The Mind of Boz

Is it national tech recruiters month or something?

Seriously, I've gotten about three recruiter emails a day for the last 2 weeks. It's ridiculous. And a little flattering. But more ridiculous.

The worst part is, most of these emails are totally vacuous. Here's a quote :

Hi Matt,

I am a technical recruiter working with some clients in both the Seattle and Bellevue area. I think your background is very interesting and I would love to discuss a new opportunity with you. Let me know when it is a good time to talk.

Looking forward to it,

Robin

That, followed by 30 lines of signature. Oh, and don't look at the code. I copied the html directly from the mail, but it hurts. It's got a font tag.

So after a phone call and three emails yesterday, I decided something needed to be done. And LindsayDayton gave me the answer -- an open letter! So here it is A message to recruiters. Go take a gander. Then write your own! Maybe together we can stem the tide of time-wasting, content-free crap flung around the internet. Well, maybe not, but at least we can point at it and snicker.

Just when I thought I'd seen every random piece of software ever.

http://regex.info/blog/2007-06-27/503

This guy decided that one particular menu in lightroom was annoying. So he hacked it. Then he built a web app to generate custom menus so other people could hack it. How awesome is the internet?

As it happens, that menu is annoying, so I went looking for hacks and the rest, as they say, is history.

This week I get to load test our J2EE application with JMeter. I'm running JBoss on my Dad's old powerbook -- G3 500MHz, 512 MB RAM. I ran the tests with 100 concurrent users. Here's something you don't see all that often :

bosworth@rout:/usr/local/jboss/server/pws/log$ w
06:18:03 up 69 days, 21:14, 2 users, load average: 73.64, 42.36, 23.98
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
bosworth tty1 - 16Apr07 20:26 0.79s 0.65s -bash
bosworth pts/0 flee.lan 06:02 3.00s 0.65s 0.03s w

73.64! Yikes! No errors though....

Update: Here's the results with 300 concurrent :

bosworth@rout:/usr/local/jboss/server/pws/log$ w
06:53:09 up 69 days, 21:49, 2 users, load average: 17.90, 99.05, 114.98
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
bosworth tty1 - 16Apr07 21:01 0.79s 0.65s -bash
bosworth pts/0 flee.lan 06:02 1.00s 0.68s 0.03s w

Still no errors! Go little Mac, go!

This week I get to load test our J2EE application with JMeter. I'm running JBoss on my Dad's old powerbook -- G3 500MHz, 512 MB RAM. I ran the tests with 100 concurrent users. Here's something you don't see all that often :

bosworth@rout:/usr/local/jboss/server/pws/log$ w
06:18:03 up 69 days, 21:14, 2 users, load average: 73.64, 42.36, 23.98
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
bosworth tty1 - 16Apr07 20:26 0.79s 0.65s -bash
bosworth pts/0 flee.lan 06:02 3.00s 0.65s 0.03s w

73.64! Yikes! No errors though....

Update: Here's the results with 300 concurrent :

bosworth@rout:/usr/local/jboss/server/pws/log$ w
06:53:09 up 69 days, 21:49, 2 users, load average: 17.90, 99.05, 114.98
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
bosworth tty1 - 16Apr07 21:01 0.79s 0.65s -bash
bosworth pts/0 flee.lan 06:02 1.00s 0.68s 0.03s w

Still no errors! Go little Mac, go!

Working on a new contract, I've been reviewing lots of online storage, and particularly online photo storage sites. SmugMug, Flickr, PhanFare, and SharpCast (among many others). It's been interesting seeing the various tradeoffs.

While I like Flickr (mostly because so many of my friends use it), SmugMug is pretty cool. Specifically, it has a much more fine-grained security policy (i.e. you can choose which friends get to view your pics).

Sharpcast has an interesting twist as well -- their client automatically syncs your images in the background. And if you do edits in their client, it will sync the edits as meta-data (takes less time and it's easier to reverse!).

In the end, this is work, and I'm testing. So here's my test photoset on Sharpcast, via their builtin sharing goobie, called PhotoWidget. Hope you like it (the pics are all from a tour of Magnolia Plantation Linds, Lish, Lish's parents, and I took in Charleston, SC in March).