More Interview Questions
The Chief Happiness Officer on interview questions, that is, questions to ask as a job candidate:
Ask the people interviewing you about their best experiences working for the company.
I do this all the time as an interviewer; I'll ask the candidate about their best professional moments, or the project that they're proudest of. I can answer that question in a heartbeat, and I think it's a good sign if someone can do that. But I'd never thought of asking that question as a candidate.
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
MinidumpMode
I've been spending a lot of time inside WinDbg the past couple of weeks. I can get around OK inside WinDbg, though I'm always learning new things. One of the servers has had a problem with locking up, and we have the server set up to take crash dumps; yesterday, it issued about 4 minidumps. I've never tried to work with a minidump before, and immediately ran into a problem: PDB symbol for mscorwks.dll not loaded: The recommended remedy for this error is a bit misleading: "If you are debugging a minidump, you need to make sure that your executable path is pointing to mscorwks.dll as well." I took this to mean the PATH environment variable, what WinDbg means is that you should use the .exepath+ command inside WinDbg, e.g.
.exepath+ C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727
and then force a reload. The !sym noisy command helps figure these issues out. Also, when working with minidumps, the !MinidumpMode 1 command is a good idea to prevent you from killing WinDbg. Take it from me, I found this out pretty quickly.
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
Stupid is as Stupid Does
I have absolutely no stake in the whole Kathy Sierra thing. I don't know any of the participants, don't read any of the sites directly involved, and fully recognize that the situation is more complicated than many of the reactions make it out to be. Still, there's a lesson in here for anybody who thinks that creating a site for as a harmless spleen-venting exercise is a good idea. It's not a good idea. It's a very bad idea. Therefore, don't be surprised if it turns out badly.
Joel Spolsky had a post just over a year ago along these lines:
"Some of the participants in the group had probably crossed the line from common obnoxious online behavior to downright psychopathic behavior. In a discussion group which prides itself on "anything goes," this was impossible to control.
At 6 pm today, I closed that discussion group, having learned an important lesson about anarchy."
It would be nice to think that the lesson, having been learned, will not need to be repeated.
But I don't think so.
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
Open Source Is Dead
The point that community matters is another spin on the idea that when one company acquires another company, the product they're acquiring is usually not the point. Companies are often more interested in buying customers. YouTube is probably a bad example, but a perfect example. Google Video is a perfectly fine platform, and Google's engineering staff certainly could have built up feature parity without overly exerting themselves, but without the YouTube acquisition, Google would still be a distant #2 in online video.
Dave Megginson is suggesting that the user data is what's important. That misses the point - so what if I can export everything eBay knows about me to another auction site? eBay is far and away the #1 online marketplace. As a seller, the only compelling reason to use another auction site is the possibility of reaching more customers. The auction sites are paid by the sellers. That's why eBay's API is geared to sellers. Ever wondered why eBay doesn't offer an API for bidding on auctions? Because such an API would be a terrible thing for sellers.