decent article on landing pages. Basically, a customized page for vistors to your site based on where they are coming from (AdWords click, other online ad, etc)

http://blogbusinessworld.blogspot.com/2004/12/raise-your-sales-with-great-landing.html

Something we should probably ad to the Swoosh site.

Posted by mikel at 05:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

.NET CF 1.0 SP3

The next SP for the .NET compact framework is available.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A5A02311-194B-4C00-B445-F92BEC03032F&displaylang=en

via The Daily Grind

Posted by mikel at 05:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Piccolo and .NET compact framework

Piccolo is a toolkit that supports the development of 2D structured graphics programs, in general, and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs), in particular.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/

There is a Java, full .NET framework, and .NET compact framework versions. Something for the CPT 355 students to check out when we discuss graphics. Might be useful for those students wanting to create a game for their semester project.

Posted by mikel at 05:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

High School Basketball Schedules

Daily schedules for boys and girls Indiana high school basketball.

Boys - http://indianahsbasketball.homestead.com/files/daysked.htm
Girls - http://indianagirlsbasketball.homestead.com/files/daysked.htm

Posted by mikel at 04:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 04, 2005

Basketball Stat Analysis

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has an interesting post about their plus/minus system.

http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000790025973/

The next version of Swoosh very well could have some sort of plus/minus impact rating for players, though it likely won't be as complex the Mav's. It will be interesting to see where Swoosh is at in 5 years though, maybe it will have some sort of AI sabermetric style logic built-in.

Posted by mikel at 08:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 02, 2005

Joel's advice for college students

The moral of the story is that computer science is not the same as software development. If you're really really lucky, your school might have a decent software development curriculum, although, they might not, because elite schools think that teaching practical skills is better left to the technical-vocational institutes and the prison rehabilitation programs. You can learn mere programming anywhere. We are Yale University, and we Mold Future World Leaders. You think your $160,000 tuition entititles you to learn about while loops? What do you think this is, some fly-by-night Java seminar at the Airport Marriott? Pshaw.
The trouble is, we don't really have professional schools in software development, so if you want to be a programmer, you probably majored in Computer Science. Which is a fine subject to major in, but it's a different subject than software development.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html

I always like to pick on the CS students and tease them about how they spend all this time learning foreign languages, upper level calculus, compilers, operating systems, etc. but then get jobs coding web pages, designing databases, or working in network security. It's not that CS isn't useful, its just that most CS people don't end up doing *science* but end up doing *technology*. If the real CS people would spend more time doing science, then I'd have cooler toys to play with and to build, functional, useful, money generating (see Joel's point about taking microeconomics) software applications.

Posted by mikel at 11:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 01, 2005

NorthWood basketball broadcasts

AM 1270 Sports is broadcasting a lot of the NorthWood basketball games this year.

http://am1270sports.com/

Posted by mikel at 04:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Mono installation instructions

Instructions for installing Mono on Fedora Core

http://www.gotmono.net/gotmono/MonoFcHowTo.html