BadMagicNumber

So contrary to some self-inflicted rumors, I’m not off to Google London or Sydney. My wife has taken a new contract here in Adelaide so we’ll be staying here for at least another 12 months.

It is kind of disappointing, but I’ve been doing the Google recruiting process for a week short of 3 months now, been though 5 interviews (with somewhat mixed results – yes, I’ll do a post about that), turned down the opportunity to do more interviews for some position I had no interest in and the last message I had from Google HR was that they would have “concrete clarification” about other positions for me on Wednesday. That was Wednesday three weeks ago.

So apparently Google have done studies which show that slowing page load times from 0.5 to 0.9 seconds cuts traffic by 20% – people just don’t wait around. Perhaps I might recommend a similar study for the recruitment process?

OTOH, all the Google engineering staff I met or talked to were great. So all in all it was a mixed experience – if you are thinking about trying it I’d recommend it, but I’d also recommend not trying anything too complicated (like saying yes to a recruiter from another continent..)

Does it make sense to say that I got podcasted?

Anyway, I did – or at least I had a good conversation when my network connection didn’t drop out. I haven’t listened to it yet – not sure I enjoy listening to myself.. But as I said on twitter – now I’m a legend in my own lunchbox.

It’s Friday afternoon, so here’s some random stuff:

• We live across the road from a park, and most Saturday mornings some guy rides his bike there to do Yoga. He also brings his pet chicken to the park and lets it run around. (This might be normal behavior in San Fransisco or somewhere, but in suburban Adelaide it is kinda odd)
• Alex is now 2, and doesn’t like sleeping at childcare. Fortunately, they have figured out that letting him sleep with a ladder (yes, a full size, aluminum ladder) will calm him down and get him to sleep.
• Paul Keating – no matter if you loved him or hated him – had a unique way with words. From yesterday’s Financial Review: “When push came to shove, McGuiness’s journalism did not add up to a row of beans. He help more political, philosophic and economic positions than would have the Karma Sutra had it been a philosophic text“.
• If you don’t program, and you write about the meaning of programming APIs then your opinion is moot. This also applies if you try and talk about APIs
• The Moth is a cool boat, but has come a long way since my circa-1970 tunnel hulled version. It’s kind of weird that they banned tunnel hulls, but freaking hydrofoils are okay…

Our boy Alex is 21 months old now. During the first 20 months of his life he sleep though 10 times, and we were often up for a couple of hours during the night and/or had to get up well before 6:00am. That was pretty tough, but then he learnt how to climb out of cot.. We had to buy him a bed and suddenly it was taking 2 hours to get him to sleep, and he was still waking up a couple of hours later.

After a week or two of that I gave in and agreed to see the sleep doctor. To my absolute and utter astonishment Alex is now going to sleep without crying and sleeps though the night at least 2 out of ever 3 nights. Even better – when he does wake up he goes back to bed himself.

So.. if there are others of you suffering though this.. there is hope!

I’m currently employed as a contractor, which means I need to have my own company (I operate as a sole trader). For a variety of reasons this sucks, and I’m interested in any recommendations for companies which act as contractor shell companies (I’m not sure what the proper terminology is). What I’m looking for is a company which employs me as an employee, and the company I actually work for pays my contract rate to. Then the shell company handles all the tax obligations, etc.

I’ve heard of a few companies in Australia which do this, but the only one I remembered to save is Entity Solutions. Anyone got any other recommendations (or experience with them)?

It was Alex's first birthday party last weekend, and I made a cake.



I'm quite proud of myself – not only did it look roughly like a fire-engine, it was actually edible!

Yes, I'm back (and have been for a few weeks).

The wedding went well – and yes, thanks to a last minute flight to London by my friend it actually was a real wedding.

I had the worst trip home ever – left Edinburgh at 9:00 am on Wednesday, arrived home at 7:30 pm on Friday. I am sick of airports, and airplanes where the seat won't lock in position, so if you have it upright it slowly starts reclining, and if it is reclined it slowly starts going upright.

In unrelated news I'm now (a) working Monday-Wednesday so Maya can go back to work on Thursdays and Fridays while Alex & I hang out, and (b) I'm now technical architect at work. I'm not quite sure how (a) will effect (b), but we'll see….

I'm off to the UK for two weeks for my friend's wedding (which is now a “commitment ceremony” due to various immigration issues).

I'll be checking my email, but don't expect well-thought out responses….

For the interested, here's some stuff to read while I'm away:

Interactive TV: Conference and Best Paper

This paper describes mass personalization, a
framework for combining mass media with a highly
personalized Web-based experience. We introduce
four applications for mass personalization:
personalized content layers, ad hoc social
communities, real-time popularity ratings and
virtual media library services. Using the ambient
audio originating from the television, the four
applications are available with no more effort than
simple television channel surfing. Our audio
identification system does not use dedicated
interactive TV hardware and does not compromise
the user’s privacy. Feasibility tests of the proposed
applications are provided both with controlled
conversational interference and with “living-room”
evaluations.

Detecting Spam Web Pages through Content Analysis

In this paper, we continue our investigations of “web spam”: the injection of artificially-created pages into the web in order to influence the results from search engines, to drive traffic to certain pages for fun or profit. This paper considers some previously-undescribed techniques for automatically detecting spam pages, examines the effectiveness of these techniques in isolation and when aggregated using classification algorithms. When combined, our heuristics correctly identify 2,037 (86.2%) of the 2,364 spam pages (13.8%) in our judged collection of 17,168 pages, while misidentifying 526 spam and non-spam pages (3.1%).

I like this paper, because I used some very similar techniques in my de-spammed version of the Google Blog Search.

I'm Nick, 28, from Adelaide, Australia. I'm married (for nearly 6 months) to a
wonderful wife.

I work as a Java developer for a mid-sized financial software company here in
Adelaide. I've been doing Java for 3 years, and before that I did Delphi (which I still
have a soft spot for).