Shanti’s Dispatches

New article up over at On Web Apps: The Hopefully, Somewhat Definitive Article on How to Store User Password Hashes.

Interesting read over at Law and Letters about starting pay for lawyers:

Although hard data about the nature of these jobs are difficult to come by (and rely on self-reporting, which is inherently unreliable), the mean salary for graduates of top 10 law schools is $135,000 while it is $60,000 for “tier three” schools. It’s certainly possible that tier-three graduates tend to gravitate toward lower-paying public-interest and government jobs, but this lower salary may also reflect the nonlegal nature of many of these jobs and the fact that these graduates are settling for anything that will pay the bills.

I came into school in the pre-law program, but quickly discovered that developing cool software applications & websites would be more fun. The above statistic makes me glad from the pocketbook perspective as well!

Law school might be nice one day though.

Though heavy metal has long been out of fashion, the death of metal culminated in the documentary wherein Metallica works with a shrink to deal with the band members’ collective issues.

If you’ve beaten Guitar Hero III though, you know that Power Metal is indeed alive and well.

Dragonforce’s video for Through the Fire and Flames:

Via Wikipedia:

DragonForce is an English power metal band formed in London, England in 1999. They are known for their lengthy, fast paced songs, twin guitar solos, and incorporation of “video game” sounds into their music.

Here are some guys playing the full song in GH3 on expert:

Via: reuters

This one’s for the Sideways fans.

Jonah Lehrer of Science Blogs writes:

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

Summary: wine experts either cannot really tell white wine from red wine, or (as one commenter suggests), were afraid of stepping out on a limb and identifying this possibility in their tasting results. Lehrer continues:

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded,” while the vin du table was “weak, short, light, flat and faulty”. Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

This one seems pretty obvious. While drinking some $100 / bottle the other night (I wasn’t paying, mind you) I wanted to bring up how Charles Shaw’s famous “$2 Buck Chuck” often wins tasting contests against much more expensive bottles:

The affordable wine beat out 350 other California chardonnays to win the double gold. Second place went to an $18 bottle, and the most expensive wines at the event, at the price of $55, didn’t even medal.

Of course, leave it to mainstream media to do a thoroughly retarded, unscientific hatched job on $2 chuck. From the ABC News link above:

After its big win, ABC News decided to put the cheap stuff to a blind taste test and see if it would repeat the victory. It was disguised and served along with chardonnays of various prices, including a $120 bottle.

In this test, Caroline Styne, co-owner and wine director of two trendy Los Angeles area restaurants, judged the wines — but to a different outcome. She ranked “Chuck” dead last, but second-to-last was the $120 variety.

So you’re telling me that Caroline Styne doesn’t like $2 chuck?!? Stop the presses — it must be true, the wine was “disguised” and served along with chardonnays of various prices!

View more here.

Original content of this post taken down since it was a bit too snarky, even for my tastes!

Turns out I wasn’t able to attend, but it was cool following their blog. They’ve picked an interesting space, and one that could use some help.

Don’t know why I didn’t think of this before… still getting new to OS X, relatively speaking.

Every once in a while, it’s probably a good idea to right-click your trash icon and click ‘Empty Trash’.

Items to delete: 99,416 …

lol - 2+ years worth!

The boys from The Pirate Bay have shown their true power of music distribution, by sponsoring a Swedish glam rock band “Lamont”.

Via TorrentFreak:

The Pirate Bay is featuring the Swedish glam rock band “Lamont” on their frontpage. Unlike the major record labels, Lamont recognizes the power of filesharing and they give away their album for free. Not without success, over 100,000 people downloaded their album in less than 24 hours, numbers that other artists can only dream of.

I don’t know of a single indie band that wouldn’t die for this kind of exposure. Groups should treat their first few albums as loss-leaders. If you’re truly in it for the long haul (and not a one-hit wonder type of group), give your first few hits away for free… then start charging & perhaps take a Radiohead “In Rainbows” approach.

Just came across this link: Dealing With Professional Burnout Without Quitting Your Job.

This one intrigues me:

Spend a week or two doing only the tasks you enjoy. Seriously. Just let the other stuff build up for a while. If a supervisor questions this, tell them that you’re working on higher-priority stuff, which is true - you’re trying to discover - or rediscover - the aspects of your job that bring about passion and excitement within you.

Probably not written by an IT professional.

Project Manager: Can you fix the XYZ bug that’s been a plague on our soul?
You: Oh.. yeah, let me see what I can do…

(2 weeks pass)

PM: Are you f***ing kidding me???

This would never happen in real life. If you have a PM that is doing their job, chances are your ass is busted within a few hours.

Startup Life vs. Task Balance

I think it would help to have some sort of self-selection of projects one works on. I hear Facebook works this way, as sort of one giant open source project from within. i.e. post a list of bugs/features/projects and let people try and snipe off the obvious fun ones. Assign out the dull / painful ones on an even basis.

There is always a slight chance that one interesting thing for one developer equals an exciting project for another. When this happens to be the case, it would be pretty insane to swap out which developer worked on which, just out of someone’s arbitrary opinion instead of the actual devs working on the items.

This coding horror post reminded me of the original, a scenario I’ve definitely had the displeasure of dealing with over the years.

While web applications can be simpler than desktop apps or enterprisey type of situations, they are not immune to this problem. (Try setting up a J2EE container sometime without exact instructions and you’ll see what I mean)

I can’t help but toot Ruby on Rails’ horn here. On at least three occasions, I’ve had the opportunity to join an existing software development team or work on some code that was halfway completed.

On all three occasions, within 2-3 hours I was fixing bugs and checking in new features.