Bloglines are asking for feedback freedback about bloglines. The idea (originally Chris Pirillo's) is that they'll pick up the term "freedbacking" and their product name, "bloglines", and get feedback for free.

I met someone from bloglines after a panel at SxSW. I gave her some feedback then, which she said was useful, but I've not heard anything about it since. To be fair, she didn't write it down, so she may well have had no intention of implementing my suggestion, or even passing it on.

So I'll repeat it here, and see if it works, and how quickly.

I use bloglines every day, for reading around 242 feeds, which are mostly blogs, a few searches and a few email subscriptions. Generally, it is excellent, and I like it a lot. A massive improvement for me would be to make the "my feeds" section skinable, or at least be able to change the font / styles. I prefer reading articles with a serif font, such as Georgia, and I don't really like the turquoise either, as it's a bit cold. I'd like to be able to change it to a warm, dark red, or a lively purple.

I realise that I could do this with greasemonkey, but I've got better things to do (like, er, writing about how I could do this in greasemonkey).

Anyway blogliners, can you do this for me?

[Tags: freedbacking bloglines]

Today I was spammed by Kathryn (Katie) Sainsbury, a recruiter from Jump IT. Recruiter spam in itself is not unusual. Compared with usual recruiter spam though, there were several unusual things:

• The job was actually in my area
• The job seems to fit with my skills
• The salary was £5k more than I'm currently earning
• The hideous colours and UPPER CASE

[Colleagues, please note that I am not looking for a job at the moment.]

Although not looking for a job, it is so rare to find anything in Sussex, needing my skills, and paying £5k more than my (already good) salary, that I decided to phone, despite the awfulness of the email.

I got straight through to Katie, and told her that I had just got her email, and could she please tell me more about the position.
She told me that she needed my latest CV before she could tell me.
I pointed out that she had seen my CV on jobsite, which is why she emailed me.
No, she needed me to email her my latest CV. It's company policy.
It's not up to date, and I don't want to spend a couple of hours making it so, on the off-chance. If the job was any good, then I might update it.
Sorry, No.
I just want to know what part of West Sussex, as I wouldn't be interested in travelling too far.
No, I can't give you any more details, because other recruiters phone us pretending to be job-seekers.

Que?

So, let me get this straight. Katie sends me a mass-mailed job ad, and against all odds, I actually phone her (I've done that only one other time in the last 18 months). Instead of trying to persuade me to apply for the job, or even answer one, single, vague question, she accuses me of being a recruiter in disguise! Sorry Katie, you've missed your chance. I'm not job hunting, but I never say never. You did have a slim chance, but you blew it.

Anyway, I appreciate that this isn't Katie's fault, as it is company policy. So, a couple of recommendations. Firstly, to Katie's client, I recommend chatting to Andy at Siptus, as I don't think your current recruiter's policy is helping you. Secondly, to Katie, I recommend talking to Andy from Siptus, and see if he has any positions available to you.

From Jump IT's website:

"We believe the combination of sound recruitment methodologies and well defined business processes, along with the obvious advantages in people networking, provides our clients with an unparalleled level of expertise across IT that enables us to find and place the right person."

Pah.

[Tags: recruiter recruiterspam self-destructive job siptus]

I had a couple of interesting comments on my last post on MCP exams. Helen pointed out that you learn the right way of doing things by studying for an exam, rather than learning the hard way. Richard pointed out that if teams having the same learning, they can improve communication. He also noted another cynical reason for the existence of MCP exams:

"However, I got the impression a lot of the exams are trying to indirectly "sell" Microsoft's technologies by encouraging people to think about problems in certain ways"

[Tags: mcp mcsd mcad microsoft exam training]

Microsoft exams are flavour of the month at work at the moment. A training company have sent the developers a quick quiz to fill in, which seems to be about about 40 questions pulled from here. [n.b. I found this after I completed the quiz.]

Once completed, the quiz is sent back to the trainers for assessment. There will be individual interviews where the results are discussed, and a training plan developed to see what needs to be done to pass the exam. This seems like a good approach, as the study books are really fat.

I have been a little negative about the prospect of taking Microsoft exams. The main reasons I've been given for taking them have been rather cynical - it looks good on your CV, and it helps the company with partner status. In the first case, I've known bad developers get certified, and good developers with no exams, so if I were interviewing someone, I'd probably ignore the exams. It's true that it's good to have MCP / MCAD etc. on your CV if you want to work for a company where the HR department checks the applicants for buzzwords. Neither of these reasons have motivated me to give my spare time to studying.

The least-mentioned benefit, and the only one that has motivated me, is that I'll learn more about .NET. My current method is a little less structured than cramming for an exam: I subscribe to various .NET blogs. There were a couple of questions in the quiz that I knew the answers to solely from blog reading, such as the difference between value types and reference types, and what boxing and unboxing is all about.

So, two approaches to learning. Which is better? Exams force you to learn things that you wouldn't otherwise know about. This is both a good and bad thing. I went on a SQL Server course once, and spent a good chunk of time learning about replication. That was good, as I learnt something knew, and also bad, as I have never needed to use replication since, and could have learned about something more useful. With blog reading, I choose to skip over the things I don't need to know about, such as remoting or image manipulation. Again, this is a good and bad thing. I can't decide which is better at the moment.

Once I've had the interview, and find out which exam(s) I'll be most suited for, and what I'll need to study to pass them, I can decide how relevant the exam is for me. Whilst I don't want to take anything away from people who have passed exams, I don't really give two hoots if I take or pass the exam. I'm interested to see how much I learn along the way, and how practical my increased knowledge will be. I certainly don't want to cram-pass-forget a load of stuff.

After Developer Day, there was a geek dinner, which was very well attended. I sat with some people who I've met at London geek dinners, and met at previous DDDs. I noticed that during the day I spoke mainly to people I knew already, rather than talking to new people. At the first one, I didn't know anybody, so it wasn't an issue. On one hand, it's great that I'm getting to know some good people better, but on the other hand, I could be missing out on meeting even more good people.

I did see Jean, who I used to work with. Hadn't seen him for a while, so it was good to catch up. I hung around with Matt, who came to the last Sussex geek dinner. I didn't get to speak to him much at the SGD, as we sat too far apart, so it was good to spend time with him.

At the geek dinner, we discussed the seminars in the day. The session on unit testing GUIs was discussed the most. On one hand, it was great that Richard Fennell stepped in to replace the missing speaker with only 6 minutes notice. Richard was a good presenter though; he was entertaining and easy to listen to, and it was an enjoyable session. On the other hand, the method he chose to test GUI code didn't seem to be that robust. To be fair, he did say that it was experimental, and that it was a work in progress, but we concluded that the fundamental approach was wrong.

From memory, the idea was that a method in the production code is decorated with a custom attribute that has (I think) two parameters; a string containing the method name of the unit test that runs it, and a parameter containing the expected result. The test runner used reflection to iterate through each method containing the attribute in the production assembly, and call it's associated test.

I can see why using reflection is a good idea, but I don't think having the test result in the actual code is that helpful. If you want to add more tests, then one would have to change the production code, not the test code. Also, the test name being a string is weakly-typed, and shouldn't be in the production code. If reflection is to be used, I would prefer to see the test code contain the name of the method to test and the expected output, which would leave the production code with no test droppings, and mean that extra tests could be added without changing the code. [This is only a theory, and Richard may have tried this and it didn't work. I haven't tried it myself, and I don't like being too harsh without knowing the full story.]

The conversation turned to test driven development, which four of the five talking use and were in favour of, and one who hadn't tried it yet. The four of us did get rather heated in our insistence that the remaining one should at least try it.

I didn't get the name of one of the guys I was sitting near. He came from way up north, worked for BT and looked like James Nesbitt. Anyone know who he is?

[Tags: ddd3 developerday geekdinner richardfennell]

I went on holiday just after DDD, so I haven't had a chance to blog until now. I took my tablet PC along, partly to try it out in earnest, partly to make sure I keep my notes, and a little tiny bit of wanting to look like the geeky one in a room full of geeks.

It worked really well. As the sessions were in darkened rooms, I dimmed the screen to minimum, and it was still usefully visible. I turned the tablet off between sessions and at lunch. These two steps ensured that the battery lasted all day, around 5 hours worth.

I took about 14 pages of notes, writing by hand. Writing is a lot quieter than typing, so I didn't feel like I was disturbing people too much. It was handy for drawing diagrams too.

[Tags: tabletpc developerday ddd3 tc4200 geek]

For some reason that escapes me, I've downloaded Second Life. I usually avoid games, because I get hooked on them, and waste my life away. Enough people recently have been raving about it, that I thought I'd have a look. Anyway, last night I completed it. I won.

OK, not really. But it felt like winning. The real interest for me in Second Life is the scripting. I'm not too fussed about buying jewelry or playing one-armed bandits. The scripting language a little bit like C, and you can do some interesting things, if you've got the time. I don't have much time, so I quickly looked at the http request, which works nicely. I created primitive that when "touched", will fetch my RSS feed, grab the title of the most recent post, and display it in the IM area. Nice.

I'm not (yet) willing to spend any "first life" money to become a premium Second Lifer, so this may not go any further. I may be willing to spend some money if I can think of a way of making some back. I've only been in three times, so I don't know the culture, or quite how to make money. I haven't yet decided whether to invest too much time in it or not. All I do know, is that it's really exciting having my own content inside a computer game. I've never done that before.

[Tags: secondlife api scripting cashing in selling out]