Try the personal touch, please

One of the laziest recruiter tools in use today is Linkedin contact requests. I use Linkedin as a consumer because it helps me keep in contact with various people in a way that would otherwise be difficult. But when I get contact requests from recruiters I almost always ignore them. If recruiters can't be bothered to dig out my email address and send me something personal, then I'm not interested in them. The other day was a new low. I got a completely generic contact request from a new recruiter at the most persistent recruiter of all  - Google (they usually contact me about once a year). I once admired Google a lot, but this just added to the list of reasons I don't admire them so much now - one of the other reasons is their participation in a non-compete cartel among software companies. But in any case, I refuse to engage with cookie cutter recruiters. They tend to be lazy and incompetent.

Yet another reason to hate subversion ...

Yesterday, a family member who is new to subversion fat-fingered a commit and instead of committing just one file committed a whole large directory. It's an easy enough thing to do. My initial reaction was "OK, it shouldn't be too hard to roll that back." After all, I use git reset on a fairly regular basis.

Turns out this is actually quite hard to do. Here is one description of how to do it. Yuck.

Time down the drain

Annoyingly large amount of non-productive time today. First I went and renovated the Makefiles for all my Postgres extensions, having originally copied a piece of bad logic from somewhere into almost all of them. This was exposed by a change in the HEAD branch of Postgres that's about to be reverted, but it seemed best to remove the bogus logic anyway.

Then, for no apparent reason, Xfce forgot to load xfwm4 on one of my machines, and suddenly I had lost all my window decorations - no buttons to close or minimize windows, no icons in the window button bar, etc. That took me an hour or more to diagnose and fix.

All this is delaying my slide preparation for pgcon :-(

Use a VM when in any doubt

Long experience has taught me that some software is best run in a Virtual Machine where it can do relatively little harm to other components of your system. Right at the top of this list is almost all VPN software. The only exception I usually make is for OpenVPN, which is almost always very well behaved. I have a couple of VM's set up for just this purpose. They normally only get fired up when I need to connect to a client over a VPN.

The other day I needed to connect fairly urgently to a client's network, and they require use of a VPN. The VPN software in question, which is proprietary, is one I know from experience can cause problems. However, I could not get it working on my sacrificial VMs, which run Linux, and they told me that they couldn't get it reliably working on Linux either, and that they all connect from Windows. I didn't have a sacrificial VM running Windows, and so, despite my best judgement, I installed the software on a non-virtual Windows machine, that, among other things, runs a couple of buildfarm animals as well as a number of Linux VMs I am using currently on another project.

Big Mistake.

The VPN worked OK, but, when I was done, the Virtualbox network interfaces were hosed. It took me a long time - literally hours, to work out what had happened, since the problem only became apparent when the VMs were recycled, which was a couple of days after using the VPN software. I tried, in turn, disabling the VPN software, uninstalling the VPN software, rebooting, and updating Virtualbox. Nothing worked. Finally I did a system restore back to the point before I had first installed the VPN software. Suddenly everything worked again.

So today I have spent more hours setting up a Windows VM I can use for this purpose. First I had to go out and buy a legitimate copy of Windows, and then get it set up and installed in a VM on my laptop. I put it there so I still have it available when I'm on the road.

But this software still had more surprises for me. It's set up not to allow VPN connections to be made from remote desktop connections. And this is rather important to me since I don't carry my laptop around my house, and when at home I mostly don't work from the laptop. But it turns out that Virtualbox will run a remote desktop server for you and connect the guest console to it, so that the guest thinks the connection is local even when it's not. Take that, nasty VPN vendor!

All in all this has cost me the best part of two days to fix and configure. I'm more than mildly annoyed by it. But I have learned my lesson. I will never run this sort of software from a non-virtual host again.

Oh for decent recruiters in our industry.

The cluelessness of most IT recruiters never ceases to astound me. I received this today:

My name is (deleted) and I'm an IT recruiter at (deleted). Our records show that you are an experienced IT professional with experience relevant to one of my current contract openings.(deleted)
The job is located in (deleted) with one of our Fortune direct client. They are looking for a GUI Developer

 Not only am I not qualified for this job, but I have proclaimed loudly my intention never again to do GUI work,

Plonk.