Reddnet Scribbles

In this long-overdue article, I want to discuss the practical aspects of writing a resume, especially ones aimed for technology fields.

You can find a ton of how-to-resume stuff, but most of it lacks practicality, or just doesn't map to the needs of the majority of technology professionals. I also want to hit darker aspects of resumes that never get the kind of serious discussion they deserve.

I've been on both the hiring, and the applying end quite often through the years, but this is just one man's opinion... take what you find useful, and leave the rest.

BTW, this is a very long article (get some coffee).

Also note: I refuse to use the fancy French spelling. The English language does NOT include accent marks...

It has been well over a year now, so I thought I'd take a bit of time to revisit my old review of ReliableSite.net that I put up last year. This was prompted by a request I received from the original review asking me for my updated opinion.

So...would I recommend ReliableSite.net for your shared hosting needs today?

Depends on what you are doing with it...

Audible.com is a great service for downloadable audio books, but they use their own format for the audio files. This format is internally very similar to MP3s, but without Audible's own software to play the files, they are nearly useless. Audible files are also notoriously annoying to convert to MP3 format, and information on converting the files is hard to come by, and often incorrect. Also, most of the tools that you see recommended for converting audible files don't actually work, so it is easy to throw a lot of money away buying commercial conversion tools only to find out they can't help you anyway. 

So, I've decided to share my own recipe for audible file conversion here. I've converted hundreds of my own books using this process over the last several years, so I know it does work, but this is NOT an easy process.  Also, it doesn't always work out for some people due to other software or settings on their system.

Anyway... I've done my best to make these instructions as clear and concise as possible, but I make no guarantees that you'll be able to get this to work. If it doesn't work for you, feel free to drop in some comments about your experience here, but don't expect me to troubleshoot it for you. I offer these instructions "as-is". 

Read on...

I've finally retired my Dell XPS M1730. The M1730 was, and remains, a very powerful machine but I'd only ended up with that beast because of bad timing. When I needed to buy last time there just weren't any reasonable machines in the upper mid-range. The available systems were either just a little underpowered, or you had to go with the overpowered gaming rigs.

The short battery life of the gaming rig has been a challenge though, so I have grown very eager to leave it behind for something a little more reasonable.

I picked the Dell Studio XPS 16, also known as the Dell Studio M1640.

So now it's review time again.

Here we go!

It has been a while since I’ve gone off on one of my famous rants... so go refill your coffee and enjoy ?

The national healthcare debate here in America has continued well past the typical levels of American political absurdity. It's a mess, and a real solution hasn't appeared anywhere near the table yet.

But the biggest victim of this political fist-fucking so far has been the U.S. Postal Service.

Anytime someone wants to scare you away from a government solution to the terrifying state of healthcare in this country, they dig up the specter of the post office!

"What? Do you really want healthcare to be run like the post office?”

Most people think then of long lines, mail gone missing, and incompetent postal workers... and they answer, "hell no"!

But I say "hell yeah"! Give me a post office for healthcare PLEASE!

While working with the TicketDesk 2.0 MVC project, I came across a really unusual situation within the relational database that TicketDesk uses.

The resulting voyage of discovery lead to me finding my first legitimate use of a "non-enforced foreign key relationship" in a relational database... The situation required an explicitly defined foreign key relationship, but also prohibited the server being able to enforce the relationship.

Here is how it happened...

I've formally packaged a new version of TicketDesk at Codeplex. TicketDesk 1.2.3 is a minor update. The most significant change is that the HTML editor has been replaced with the markitUp! editor using the markdown syntax. This should hopefully work around some problems many users were reporting with adding comments in IE8 as well as some display problems that could occur when a user cut/paste content from a word processor or other sources with embedded rich formatting....

As I've mentioned before, I'm working on the next major version of TicketDesk 2.0 on the  ASP.NET  MVC framework. The project is still a little early in development, but is starting to resemble a real application now.

I've put demo site up to give the public a preview...

[UPDATE - 1/12/2010]: MarkItUp! version 1.1.6 inclues a fix for this issue (thanks Jay!)

I've been working with the wonderful markitUp! editor by Jay Salvat. Specifically, I'm using markitUp! as a markdown editor for TicketDesk and a few other apps I'm working on. I'll probably post more about using markitUp! as a markdown editor later, but for now I wanted to address a specific bug that markitUp! exhibits in IE8. 

By default, markitUp! uses an iframe element for a preview window. 

In IE 8, closing the preview iframe will cause IE 8 to try to close the entire hosting window or tab. IE 8 will prompt the user before it does this, but if you click yes when prompted it will indeed kill the window/tab... which is not good. 

After some digging, I've located the problem... 

Now that the ASP.NET MVC Framework is out, I've decided to tackle learning the new platform the same way I usually do... by writing a real application for the new platform.