Strange search results

August 21, 2008 – 10:09 pm

I wonder if it is an invasion of privacy to see what you were searching for when you found a website? Not much that can be done about it, except only allow POST queries… perhaps?

Google likes it this way. They can see, We can see, so nobody questions it.

Today I found:

  • types of interview questions you would ask mahe drysdale
  • www.tvnz.keyword:Olympics

What would you ask Mahé? Does it piss him off when people write his name with out the accent? Or how about the TVNZ website and how they write his name with a question mark? Would you ask about those last 250m.. or ask about the build up, learning that he’ll have to race Rob and very nearly missing out on the single… everyone knew the double was going to be a tough race.

All TVNZ need to do is make sure all their data and processing pipelines support extended character sets… But what would people like to know about Mahé? I’d like to know what his perception of peaking is, Rob states in his blog that peaking is a pretty subtle affair and the difference will be around half a percent.

There is always talk about when to peak and peaking too early – but it is not really a concern. Nathan and I are a consistent crew – I’ve always believed you should be within half a percent of your top speed all year round. All this talk about peaking and so on – which you hear across all sports - it is a pretty subtle thing. Yes, of course these other crews will come up – and it may look like it is closer – but for us it is just where we are at.

Of course that depends on how you measure a percentage; in rowing if you consider a fast double, it might be a little over 6 minutes or 360 seconds. If you consider that time to be 100%, then 1% slower is 3 or 4 seconds… which is perhaps a length or more in a race. But a length should be a big deal for the fastest man on earth? So what was all the hype around seat racing against a guy who hasn’t been involved in competitive rowing for 7 years? Mahé probably realises that Rob had been training with other elite athletes for long enough to get himself back within that half a percent before he told the media that he might be interested in competing at the 2008 Olympics.

The really interesting question, is whether Rob and Mahé would consider going to the London Olympics in 2012!

The other query uses tvnz’s keyword system… tvnz obviously need some help… why have keywords? it’s a silly hangover from AOL… and why are you letting somebody build your website for AOL? We use NZ monopolies here.

By James Little | Posted in rowing | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Jared Fogle in Wellington

August 20, 2008 – 8:53 pm


Subwaywgt031

Originally uploaded by alphafoobar

Being a subway card online member, I was invited along to meet the “Subway guy” Jared Fogle. I was a little apprehensive about this meeting; it was at The Boathouse facilities above Star Boating Club, so the facilities could fit rather a large number of people. But it was clear that they were not expect hundreds of people to appear.

They didn’t give out tickets, they didn’t even seem concerned about the number of “guests” I would bring with me. It seemed that the only advertising of the event was through the Subway card memberships email database. So I was really in the dark on who would show up. Plus Wellington was pretty cold that night, I think it hailed later and the hail was about the size of 10 cent coins.

I sort of thought there might be a few school kids there or perhaps a stack of office workers… it was basically in the CBD. But I think their were around 20 people there, perhaps a few more. Jared didn’t seem to care. He’s been doing stuff like this for the better part of ten years now, his routine is pretty slick… his 10 year old jeans look in pretty good condition, well washed and perhaps even ironed.

Jared spoke about his story, and it didn’t sound like a corporate American speech, I hear plenty of that crap at work. Jared sounded like a normal bloke; a guy who found himself embarrassed by the way he’d let himself go and who had tried a few things to try and get himself into a healthier weight range. It happened that the thing that worked for him also worked for Subway and that’s sort of how Jared Fogle “the Subway guy” came into being. Around 1998-9.

The other thing that struck me about Jared, was that he seemed like a really easy going and relaxed sort of guy. I asked him about the South Park episode Season 6: Jared Has Aides, Jared was familiar with the episode and several other of his appearances on other shows… but I hadn’t seen any of the others.

I was quite impressed, Jared was an amusing guy. But I couldn’t understand why so few people were there… perhaps people don’t really care here. But I thought more would show up through pure curiousity.

Perhaps it was that the only advertising was via email and spammers have taught people to ignore almost everything they didn’t ask for. Perhaps the lesson is maintaining a good email database of your customers is easy and sensible, but don’t rely on it for all of your advertising needs… that email is probably in their Junk inbox.

By James Little | Posted in misc | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Java programmer certification and interview questions

August 19, 2008 – 4:44 pm

A cup of Java, from FlickrEarlier: Java programmer certification CX-310-065 preparation | James … I posted about preparation, I passed but didn’t get a great mark. The Sun exam objectives and overviews provide a lot of good information about what will be in the exam and I should have spent more time revising that material - especially since many of the concepts in Java 5 and 6 are still unfamiliar to me.

That’s ok, I passed and am currently working on the developer project. Much more comfortable for me.

If you arrive on my blog looking for interview questions and answers, I don’t do much of that. There are around 50 questions on this page. But a lot of those questions are about language stuff, for example:

38. Explain the Polymorphism principle.

41. What is OOPS?

22. What’s the difference between J2SDK 1.5 and J2SDK 5.0?

31. If you’re overriding the method equals() of an object, which other method you might also consider?

I wouldn’t be very excited about a job where the “technical experts” asked me any of these questions… #31 was brought up in the office as a *good* interview question. I disagree, 90% of the time you don’t need to override hashCode… it is a good idea to override it if you are going to stick it into a hashtable as the key, otherwise why care?

In one interview I was given a multi-choice assignment including a mix of Java API, syntax, JVM runtime configuration questions, then I was asked to write some basic code, using collections etc. In my experience, you are unlikely to see that; I thought it was a good idea, but I was fresh from Uni and understanding source code off the top of my head seemed important… now I don’t think it is.

These days, frameworks are available to write most of the application for you, the IDE is there to correct your syntax. Testing, code compliance and bug finding tools and plugins are available to check the logic of your code and fish out all the rubbish that bad habits encourage us to put in. Source control systems are used to allow peer review before your code becomes part of the main stream of work.

So why would an interviewer ask you questions about OOP and polymorphism? Or overriding equals - your IDE should warn you, but Eclipse doesn’t seem to, I checked.

You should be asked about previous experience, frameworks you are familiar with, technologies you understand… perhaps explain what is going on in a couple of tricky application code straight from the project they’d like you to work on. What blogs do you read… how do you approach a particularly difficult problem - is the answer Google it, see if anyone else has done the same thing… is there a framework to do it? what is it licensed under? My favourite is explain why Tomcat is or is not a Java application server. My least favourite is which frameworks have I worked with… everything is a framework, this could take a while.

By James Little | Posted in development | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Panoramic attempt on the Zugspitze

August 19, 2008 – 12:26 pm


dsc00163

Originally uploaded by alphafoobar

Zugspitze is Germany’s highest mountain. On our recent travels we had the opportunity to ascend to the top in the very accessible cable car and gondola services that they have running up there. Which is lucky, because there is no way we would have had that experience without the tenacity required to put a cross up there over one hundred years ago!

It was an amazing experience… we even got to see a German military ski patrol come down from somewhere in the mountains! Even though this is a bad attempt at using the panoramic function on my cellphone… the image is a favourite.

Someone elses Zugspitze photo, a little nicer

By James Little | Posted in travel, web2.0 | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Make tracks in Europe

August 18, 2008 – 11:05 pm


View Larger Map
You can use Google maps to plan a car journey, or (still in Beta) a walking journey. Some countries are not as well maintained as others, but you can make plans to travel through rather a few of them… I guess it depends on how close the roads data is to the towns data?

In the above map I was looking at cycling from Lisbon to Moscow (or vice versa)

  1. Lisbon to Madrid: 628
  2. Madrid to Barcelona: 619
  3. Barcelona to Marseille: 506
  4. Marseille to Genova: 398
  5. Genova to Trieste: 536 (Though I was looking at Rijeka, Croatia (further distance, but no google directions)
  6. Trieste to Vienna: 556
  7. Vienna to Warsaw: 722
  8. Warsaw to Minsk …
  9. … Moscow??

Unfortunately Google gets a little lost in the old Soviet Union it seems. Perhaps that is a US directive, as I am sure most of the software engineers in the world are Russian? Actually, I’ve never met one, what are all those Russian computer science graduates doing?

Update: I think I’ve found the perfect site to piss off my girlfriend: Crazy guy on a bike! I think it’s pretty obvious what this site is about… worth a look if you are planning an insane human powered journey.

By James Little | Posted in travel, web2.0 | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)