Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

What To Do When 9rules Rejects Your Application
May 17, 2006

In case you missed the announcement (I have on the past three occasions, and have taken special measures to ensure that it doesn’t happen again), 9rules is enrolling today. Of the hundreds and thousands and millions of blogs that they will review, only about three will be allowed to join their exclusive blog network. And since one of those blogs is bound to be Asymptomatic, that only leaves two slots open for the rest of you.

Since your chances of being accepted as a true blogger are about as likely as the chances of anyone escaping from the Lost island alive, I thought that I might provide some suggestions as to what you can do to quell your thoughts of suicidal rejection.

Option A: Go on a comment spam fit on all of the newly added blogs and leave hateful messages about how 9rules sucks because they didn’t add your site. Explain how you think their network is bogus self-promotion and that you wouldn’t join their crappy little group if they paid you. Deny that you ever submitted your site for inclusion, and cast aspersions on any such insinuations.

Dining For One
May 16, 2006

I’ve made a casual observation many times in trips to places like the mall food court. Have you noticed how people don’t eat together?

I mean, if you go to the mall with a group of people or with a spouse or friend, you’ll eat with them, surely. But if you’re just shopping by yourself and you decide to get lunch, you’ll be eating by yourself. And so will every other solitary person.

Interview Questions Answered
May 13, 2006

Perusing Digg, I came across a post that outlines a set of twenty questions that interviewers should ask their candidates for web development positions. I thought it would be fun to see how I would answer these questions. Here we go…

What industry sites and blogs do you read regularly?

None religiously. Great ideas don’t always come from the most respected names in the business. You’ll find that every now and then, something new and interesting will come from someone previously unknown. That’s why you have to have your fingers on the pulse of the web, and know how to sip from the firehose of new web tech.

That said, I do monitor QuirksBlog and have occasion to peruse ALA periodically. Also, I have in my aggregator a bunch of folks who keep tabs on these things pretty well. Combined with some good PubSub subscriptions and the Digg/del.icio.us/Slashdot filtering I do, I get a good feel for what’s going on.

Do you prefer to work alone or on a team?

It depends on what the project is. It only makes sense that if it’s a very small project, I would expect not to have to coordinate with five other developers. Also, I prefer to focus on coding over design if possible, so a team of developer (me) and designer (someone else) suits me great.

I'm Sorry, Miss Fairy, You're Fired
May 12, 2006

Abby’s third baby tooth fell out yesterday on our way to dinner. Thankfully the tooth was not lost, as was the last one in a horrible “I swallowed it” crying fest.

No, this tooth was preserved and kept save, and upon our return home it was placed in a large purple zipper bag for storage. I say “large” because Abby had planned out how she was going to deliver this tooth the the tooth fairy, and in involved a small purple net-mesh bag with a gold drawstring that really was perfect for the task. Sadly, it got misplaced along the way, and we weren’t able to find it. So we were stuck with the larger purple bag.

Abby duly placed the tooth-containing purple bag under her pillow last night and awaited the fairy who never came.

WordPress Developer Function Reference
May 12, 2006

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, because I’ve been waiting to finish a few features. This one feature is still not complete, but I did something today using Google’s new Coop system that merits a little attention.

You may have visited RedAlt before for various reasons. RedAlt houses a cross-reference of WordPress source code, not just for the trunk (current in-development code), but for both the 2.0 branch (which is the current in-release version), and 1.5.2. These are generated with PHPXref, a tool (written in Perl?) that parses the PHP source code and creates all the links to output and such. So that’s pretty cool. There are a few installations of the XRef’ed WordPress code in various places on the net, but I’m not sure that all of those sites provide XRefs for prior WordPress versions, which may be of use if you’re still using the stable versions of old.