Blogs

My sister just arrived home from a month long trip to Central America and I was lucky enough to receive a fairly cool piece of art from Guatemala and a nice bottle of Scotch Whisky from the airport... This got me thinking, I really should learn how to drink Scotch. To help me in this endeavour, I was wondering if anyone would be free to catch up in Parramatta one Saturday afternoon in late February (or maybe early March) for a drink and maybe to try some Scotch? Im hoping to be in Sydney city on Friday the 2nd of March (assuming I can get my position covered for the day), so Saturday the 3rd of March could be a goer.Theres also the option of a day walk if drinking doesnt appeal. I came across this one a little while ago - http://fatcanyoners.org/2012/01/12/paradise-found/. Its only a short walk from Linden station, and given that it is listed on the website of the fat canyoner I can only assume that it is lazy person friendly!Anyway, I guess that the overall point is that it would be good to catch up at some point!

So, once again i am thinking about buying a new (dealer new or newish-used) car. I have been looking for a month or two, but my recent incident in the Getz (not the car itself, rather the mechanic left the fuel hose partly detached at the last service resulting in it disconnecting completely yesterday morning) has me taking more of an active interest in what might be available. I was thinking about a Peugeot 308, but now im also thinking about a Golf. Wagon versions, too - this will give me more of an excuse to travel with my bike and maybe get back into hiking and the like by having a more practical car. The only issue is the cost... $35k or so for w brand new car isnt cheap. Even the Hyundai version comes in at $30k, but at least it includes leather seats... Anyway, im going to keep on saving for another couple of months before making a decision. This weekend ill likely go out for my first scouting trip and see what type of deal the local auto dealers think might suck me in. Should be interesting.

A while ago I blogged about a ray tracer which you can sort of use to benchmark your PC. See http://www.boyter.org/?component=content&option=permalink&id=735

Anyway I ordered a new server for searchco.de and thought I would benchmark it just to test it out. Here are the results. bboyter@Ubuntu-1004-lucid-64-minimal:~$ time ./smallpt 100 Rendering (100 spp) 100.00% real 0m28.923s user 3m49.370s sys 0m0.010s This is running a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz so needless to say its pretty dammed quick.

So sometime last year for fun I sent out the old resume and applied to a few jobs. Some looked interesting  but I wasnt really taking the thing very seriously. Anyway one that stands out when down like this.

Recruiter: "Hey you have Python on your resume, I think you would be perfect for this role, ill schedule an interview with them"

The position sounded fairly interesting, I believe it was something to do with a product for analyzing stocks or something so I agreed to do the interview. Dressed up, the usual. When I arrived (office just off Martin Place) I informed the receptionist and sat down to wait and read the untouched newspaper. The guys arrived (one 15 minutes late) asked a few simple questions such as "What is MVC" "How would you go about solving this problem". All seemed well and after an hour I left.

The next step naturally was to perform a test. This is where it all went a bit pear shaped. The test was something along the lines of,

"Use the Yahoo BOSS API to search for a keyword, then display the results with their Alexa score and Google PR. You should be able to sort the results on the search order, score and pr."

I have three things wrong with this test.

1. You have to pay for the Yahoo BOSS API now. I refuse to pay for a job I may not even get and I certainly am not handing over access to rack up bills on my Credit Card to a third party.
2. The Alexa score is obtained through an unpublished API which as far as I can tell you shouldnt be using.
3. Google does not publish the PR of any page and to reverse engineer it is against their terms of service. I am not going to get myself further blacklisted from Google.

I emailed back (to the recruiter who was not happy at this point) with something to the effect of the above, but mentioned I would do the first two but only if I use the Bing API which is free. At this point I was doing it just for the heck of it. Any company that wont keep its interview question up to date and is cool with potentially pissing off Google doesnt sound very smart to me, and I do not want to work for or with them.

So anyway they agreed and I coded it up, and all was JavaScript, AJAX, Django goodness. I removed my API keys, wrote a test file saying where you needed to add them again, with some sample instructions zipped it up and emailed.

Waited.

Waited.

After a rude amount of time they came back "Not happy with implementation. Did not work. Some bade code choices." In their own words they had some issues with the pokemon exceptions I added in (I had a comment to the effect of "I dont know all of the errors that can happen here, but all are bad so pokemon exception it is").

I was tempted to respond with my review.

Asked to perform unethical tasks in tests. Did not follow instructions on how to run test. Did not read comments. Lame.

Well a quick update on why I was downloading countless gigabytes of code. The reason is http://searchco.de/ which is my side project. It now supports regex search over about 2 billion lines of code. With Google Code Search going away I figured there might be some space in the market and now its live.

Some examples searches are here, http://searchco.de/?q=/[cb]at/ http://searchco.de/?q=/atoi/%20ext:c

Im pretty happy with how it has turned out so far. I will continue to update the index over the next few weeks and generally improve it.

It has been an interesting yet rewarding year. For me one of the main things has been the new job - long hours (so much so that some of you may think that I am now finally earning my money!) and almost entirely about process, but its a great stepping stone for the future.Anyway, I hope that everyone has a merry christmas and a great new year!

So in a follow up to the Vegan thing (which I said I would do) I am still somewhat following the diet. I have pretty muched switched my diet around and eating less then 10% meat. Most of my meals consist of rice, pasta, vegetables and fruit these days. Feeling pretty healthy too which is rather nice. I still enjoy the occasional steak, but the lack of meat isnt really that big a deal to me. I think I can say I am neither a vegan or vegetarian, but have a mostly plant based diet.

The benefits have been pretty huge though. I am enjoying different foods now (I guess perhaps I was in a rut?) and branching out in my cooking. The other day following a pasta cooking class I made a really nice pasta which was asparagus cooked in a little olive oil, with pasta tossed through, cherry tomatos (salted with spring onion and a little extra virgin olive oil), and pesto. Delicious, cheap to make and one of the better pastas I have had (finally found a use for pesto). Other benefits include sleeping better at night (I guess because the stomach has less work to do?) and generally having more energy.

So anyway thats my health binge out of the way onto other matters. Have been downloading lots of Github/Google Code/BitBucket/codeplex/sourceforge projects. The reason will become clear over the next month or so, but suffice to say downloading 200 gig or so of code is a pain to manage.

So, Im thinking that we should probably pick and lock-in a weekend for the next hike (if people are still keen for a hike, of course!). If not a hike, maybe an overnight camping trip coudl work. Say middle of December?As for me... Not much to report apart from the following:- Work is taking up a lot of time but I am largely enjoying the role;- Im still thinking about where to next, at least in terms of my next role, and this has been made kind of interesting by a former manager already saying that I should give her a call when my stint is nearing its end;- I recently bought a new bicycle and Im starting to enjoy the odd ride around the lake/s; and- today I bought two trees for my parents backyard - a blood orange tree and a mango tree. We wont see any fruit for a few years, but I guess that I can wait!So ends yet another informative blog! Next time I might see if I can draft a mini essay... Any suggestions for a topic?

So. I have started to think. Work is going well - long hours spent pushing a lot of paper, helping others get things moved along, etc. I still have another 11 months to go in my current role, but im now wondering where to next... Both in the short term and long term. Public service is the most likely answer to both, but i probably should work out whether i want to specialise or become a generalist (a Humphrey). Interesting times. Oh well, i still have a bit of time to think about this before i have to make any decisions!