Reference update

Here's another update on my former colleague who has been looking for work in high tech. I heard from him this week. He gave me a heads up that I might be hearing from a company he has interviewed with. That was considerate and smart of him to tell me in advance who I might be hearing from.

The company is a large, well known IT firm. I haven't heard from them yet. I kind of thought I would have heard from them by now. Maybe he's dropped out of the running.

Fortunately for him, it turns out that he does currently have a job. He caught on with the startup company he'd interviewed with. He said he's still looking because the pay isn't quite what he wants and the work is a bit light on the skills he's most interested in. I'd say go for it if something better appears. There is little loyalty in high tech, it's every man and every company for himself in this industry.

But its good for him. Having a job gives him credibility with other companies that he's desirable and employable. Plus if you don't land something better then he still has something which is good enough and many times better than being out of work on the outside and worrying about how long his severance and unemployment will hold out.

Sneaky Network Magic

I was getting some weird printing errors on the Dell laptop last week. Visual C++ runtime error, followed by program termination. That's weird, it was all working OK and nothing had been changed.

I went to the printers console in the laptop, and it said stuff like spooler service not running on the main HP PC where the printer was shared from. Hmmm. I opened the printer in the HP. Indeed the share had been turned off. That's strange, I didn't turn it off.

So I clicked the Network Magic console. It showed a message indicating that the free trial had expired and I had to upgrade to enable printer sharing. Their GUI implied that there was no way around this to turn printer sharing back on. Luckily I knew better and just turned on the share manually. After that I went back to the Dell and did the printer discovery wizard again and it all worked.

That was pretty dirty and deceptive of Network Magic. First they "helpfully" set up a shared printer, then they go and turn it off without my consent. Then their GUI is extremely deceptive, acting like they were holding my shared printer hostage until I gave them some ransom money to release the shared printer lock they had put on.

I'm glad I don't work for them. This to me is very unethical, basically Network Magic is acting like a trojan. That must have sucked for the programmer who had to write that feature to turn off printer sharing and then try to dupe unsophisticated users into thinking they had to pay off the Network Magic shakedown to get their printer share back up.

Make no mistake: the printer share is not created or owned by Network Magic. It is part of Windows itself. It is owned by the PC user. The user is free to manually turn on printer sharing with no assistance at all required from Network Magic. That's true for all of the other Network Magic features too, file sharing, wireless security and access lists, all of it is part of Windows and the user can easily set up all that stuff himself using the GUI in Windows.

If you want to pay for their nice, intuitive GUI for the above features, then fine, that's your choice. But their guerilla bait and switch marketing is very bad.

Documentation

We're nearing the end of the testing cycle for a product release. There aren't any high priority bugs around so I was told to just grab some lower priority issues. Given a choice I decided to tackle some documentation that had become a little bit out of date.

I find I've enjoyed doing the documentation. There's a certain Zen to documentation that makes it satisfying. Maybe it's because, like code, it can be verified to be correct. Plus I'd been involved in this documentation in earlier releases so it was something that I'd been involved with in the past that I wanted to see maintained at a high level of quality.

Documentation, especially API documentation, unlike code, can generate feedback from external users. Nobody ever sees the code you write, especially outside the programming group. But with documentation you are presenting yourself and your department for external valuation. Do a good job and you'll look good and be praised. Do a shoddy job and probably nobody will say anything directly, but the bad vibe will come back around in some way.

Around 10 years ago my younger sister was finishing up high school and considering her options heading into university. I encouraged her then to get into technical writing. She can write, and could learn the technical jargon easily enough. There were about a million tech jobs open at that time. It's much easier to teach natural writers the technical stuff than to try to teach people how to write well. You either can or you can't write.

She ended up going to law school and has had a good career. If I wasn't programming, then maybe I would have got into technical writing. I probably would have enjoyed it enough as a vocation.

How to share HP deskjet 3650 printer with a Dell laptop

We now have a Dell laptop computer in addition to the HP Pavilion we already had. My wife will be using the laptop. She wanted to be able to print from the laptop to the hp deskjet 3650 using the wireless router.

The laptop is connected to the Internet through a D-Link wireless router which works great. The D-Link included Network Magic which set up the home network. It also set up the printer as a shared device.

So it would seem straightforward to add the HP printer to the Dell and get printing remotely. Well it almost worked. The wizard came up and was able to find the shared printer off the HP PC. However after the dialog about downloading drivers off the HP, there was an error message that it didn't have the right driver version.

Uh Oh. I brought up the printer properties. It had an additional drivers section. That looked promising. But when I clicked to add new drivers it prompted me for a drive letter. There's no CD as all the software on the HP was pre-installed.

I thought to get the drivers from HP. So from hp.com I was able to easily click through a couple of screens to find the download for deskjet 3650 drivers. First I thought to put it on the HP. Then I decided to leave the HP unchanged as it has always worked fine so I didn't want to risk changing it. So I downloaded the drivers to the Dell instead.

When I installed them on the Dell the dialogs came up and then one said to plug in the printer. I just clicked Cancel, hoping it would work. But clicking Cancel aborts the driver install. So I ran the wizard again. This time when it said to plug the printer into the USB port I moved the laptop next to the PC. Then I unplugged the printer from the PC USB port and into the Dell USB port. Then happily the driver install completed and I was able to print a test page from the Dell onto the HP printer.

The last step was to plug the printer back into the PC USB port. Then I went back to the add printer wizard on the Dell. It found the shared printer as usual. This time it was able to add it successfully as it now had all the drivers from my earlier trickery. Then I set the shared printer as the default and deleted the physical printer definition that the driver installed. And that was that.

Reference update

I didn't hear back anything from my former colleague's first interview. However I did hear from recruiters twice in the past week doing reference checks on him.

The first one was from a large well known tech firm. The second was from a startup company.

The woman from the large firm seemed to be looking for an overall feel for what my colleague was like. She asked me how long I'd known him; how long we worked together on projects; what specific technologies did he work with; what was his biggest strength; what was his biggest weakness; did he get along well with others. We talked for around 15 minutes.

The end of the discussion was interesting. The recruiter started asking me about my skill set. I told here we're a Java shop and I'd been working on basically the same stuff as my former co-worker. She said they are interested in J2EE and Oracle and asked me if I would interested in applying to her company. I told her I'm not presently looking. She suggested she'd e-mail me and I could reply with a resume to get on each others rader screens in case things change in the future. I said sure - Why not? Strangely she hasn't followed up on that e-mail. Oh well she must have forgot after she hung up.


The second company wanted to talk to me during the daytime. I had said when I agreed to give a reference that a phone chat was available in the evening hours. The fellow e-mailed me back and said he'd try to call me that evening.

I haven't heard from him since though. He must have had to go out of town or had some unimaginably high priority thing. After all, in a small startup with a very small programming team, what's more important than getting in great developers. A bad hire could cause the company to fail, and a great hire could be a difference maker. So like Google you'd expect he'd make the effort to do the follow up to get as much data as he could on this potential hire to be sure he was getting someone very good. What's more important to the success of a software startup than hiring outstanding programmers? Not much.

He feels he might get offers from both companies. He may be favoring the startup because it is closer to his house. I reminded him in the chat that the hours can get long at startups, but he's done the startup thing at least twice now so he knows what to expect.

Test team

We're a small team, around a dozen developers and a handful of testers. Two or three times a year the developers have to temporarily join the test team to help complete a test cycle for a product release. Myself and around three other programmers have been with the test team the last week or so. Hopefully we'll be finished up by the end of this week.

Testing is an interesting experience. I don't mind doing it once in a while. I always test my own code of course, but testing other people's work is interesting. You get to try to think like a customer.

With testing, my take on it is that the name of the game is automation. I think our test team should work on ways to increase use of automated testing. There's some, but not as much as there could be. I was testing three APIs. One internal API is my own API; and two other APIs developed by others. For my own API, after I tested it out OK, there was a gap between candidate releases. The test team lead said OK to my request to use the time to create an automated test suite for the my own API.

It took me around two days to assemble the individual loose tests for each API function into a one pass driver that calls all of them. I suspect I've already saved in the subsequent baselines close to the amount of time I spent creating the automated test driver.


For the other APIs, we have a GUI driver that will set up and call each API function with data the GUI user enters interactively. This is OK for a programmer to test individual APIs as they are added, modified or debugged. However it doesn't scale well and is labour intensive and isn't well suited to rigorous regression testing.

So after this cycle I'm going to push to get some time to create a driver for the other two APIs as well. That may save me truckloads of weekend time in the future.