Unsought Input

Recently I received the worst job inquiry I have ever seen. I’ve had my resume floating around on job sites like Dice and Monster.com since the last time I was actively looking, more than three years ago, so I periodically get emails from keyword-searching recruiters. But nothing like this. This is a masterpiece:

HI, GREETINGS!!! WE ARE LOOKING FOR UI DEVELOPER SPECIALIST WITH BELOW SKILLS TITLE: UI DEVELOPER SPECIALIST Ø LOCATION: CULVER CITY, CA Ø TAX TERM: CON_CORP CON_IND CON_W2 Ø PAY RATE: ALL INCL Ø LENGTH: 12 MONTHS SKILLS: AJAX CSS PHOTOSHOP JSP HTML JOB DESCRIPTION: A MINIMUM OF 5 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE WORKING IN A TEAM ON A COMPLEX-PHASED NEW TECHNOLOGY MEDIUM SIZED WEB PROJECTS UNDERSTAND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY (PREFERABLY RUP) ABILITY/DESIRE TO UNDERSTAND BUSINESS PROBLEM THAT THE APPLICATION IS TRYING TO FIX/SOLVE RESPONSIBLE FOR DEVELOPING THE USER INTERFACE FOR A COMPLEX WEB APPLICATION WITH A LOT OF DATA ENTRY SCREENS, WORKFLOWS, VIEWS AND REPORTS EXPERIENCE USING TOOLS SUCH AS PHOTOSHOP OR ILLUSTRATOR TO PRESENT DESIGN COMPS, UI OPTIONS PARTICIPATED ON PROJECT WITH EXTENSIVE UI REVIEW PROCESSES AND CHANGES CAN PRESENT AND IDENTIFY USABILITY CHALLENGES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT. CAN DESIGN PAGES WITH USABILITY IN MIND EXPERIENCE USING TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT AND XML EXPERIENCE WITH BLEEDING EDGE TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS AJAX AND FLEX (ACTION SCRIPT) EXPERIENCE WORKING ON SITES THAT HAVE A JAVA BACK-END; WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF JSP EXPERIENCE WORKING ON PORTAL BASED SITES (NICE TO HAVE) EXPERIENCE ON PROJECTS WHERE SLICK UI**S AND HIGH PERFORMANCE PAGES ARE A KEY CAN UNDERSTAND AND EXPLAIN CROSS BROWSER CHALLENGES, PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES BASED ON UI DECISIONS ETC. MUST BE ABLE TO PROVIDE EXAMPLES DELIVERABLES WILL INCLUDE: LOW-TECH MOCKUPS USING PHOTOSHOP, ILLUSTRATOR, EXCEL OR VISIO HTML PROTOTYPES WITH FUNCTIONING JAVASCRIPT AND DATA INTERACTIONS FLEX APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT TO SUPPORT THE BACK-END DEVELOPMENT TEAM JSP DEVELOPMENT TO SUPPORT THE BACK-END DEVELOPMENT TEAM .PLEASE RESPONDS WITH YOUR UPDATED RESUME AND THE FOLLOWING DETAILS RATE EXPECTATIONS | IMMIGRATION | AVAILABILITY | CURRENT LOCATION| CONTACT NUMBER ——————————————————————————– WARM REGARDS, JOHN ADAMS | SIERRA INFOSYS | [ed: removed] PHONE: [ed: removed] (OR) [ed: removed] | [ed: removed] ——————————————————————————–
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Ultimate Tag Warrior is a great WordPress plugin that lets you add tagging to your blog and build your own folksonomy. You can use it to show related posts or a nifty tag cloud.

As of version 2.3, though, Worpdress has tagging built right in. That means that development on UTW has stopped, leaving us with a very nasty bug in the final version. After someone comments on a post (and the comment is approved), all the non-category tags are deleted.

This is a known bug in UTW 3.1415926. I’m not quite ready to take the plunge into WordPress 2.3, digging up new plugins to add the features I want and changing our theme. So in the mean time, I found an ugly hack to stop our tags from vanshing into thin air.

1. Go to your ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php file.
2. Find the SaveTags function.
3. Comment out the code that removes tags that are no longer associated with the post.

The end of the SaveTags function should look like this:

// Remove any tags that are no longer associated with the post.
/*
if ($taglist == “”) {
// since “not in ()” doesn’t play nice.
$q = “delete from $tablepost2tag where post_id = $postID”;
} else {
// lop off the trailing space+comma
$taglist = substr($taglist, 0 ,-2);

$q = “delete from $tablepost2tag where post_id = $postID and tag_id not in ($taglist)”;
}
$wpdb->query($q);
*/
$this->ClearTagPostMeta($postID);
}

Please note that this is an ugly hack.  It makes it much more difficult to remove tags from a post when you want to.  I find that we get comments on posts way more often than we ever want to remove tags, so it’s a god tradeoff for the time being.

Got a better solution?  Post it in the comment below.

A couple of weeks ago the esteemed Mr. Wallz mentioned that Radiohead was giving their next album away for free – sort of. The deal is that you can pay any amount you want for the MP3 version, from $0 on up. They are not going through iTunes or Amazon or anyone else and are selling direct from the album’s website.

I went, I bought, I listened. The verdict? Good album, incredibly terrible website. Seriously, the site looks and acts like something that crawled from the depths of 1998, escaping some doomed graphic artist’s college portfolio and wreaking havok on unsuspecting downloaders everywhere.

Here’s a screenshot of the registration screen. Too many fields, and too many required fields. Do they really need my mobile phone number?

Yes, the entire web site looks like that. It’s like someone asked their 4-year old to draw a rainbow in Microsoft Paint and then saved and re-saved it as a jpeg 100 times.

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Had to rebuild my desktop at work this morning, which meant re-installing the RAW Viewer. Why Microsoft never saw fit to natively support RAW files in XP is beyond me. Then there’s the whole “Windows Genuine Advantage” validation routine they make you go through to actually download the viewer. But that’s another post for another day. I found something interesting while downloading the viewer from Microsoft’s website:

See it? No? How about a closer look:

Lookie there – the Firefox logo on the Downloads pane. So whoever wrote up the downloads page didn’t check their browser before grabbing their screenshots.

At one point, I followed the statistics of how many people used first Netscape Navigator, then later Mozilla, then Firefox. At one point, I watched closely what market share they had versus Internet Explorer. Lately, it seems all those figures are up for debate and scritinizing. But it sure says a lot when Microsoft’s own employees prefer the competition’s browser.

Blogs are an integral part of whole “web 2.0″ business, so it’s not too surprising that bloggers like adding tags to their posts. If you are using WordPress, one of the best ways to add tagging functionality to your site is with a plugin called the Ultimate Tag Warrior.

This article won’t go into all the great features included with Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW). If you are new to the plugin, I suggest reading this great article by Lorelle. You can use it to show related posts, tags related to a particular post, and a bunch of other stuff. But there’s no easy way to show tags related to a particular tag or category.

If you take a look at one of our category page, for example the Environment category page, you notice a list of related tags. Here’s how I did it.

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