Backblaze and Spotlight
Last week, on more than one ocasion, I could feel my laptop getting really hot for no apparent reason which pointed me to take a closer look at what’s using up my resources. Indeed CPU & memory were being intensely taken over by mds and md-worker (mkay, they weren’t really “taken over”, more like one core was and half a gig of RAM, but still quite significant). What are those, you ask? Well, they are processes related to Spotlight, that wonderful little tool on the Mac OS that just seems to know where everything is on your system. In order to do that though, it has to spend some time going through your new files so that it can find them quickly when you’re looking for them.
I was on the right track, but I couldn’t really picture any reason why Spotlight would be working out so intensely all of a sudden, as I hadn’t copied any large amounts of files or anything of the sort in the previous days. Even if I had, why would it take so long to index them (it was pretty quick with everything in the very beginning). It took a bit of searching around, but I eventually tracked down a bug that makes Backblaze (a cloud backup service) and Spotlight not play well together.
Here’s a description of the problem and very easy fix (on the Backblaze website! How cool is that? Good job tech team!); it boils down to Backblaze playing with a (large) log file very often which apparently makes Spotlight want to reindex it and results in a continuous load on that process. All you have to do is tell Spotlight to ignore that log file. Done, everything is back to normal.
(Note: It seems that Backblaze does try to tell Spotlight to ignore that folder when it installs, but sometimes it doesn’t work right. Maybe it’s a Lion-related bug? I don’t really know, but nonetheless, it’s good that they actually put up a description of the problem and fix on their website, I really liked that).
KLM A la carte… About time!
I’ve been saying for a long time that I do not understand why food on flights has to be so horrible. It’s not the cost-cutting part, I get that. What I don’t get is why airlines don’t try to follow one of two routes which I believe would be a better action:
1. Marketing approach!
Have some caterer provide the food and cut your costs by allowing them to advertise on the flight. Let them tell me who made what I’m eating and where I can find them once I land and I guarantee that they will make sure that the food in front of me doesn’t suck so much. Such a deal should also result in having the airline pay less for the food, since the caterer is getting free advertisement – if I like it, I know where to go eat when I land.
I’m not an expert in this area so maybe there are other problems here which I’m not seeing (greed sounds like something I may be missing).So that brings me to option 2.
2. Make me pay for it, but at least give me options!
Airlines are getting really really good at price segmentation. You’ve got low-cost airlines, regular economy tickets, economy tickets + extra legroom, economy tickets + even more extra legroom and then the business/first class choices. Depending on how much you’re willing to budget for your comfort, you have enough options to satisfy almost everyone. Except for meals.
Meals come in two flavours. If you’re in the expensive bracket (business etc.), I’m guessing your meal may actually taste like food (I wouldn’t know because I was never there, but if you pay that much for a ticket and still get crappy food, I’d be quite furious if I were you). If you’re in the economy section, irrelevant of other upgrades, you get flavoured plastic. Why? Why does this have to be black and white?
How about you give me the option to get even MORE of my money for something that tastes at least somewhat like organic matter? Yes, it will be overpriced, yes I will complain loudly about it, but at least give me the option. Just because I don’t travel business doesn’t mean I can’t get a few bucks out to not eat recycled paper. Yes, it’s annoying that I have to do that and that your regular food serving can’t be at least half-decent, but if I am willing to do it, why not let me?
To my great surprise, someone has finally caught on to this! KLM is now introducing an “A la carte menu” in the economy class. As the title says… it’s about time!
…Of course, soon I will probably blog complaining about how they’re making me pay extra for decent food. Oh well, you can’t change human nature.
E-Books ups and downs
Almost a year ago I blogged about getting a Kindle and how I was pleasantly impressed by it (that’s an euphemism for being totally blown away). It’s been 11 months and in this time I have downloaded 58 books on my Kindle. Wow! Now I say download and not bought because about half of these are free ebooks that you can get on Amazon (mostly classics). Out of all these I read probably about 20-25. In case you’re wondering how do I end up getting more books than I actually read, that’s an interesting topic that I’ll touch on another time.
Regardless, that’s still a lot of books read and a lot of books bought. I can say with certainty that I bought more books this year (using the Kindle) than in any year before because of the convenience. Nonetheless, among these numerous books, free or paid, there is not one technical book. I just never bought an ebook that I would be directly using in my work. There are several reasons for that:
- Kindles are great for reading a novel from start to end, but not that great for flipping through pages and going back and forth
- I don’t even notice the screen lag when I’m reading, but it would bug me a lot if I were going back and forth between a few pages (as I often do with reference books) or if I was searching for something specific
- No color makes many figures and screenshots useless and most others hard to read
- The screen is small by “tech book” standard. This is perhaps a weaker argument since there are larger Kindles, but for me it’s an argument nonetheless
- Old habits die hard… I just like having the reference book next to me so that I can flip through it, make notes and of course throw it at the wall when code crashes!
Recently though I did purchase what is most probably my first technical e-book. I actually bought three of them in a pack. These are the Android Books from CommonsWare and again there are several reasons why I decided to buy these. As tech books go, these are quite cheap actually so it’s not a huge gamble if it turns out to be a bad idea, I could check on the author (by observing his inhuman rep on StackOverflow and the way he explains things there) and they actually seemed quite promising in terms of quality. But really, the one selling point that got me to decide on this almost immediately was getting Free updates for one year.
Now let met just stop there and expand on that. Free updates for any period of time is a HUGE thing in technology documentation, especially with something young like Android that mutates into something new every 10 minutes or so. My previous book on Android was outdated by the time I purchased it. By the time I finished it, Android was something else altogether. Updating books is something that you can’t have with “dead trees” and I cannot overstate its importance for tech books. I believe this to be the strongest argument for getting tech books electronically. Unfortunately, not all ebooks come with this benefit (actually…most don’t as far as I know), so the argument becomes rather null. It’s sad to have a medium with so much power, but find it not be used to its full capability.
Of course, I’m now back at my original concerns. Having this new ebook I was faced with the challenge of…well…using it. This is for personal work and I’m doing that off a laptop now which means that I don’t have three screens so that I can put the book on one and just work as normal. Lion’s fullscreen mode plus gestures actually helps a lot, it’s easy to switch between the book and the environment… but I still have to switch, which is a bit annoying (for those of you confused, I was spoiled by working on two 24+21 inch screens for a year; you just can’t really ever get over the experience of 40″+ of screen space).
Among my numerous options with these ebooks, I could get a Kindle version of the book so I could put it on my Kindle, but I run into the problems I was previously mentioning. Again, call me fussy, but I just can’t see myself using my Kindle for a tech reference.
I think this is where I become interested in having a tablet. I can genuinely see that be useful for something like this. A 10″ screen is decent size and if going through pages is as smooth and quick as it is on the computer, that’s great. Since the reasons for getting a tablet are adding up, maybe once the Kindle Fire makes it to the UK, I’ll look into that.
(You know, it’s funny how when the iPad came out I was completely unmoved and considered it a dumb idea and as time went by, I slowly started buying into the whole tablet thing; I hate to admit something like this, but in this case Steve was absolutely right… I had no idea what I wanted until he shoved it in my face. Damn!).
Getting your first “real” job: 1 – Resume/CV
As I promised in the intro, I won’t talk too much about this, as there is a lot of info out there already. I’ll just share a few personal tips.
Your resume is very important (as if you didn’t know that already)
Unless you are referred for a position, this may very well be the single piece of information that will decide whether or not you move on to the next stages of the application process. You need to make sure it represents you well, it’s concise and easy to read and it’s truthful.
Your resume is not all that important (and I like contradictions in my posts)
About one year ago, I spent an exaggerate amount of time (re)designing my resume. I rewrote the entire thing in Latex (and I don’t even know Latex). I had it reviewed by several people multiple times, made lots and lots of modifications, maintained different versions etc. I’m not saying it was the best resume, but it was definitely the best I could do at that time.
All this glorious effort and the vast majority of jobs I applied for never ever got to see it. Why? Because they use these recruiting apps where you have fill in all the data that is in your resume in a web form. This will quite probably be the most frustrating experience in the whole process. You’ll be filling the same information over and over again, in pretty much the same web app (no really… they use the same one! But you still have to write it every time again and again because there’s no information shared from one to the other) and that’s just the way it is. Honestly, if there is a way to write your resume that makes it optimised for the auto-filling function of these apps, I would definitely keep a version written in that way, but I’m not aware of any.
Anyway, that aside and assuming you won’t be filling out too many of these online applications, you should have one resume version that looks good; but just *good* should be enough here. The effort to go from a good resume to a fantastic resume is (in my opinion) not justified by the gain you’re going to get. I think it’s safe to say that by the time human eyes actually read your resume (so that they can be impressed by your awesome design skills), you will generally be already past the first stages of the process where the resume is the most important thing.
Conclusion
Keep it concise and well-organised. Do a good job, put some thought into it to make sure it represents you well (you should be proud of it), but don’t sweat the design/layout too much. There are lots of designs and formats out there, just pick one that you like and go with it.
Also don’t be afraid to maintain and create different versions, targeted for specific jobs or regions. You could have a longer resume which contains everything you would want to say, but don’t have space for* and from that you can create more concise versions targetted for your specific application.
Okay this was utterly unhelpful and boring, what’s next?
I know I didn’t have much to say here, but I had to talk about it at least a bit. Next thing, I’ll tackle how you actually go about applying to jobs and I’ll have some more interesting things to say there.
* I am really just mentioning this for the sake of having it there, because since this series is for getting your first job… I really don’t think that it should be the case that you have so much content to squeeze in. If you are just fresh out of college and feel that you have a lot more to say than you can fit in 1-2 pages, you’re probably not filtering the content right. Get some reviews from more experienced people to help you take out the most important bits and drop the rest.
Recycling is great, but…
I think recycling is great. I’ve been supporting recycling since before I was able to actually do it (Romania is a bit behind on all that). I think we need to push the technologies further to the point where the concept of “recycling” is the norm: always reuse everything! I don’t want my future kids to have to recycle, I would rather they didn’t know what throwing away was. I could tell them fun “war stories” about how when I was their age I would actually sort things into stuff that can be reused and stuff that just has no more purpose and will be thrown away and burned. I’d hope their world will be so different that they will find it as hard to imagine as I may find the milkman.
I digress… but let me just make it exceptionally clear that I think recycling is fabulous and I’m a big supporter of it (done the right way).
However…
What would be even more awesome is using less stuff to begin with!
Here’s my “tipping-point” example (though I’m sure everyone has their own that’s similar). When I don’t make it to a farmer’s market, I buy organic tomatoes because they taste vaguely closer to what I believe tomatoes should actually taste like.
Here’s an example of what I may purchase on an average day:
Source: http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-thing?.out=jpg&size=l&tid=8717653
Can anyone explain to me… why in the world do I need my tomatoes to be placed on a plastic tray and wrapped in a plastic bag, before I even touch them? The fact that I am bringing my own bags to the store pales into utter insignificance in light of the fact that lots of the produce that I buy comes prewrapped in egrigious amount of plastic*! Sometimes, after I get home, I spent a good several minutes cutting everything open and throwing that stuff in the recycling bin because I simply can’t fit all that plastic in my tiny fridge.
So sure, yes, it *IS* getting recycled. But why does it have to be there in the first place? I fear that because we can recycle, we’ve become too relaxed about using extra stuff.
I could even go as far as suggesting that more things that come in plastic bottles be instead put in glass bottles that could be later returned. Milk comes to mind as a great starting point. Most families buy it periodically and they could bring back the old bottles every time they come get the new ones.
I could go even further, suggesting that we should be able to use some containers (like small baskets) in the store for grabbing produce and carrying it to the counter (so that they can be weighed and priced) and then leave them there at the counters. This way I could genuinely come to the store with three bags and leave with three bags, instead of three bags plus a dozen other smaller bags.
And don’t even get me started on the toxicity of plastics and how all of this may come together to an even bigger concern regarding health and the environment.
I won’t go there now, maybe some other time. In the mean time, I have to ask my council for more recycling bags again, because we blew through the last lot in a matter of weeks.
* that may have been a Jack Sparrow moment. Or not… We’ll never know.
