dimator | head

Well, this is a small disaster. Bram Moolenaar, the main developer of Vim, has been hired at Google, which is good for Google, good for Bram, but bad for Vim. It looks like Vim 7 will be the last new Vim for a good while, if the project continues at all.

I hope someone steps up to take over full time development, though, as this is one of open source’s most valuable projects. It would demonstrate the ability of OSS software to continue after a project’s patriarch leaves.

HavenCo is not new. The company was founded in 2000. I was checking out their rates, and they are clearly trying to cater to a different crowd than people like me, who just want a little privacy from the prying U.S. government, and the greedy U.S. companies that are dictating more and more policy. Everyday, our liberties are eroding away, in the name of “copyright enforcement.” We are being hammered and shaped like so much raw metal into purebred consumers. Buy, buy, buy, and don’t even think about sharing anything with your neighbor. How long before 20th Century Fox or BMG have their own stormtroopers?

Anyway, I think there’s a market for a company like HavenCo to offer a service for privacy-focused citizens like myself. I’d love a shell account, for example, so I can securely tunnel whatever communications I’d like to keep secret. The point of doing it through HavenCo is that they are under no legal obligation to turn over any customer records. I wonder if such services exist?

Here’s some code my co-worker tried:


>>> l = [1]
>>> l.sort(lambda a,b:1/0)
>>> l = [1,2]
>>> l.sort(lambda a,b:1/0)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "“, line 1, in ?
File ““, line 1, in
ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero


Sorting a one-item list is a no-op. He said python is wierd like that. I think it’s cute.

We’re looking for a little help at work, so we got a Monster account. I went through some candidates, and we’ve got a few good resumés on our hands. I’m the guy reading resumés, which is something I’d never thought I’d do.

Reading resumés gives you a unique perspective on how people advertise themselves to be hired. I’ve learned to be wary, for example, of things like “I know languages X, Y, Z, …” because I have a different notion of “know” than most people do. If you’ve done a couple cookbook tutorials in a language, you don’t “know” anything. I remember one joker I knew who claimed to know 70 languages. Really, now? 70? Give me a break.

I know they want to embelish their skills a little, which is why they put language names, but that’s not really important. I’d rather see “X years of programming experience.” This tells me that this person knows that buzzwords are not important. Languages are not important. What is important is someone’s grasp of the fundementals, of what’s really going on under the hood.

All those resumé HOWTO’s are really true: people doing the hiring would rather see detailed descriptions of what you’ve done, the projects you’ve worked on, rather than the fluff I am seeing too often.

Once again, a great idea that I am supremely jealous of: prosper.com. P2P lending, where everyone’s a lender. The site does a better job of explaining than I do, but wow, what a great idea.

The only thing that is troubling is the fact that someone can be delinquent or default on a loan without the normal repercussions of if he went through a “normal” lender (bad credit, foreclosure, etc). The site has the notion of “groups,” though, which might alleviate that concern a little bit.