Yeah, I know the guy who runs the site. I'll have to poke him with a stick. I've stuck it with Imageshack now:
seamustheseagull
@seamustheseagull
Best posts made by seamustheseagull
Latest posts made by seamustheseagull
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RE: Awesome Windows
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Awesome Windows
Clearly my install of XP has discovered a new way of connecting to the web without a network connection.
As per the screenshot, there are no network connections (1394 doesn't count - WTH is that anyway?), yet Skype, MSN and GTalk are all connected. Awesome. Internet through the ether.
http://omg.wthax.org/no_network.jpg
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RE: Recruiting Agent Headaches!
In Ireland and probably most of the rest of the EU, most recruiters work off a commission basis with a base salary. The base salary is usually less than €30k, and commission varies, often it's between 5% and 10% of the candidate's yearly salary, with the recruitment company obviously taking a sizeable cut. Commission is often split in two - 50% when the candidate is hired and 50% after six months (assuming the candidate has stayed on). Sometime the commission isn't paid at all until after six months.
So in this regard, you would think that the recruiter has a lot of interest in both matching the right person to the right job (to ensure they stay), and also maximising the salary they get. Experience tells me this isn't so.
Most recruitment companies have a contract with their client which prevents the client from dealing directly with a candidate. This means that neither the company or the candidate are allowed to contact eachother before, during or after the process, and many contracts prevent either party from dealing directly with eachother for up to a year afterwards (so if the company liked you, but want to offer you a different position in a few months, they're obliged to go through the recruitment agency).
Many companies also sign exclusivity agreements with agencies for particular positions - temps and the like. So even if the CEO's daughter is brought in to give a hand on reception for two weeks, the company will still have to pay their recruitment agency a % of her hourly wage.
I've found that good recruiters are few and far between. There are people who got into it because they heard the bonusses are great, and as someone else said, they're nothing more than glorified salespeople. I've lost count of the number of voicemails I've received which mention, "Some great opportunities", completely outside of my interest/skillset. On the other hand, you find a few gems who've spent a few years in the industry, understand the basics (and the differences between a Sys Admin and an "IT Guy"), and don't bother putting you up for Senior Oracle DBA jobs when you've just left college. I've found that the best recruiters are the ones who put you forward for less, but relevant positions, rather than the ones who go for the scattergun approach.
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RE: No gold medals for this competition...
Reminds me of when a family friend approached me to do a website for a new business he was trying to start on the side, dealing with yoga and holisitic medicines all that kind of stuff.
Sounded easy when he described it first to me - could use a bog-standard CMS like Joomla, plug in some free template. Standard business site - who we are, what we do, where we are, contact us, etc.Two days' work, easy-peasy.
Then he went on and said that he'd like to have some social networking in it too, "Like bebo and myspace", and some forums and a chat client would be good too. He never managed to accurately explain to me why a business site would have a social networking aspect to it. It also had to be done cheap. Like the equivalent of a month's rent cheap.
I went on to list off some of the properties that a normal social networking site and forums would have and he turned down most of them saying that they were unnecessary. So I was still thinking I could use standard open source packages, integrate them and then hack them until they were crippled and bleeding.
It was a favour, but it was also a business, so I quoted him probably about a third of what it would normally cost, which was about a fifth of another quote he'd gotten from a professional web firm (as opposed to a hobbyist like me) and about twice a month's rent. He still turned it down. I was quite relieved.
I think the WTF here is that I quoted him at all.
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RE: Cuil?
3 days after going Live, this stupid search engine still can't find "cuil.com".
though it has no problems finding all of Google's different pages.
Works fine for me - this seems to be a transient problem of theirs; Every so often a search on something generic gives, "No results". Which is a programming error if I ever saw one.
Seem to victims of their own publicity if nothing else. I've no idea who did their PR, but their must be big money behind them. I think their hook was, "We have a bigger index than Google". The media loved this and of course have no idea that a bigger index doesn't correlate to better, quicker or more relevant search results.
The only thing I like is the related categories. Could be useful if you're researching a particular topic.
For the record, the correct pronunciation is close enough to "cool". It's an old irish word for knowledge.
The modern Irish word for knowledge is "eolas", pronounced "Oh-less". In a modern context, "Cuil" means "Goal", and is occassionally used as slag for "Arse".
I have no idea why they chose an extinct Gaelic word for their site, when it already has another meaning in modern Irish.
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RE: How much can MySQL handle?
I said it could execute up to 50. Which is the maximum I ever see it getting to.
And in two years' time, they decide to extend it to a tonne of new users and you're looking at a rewrite. Easy mistake to make to be fair.
In this kind of situation, joins are your friend. You can get all the info you need in a single query regardless of how many auctions are actually going on, e.g.
SELECT a.*, count(b.id) AS `num_bids` FROM auction a LEFT JOIN bid b ON b.auctionid = a.id WHERE NOW() BETWEEN a.start_date AND a.end_date GROUP BY a.id
In the event that there are no bids, the "num_bids" column will be zero.
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RE: Not quite getting it..
My theory is that when you tell people that you've added/created a feature that will do <insert painful task here> automatically/quicker, they think that you're telling them a nice story about how much easier you've made your own job and nothing that they do will change. "The process be praised", and if emailing you is part of that process, it's next to impossible to get yourself out of the loop.
I inherited a hacked together web app in here which manages requests to set up new clients in our ERP system. There are hoops to be jumped through and approvals to obtain before one should be created, so a web-based system was created.The benefit being that it creates an audit trail and contains "digital" signatures (not my words) for everyone who has approved it.
Often, people start the request process and then realise they don't need it (the client already exists), so ask the admin to delete the request from the system. Easy. Often the request gets completed, the client gets set up, and *then* they realise they didn't need it.
The administrator raised a bug with me, where a number of clients existed in the ERP system with no audit trail in the request system. On examination, I found he had been going in and deleting completed requests, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately.So we had a client, and no audit trail.
So I added a hack into the horrific deletion script which put up a big note saying "This request is complete, and cannot be deleted".
Now I get emails from him saying, "For some reason I can't delete this request, can you do it for me?".
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RE: Shaadi.com joker
It looks like Sriram pastes the request into a knowledgebase and then pastes the first result that appears into his reply.
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RE: An Upgrade to Microsoft...
@Kattman said:
But Seamus hasn't been to England so he hasn't seen any of those.
Well I have, plenty of times, but while there I haven't seen an ATM crash or otherwise seen anything but the ATM UI. Here at home (Ireland) I've seen an NT 4 "Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to log in" prompt a couple of times. -
RE: An Upgrade to Microsoft...
Says more about the banks own QA procedures than any Microsoft upgrade tbh. The primary reason why banks are so slow to upgrade it because their systems need to be as stable and heavily tested as possible.
Many ATMs I've seen are still running NT 4