I've not done a links post before, but there's a few things I've found recently(ish) that I'd like to share with you:

1. Top ten geek business myths.
2. Threading. A PDF e-book explaining threading in detail.
   
3. The Braidy Tester. Making developers cry since 1995.
   
4. Text link ads. Sell text links on your blog. I've been doing this for a while now, and last month it paid for my yearly hosting costs.
5. A 15-minute demo of Ruby on Rails on YouTube.
6. The tube map journey planner. A clever use of Google maps, with the tube map superimposed.
7. How to access private and protected code in .NET assemblies.
8. An alternative to interviews. Seth Godin's approach for not getting caught out.
9. Possibly the most pleasing website I have ever seen.

[Tags: list]

You will learn how to:

• Use the common technologies mentioned on job adverts.
• Get more interviews with little or no technical improvement.
  
• Overcome the "number of years" trap.
• Beat the recruiter's HR department at their own game.

Course benefits

• TLA technologies offer unprecedented opportunites for integrated software development. This hands-on course provides the minimum skills required to create applications using TLA (provided the applications just read values from a database).
• YAFLA certification on 3 year day course.
  

Who should attend

• Skilled developers who still write code in Java, C++ or other deeply unfashionable language.
• Unskilled programmers using previously fashionable technologies such as JSP, ColdFusion or "classic" ASP.
• Anyone wanting an interview at a large corporation.
  

Hands on training

During this course, you perform extensive exercises that provide in-depth hands-on experience, including:

• Following the instructions on the hand-out to open the editor.
  
• Typing text from the hand-out into the editor.
• Following the instructions on the hand-out to compile and run the application.
• Writing your CV to match the requirements in common job advertisements.
• Considerations of "x years" calculations: elapsed time (number of years since first hearing of TLA) vs. total hours working with TLA (factoring in the time you would have spent on TLA had you not been working with other things).

Course duration

• 1 day per year for 2, 3, or 4 years, depending on what the advert specifies. If they want 3 years experience, then you will have had experience in 3 different years.
  

[Tags: training tla cv hr]

I've been a bit late with this one, but I overheard someone saying that Google have spend $1.6 billion buying a rock band. I haven't had a chance to read about it yet, but hey, I trust the people I overheard. Apparently the band is a well established brand, with a large user base, and they've got some good videos. Microsoft and AOL were rumoured to have considered buying the band, but they had better technology and decided not too. Google, however, was more excited by the fan-club.

It seems unlikely that the band will adopt Google's site design, after all, it currently has a black background. It just wouldn't work on white. Despite this, I expect to see adwords appearing on U2.com very soon.

[Tags: google rockband]

I just met someone in Second Life, at Koz's blogHUD area, where we couldn't get the news screen to work. We got chatting, and she was interested in my "first thing that works" object that reads the first title from an RSS feed in the real world and puts it in the chat window. Honestly, it was just for trying out HTTP requests in the scripting language, nothing of use.

Anyway before a could give her an object with the correct permissions, she vanished. As I'm not going to develop it further for quite a while, I'll post the script as a starter for ten. If anyone (including Pixeleen Mistral) can use it, hoorah, and please let me know how you get on.

key requestid;

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
    }

    touch_start(integer total_number)
    {
        requestid = llHTTPRequest(
 "http://feeds.feedburner.com/harriyott/simonssoftwarestuff",
 [HTTP_METHOD,"GET"],"");
    }

    http_response(key request_id, integer status, 
 list metadata, string body)
    {
        if (request_id == requestid)
        {
            list titles = llParseString2List(
  body,["<title>", "</title>"],[]);
            llSay(0, llList2String(titles,3));
        }
    }
}

[Tags: secondlife rss llhttprequest]

[Tags: fatalexception]

I had an interesting chat with Tom Morris on the way back from the geek dinner last night. I asked him about all the OPML stuff he's doing at the moment, and there is quite a lot. He's got another thing going on at the mo (that's about as specific as I can get!), plus his uni work, and prolific blog writing. I asked him how he fitted it all in, and he said that he has 3 hours on the train each day.

Suddenly, getting the train into London seemed quite appealing. If I'm lucky, I can get 3 hours a week of geek-out time. I've got a couple of things on the go, but I've also got to squeeze in emails and the occasional blog post, and my evenings are quite busy. Still, I can walk Toby to school before work, and I get home in time for the four of us to eat dinner together, which I wouldn't get if I had 3 hours of commute. And that's the trade-off I chose nine years ago.

I was offered two jobs at the same time. One in Islington and one in Nutley, two hours away and 10 minutes away respectively. I chose Nutley over Islington, life over commute, and I'm glad I did. My current job is further away - 15 minutes - but living in rural Sussex, I'm lucky to find any development work at all. Despite having very little geek time, I'm very happy with my life choices. Still, I do get a little envious when I see what Tom's up to. I'll have plenty of geek time though, when the children are teenagers and don't want to hang out with their geeky old Dad.

[Tags: tommorris geek geekdinner nutley opml]