The Pentop computer.

OK, for over a year I was looking at the Leap Frog Fly pen. I drooled over the concept for the whole time. The hell with the Tweens it was aimed at. This was for 40+YO geeks.

Finally the anouncement came out last September. Details were out. It looked great.

Then I saw the cost of ownership. Expensive paper, and no hookup to your computer. What you stored in the pen stayed there. No note app that let you upload your work to your computer. Plus the cost of paper is way too expensive.

So I shelved the idea of owning one.

I was at Fry's a while back and saw this logitech device. Looked it up and was more impressed. It is meant to take notes, write emails and to-dos, calendar events... And upload these to your mail app, outlook, word and other apps. This was more impressive.

Now the paper costs. LeapFrog, logitech and Maxcel all license the digital paper from Anoto. They have the patent on the micro dots the pen reads to track what you are writing. But now instead of just buying paper from LeapFrog, you have 3M Post-its, 2 note pads from Mead and notepads from Collins using the Logitech Brand. More licensees means the cost go down as more paper companies jump on the bandwagon and more people buy these devices.

At this time it is $8 for an 8.5x11 pad with 64 double sided sheets. So I will use both sides of the paper at this cost.

At work I tend to use about one pad a month. Do cost of ownership is about $100 per year. If this really saves me the time of typing in the notes I just wrote down, then this can be worth it.

Plus there is the cool factor. After I buy one, I'll obviously post a review.

OK, I've been using the
Logitech® io™2 Digital Writing System. I did not realize that I really don't take notes all that often until I was waiting to a reason to use it. I just don't do to meetings.

I did find an interesting bug in the MyScript software. I installed the software at work since that is where I use the pen.

I am using version 2.0 on both my home and work computer. I did not want to have to redo the training, so I exported my profile and tried to import it at work. It did not work. It claimed to come from a different version of the software.

So I luckily saved the handwirtting .pen files. I used those to setup the profiles and it works great.

I decided to install it at work after going through the process of docking the pen at home, performing handwritting recognition, creating a word doc and mailing it to work. What a freakin pain in the ass!

So now I just have the software at work. I can search the pen files without doing handwritting recognition. Works pretty well. The trick is to make sure other lines are not touching the word. Example. Don't write a word through the bottom loop of the lower case j or g. Or the arrow line from a diagram. This way you do not need to do handwritting recognition unless you really need the text imported into a another application as text.

Overall this can work. I used to take my note book when it filled and type in the important data into text files. Now I can skip that. we'll see.

In the mean time, consumables are hard to come by. I assume the pen tips do not last long. If there is a full CC if ink in there I'll be surprised. The pen comes with 6. One plus 5 spare. So I hope that will be close to a year of ink.

Getting the books are the biggest pain. Only CompuUSA stocks it. And the closest one is 30 minutes away.

I work with a bunch of very smart people.

I work at Yahoo. I'll have to watch what I say here. I don't want to be one of those idiots fired because he lets out a trade secret.

Just spent two days at an internal summit covering the the things known publicly from the Yahoo Developer Network as well as hush hush stuff.

Granted not everyone is a great speaker. I've been known to help people catch up on their sleep. But getting to hear people who developed the Yahoo! user Interface Library talk about it. Was great. Nothing like hearing the author talk about how to use a tool.

The person who published the Design Pattern Library is causing me to rethink a project I am working on.

At another talk I saw some really great examples on how and how not to write HTML and apply CSS in a way that allows site style changes really easily with out reworking the HTML each time.

Sorry about not naming names, but for all I know that is a no no as well. Makes this post just really obtuse. I never said my random thoughts were alway clear.

Seeing a talk by a really big name in PHP show his point of view of how to write PHP for use with WEB2.0 apps was also really cool.

The strange part is that I did not look to join Yahoo. An internal recuiter found me on Hot Jobs. The work I do is pretty cool. I collect help the different groups improve the performance of their sites.

So overall events like this make me happy to be here. The time it takes for certain procedures makes me want to jump back to a small company. Those of you who work for large companies understand that things can take weeks or months. Hell it can take you a month just to find out the correct group to talk to. Very fustrating.

In a large company, they have the money. You just need to wait them out to get it. In a small company, you have to time it right so you ask when they have the money.

Everything has it's upside and down side.

Serendipitous job opportunities and a strange interview

I guess I don't want my current boss to see this. But then again, when someone calls you for an interview and it is a company as cool as NetFlix, you take the opportunity. Especially when it was found in a passive manor. My LinkedIn profile.

I received a call from an Engineering director, John, and we talked for 2 minutes. He called me at work. It was strange, I did not post that phone number. I guess he just called the main number and asked for me.

We talked for about 30 minutes 2 days later. NetFlix is a Java shop. I've been a LAMP developer for about 2 years. I have not written java in 2 years. And have not lived and breathed Java in about 5 years. Just a little rusty.

Because of my overall experience, he wanted to bring me in. So the time was set for Monday Feb 20, Presidents day. I had off. So I would not have to make up some lame excuse at work.

I talked to one person. It was obvious that the interview was not going well. One, my Java skills were obviously out of date. Two, I fumfered over the question he asked. I did not know if he wanted to see if I was a bit twidler or not. I thought that is what he wanted, so that is what I tried to give him. Unfortunately he was just looking for straight proof I could write efficient code. I tend to over analyze what someone is asking in an interview sometimes. So things did not go well.

The next person comes in and starts asking me perl, since I said I was more comfortable with perl. But the question he asked I thought was a weird one. If someone reads this and can mail me the code that does it, I'd be happy. Here it goes.....

Have a log file piped into a filter and prints one random line. Here are the parameters:
- No buffering more than one saved line and the current line.
- Each line has a 1 in N chance of being the line printed. Where N in the current line number.

So line 1 has a 1/1 chance.
Line 2 has a 1/2 chance
Line 1013 has 1/1013 chance of being the line chosen.
So you need to write a function that knowing the line saved was line number X. The current line is N. Calculated if line X or N is the line to save.
I was lost. Except for an exercise in futility or statistics, why would you ask someone that question?

About 25 minutes into this, John walks in. Apologizes and says they need someone who can "Hit the ground running." I know that wasn't me. So I saved myself another 1 1/2 hours of wasted time for a job I would not get.

It's weird. I was not required to sign a non-disclosure. I know their OS, approx architecture, number of customer how many servers they have servicing these customers. I think I'm allowed to say. I know how a big part of their engineering process. Wow, some of the family jewels, and I was not asked to sign anything saying I would not talk about it. I even asked the receptionist If I needed to sign something. Anyone want to buy me a beer? :D

I thought it was strange. I have never worked for a technology company that did not have presidents day off. This made it the third red flag for me before I got there.

While talking to John, we talked about company bureaucracy. He said things are so light that Netflix employees do not accrue vacation. When you want to take vacation you work it out with your boss. Red flag, what if your boss does not want to let you take vacation. Also one of my indicators that I should take vacation is that my vacation balance is too high. If you don't take vacation ever, no one from HR bugs you that you are at a use it or loss it stage. And of course when you leave netflix, they don't have to write you a check for your vacation balance. Because of their development strategy, I would assume that it is very hard to schedule vacations. Red Flag.

I have been working from home atleast half time for the last 10 years. So this means 2-3 days a week. They only allow 1 day a week. Again because of their development process.

But their building is really nice. They just occupied it January 2006. They did something I thought was the smartest thing I've seen. They don't hang white boards. They treat at least one wall so that the wall is the whiteboard. Fucking billiant! I thought that was great!

Overall, I think NetFlix offers some interesting engineering challenges. It would be an interesting place to work.