What's it all about, Alfie?

I'm not an analyst, but I know what I believe in, and what makes me nervous. Facebook has always been in the latter category, and it's all because of how it's making it money, and what face it presents to it's users. I guess it's also that I'm willing to bet that less than a few percent of the Facebook users really understand how they make money, and what they are doing with the user's personal information.

So today was interesting… Facebook announced earnings, and the result wasn't good:

and it's still falling… down %10 in after-hours trading. But that's not the worst.

No, it seems that Zynga has had it's own round of problems - this in the form of near scandal by the underwriters and massive dumping by the principals in Zynga:

It's amazing that people don't think everyone on Wall Street are crooks. Look at what they are doing to literally millions of investor dollars! It's evaporated. Done. Poof. It's almost a crime.

But I know it's not. Not really. And that's why I can't stand folks like these.

Today OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion goes on sale for $19.99 in the Mac App Store, and while I'm certainly going to update - eventually - I'm not going to do it while I'm at work, nor on a work evening. I'm definitely going to wait for a weekend. However, we have updates in Software Updates for Safari 6 - and that's great news.

It's not often we get a major revision of Safari, and this should (hopefully) make a few things a little nicer, but we'll have to wait and see. It's certainly something I can update in the middle of the day comfortably.

There is no doubt that the best way to get from my Mac to a Windows box is with CoRD. No question. This morning, with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion due out later today, it's time for folks to be updating their projects to with with 10.8 and the retina MacBook Pros. So it is with CoRD. This release candidate sports a new icon as well as the internal changes, and it's just spectacular looking. Very nice work. Best of all, it just works!

Can't beat it if you have to talk to Windows. Glad I don't have to do that much any more.

[4:22] UPDATE: They did a final release today as well! What a deal! This is the kind of deployment I love to see.

This morning I read a tweet that is going to make my life a little bit easier - and my appreciation of LaunchBar that much greater:

it's all about this Gist:

If you have the Gist Vim plugin, it's easy - load it up and save it as ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Actions/Open in Chrome.scpt and then open LaunchBar and use the OIL short-hand and hit enter, and it's done -- the front page in Safari is opened up in Chrome!

This is just amazing to me! I've been using LaunchBar for years but I've only really been scratching the surface. This kind of automation is so simple, but so incredibly powerful. Gotta love great software!

[7/24] UPDATE: the gist has been updated with a few fixes for some cases when Chrome wasn't open, etc. It worked for me because I already had it open, and, like the developer, didn't need the extra work. But now it'll work even better, and that's great too.

Today I was updating a few Safari Extensions on my work laptop and I saw an extension: Resizer that would allow the user to define a series of window sizes and positions and then make those available in the contextual menu as well as a secondary menu in the title bar/strip. This is exactly what I had those Apple Scripts for! Except this is doing all that and more. How nice!

Out with my old Apple Scripts, and in with Resizer. Very nice!

I've been using tcsh for years - back to my first MacBook when it was the default for new accounts on Mac OS X. It's been a long time. But there are just too many things that are looking for bash as the shell, and I'm just tired of having to fix things, or re-do things, or just have to roll it all myself, so I switched.

This makes a lot of sense as it's the same shell I'm going to be using on Ubuntu, and all the other platforms I'll ever use. It was a pain to get going as I needed to convert my login scripts to bash, and that took a little bit of fiddling, but it's now worth it. I'm converted, and things are running smoothly again.

Great. Now I can get to running Ruby from RVM. Very important for the work I'm doing.

Well… as Liza kept telling me, the dry spell is over and I've accepted a job offer from Groupon. The offer is really nice, and most importantly the environment and the work look to be incredible. I interviewed with my new manager, and he seems like a really nice guy, and I think we really hit it off. Don't get me wrong, I'm not thinking this is going to be all sunshine and ponies, but it's going to be a lot nicer than the kind of environment I've been in for the last several years. I'll be learning a new domain, certainly picking up some new language skills, and going to work in shorts in the summer. You just can't beat that.

So it looks like I'll be starting on Monday July 16th, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Oh… did I say, they all use Macs. With 27" Cinema Displays. That's a pretty sweet development set-up, if you ask me.

The Google Chrome Team has once again bumped the major version number on Chrome, and we're now on 22.0.1201.0 with an incredibly short set of release notes. No matter, the V8 javascript engine is now 3.12.9.0, and I'm sure there are a batch of security and stability fixes for this guy as well. They have done one thing on the Mac client - the minimum OS X release is now 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and that's nice in that it means they can expect certain minimum from the OS that makes it easier/nicer to build on.

Keep up the nice work, guys.

It's common to hear, the company you are interviewing with wants you to take a test on the language you say you're proficient in - just to make sure that you are what you say you are. It sounds very reasonable: You say you've been doing C++ coding, then taking a little test for an hour should be no big deal, right? Java, Ruby, anything can be tested, right? And this will let the employer know if you're really good at this. Right?

Not so much.

I've been taking and writing tests for many years, and I've no problem with tests of any kind - so long as the results of the test are balanced against other factors. For example, are you going to hire an architect for your house based on his ability to take a 60 min test on the loading of certain structures? Or the standard lengths of commercially available lumber? No. You want to see what he's done. That's what's impressive (or not).

You want to look at what a person has done, and can do, in order to know if you want to hire them. It's possible that a one-hour test is a good measure for that, but I'm guessing not. I've taken too many of these tests in the past couple of years to think that any web-based test can be a good, complete, and accurate measure of a person's ability to write real-world systems.

How are you going to test their ability to design solid thread-safe code? You can ask them questions about it, but that's not the same. You can ask about immutability, but that's not the same as knowing when to apply it, and when not to.

The problem is that these tests are billing themselves as an authoritative measure of the quality of an individual, and they can't possibly be. They are far too narrow. How can you possibly measure a person in an hour? No way.

So I had to take two of these today, and it just wiped me out. I got "decent", but not "great" scores - as I'd have expected, and that's about as good as I can expect. But I guess I need to look at these tests in a slightly different light -- if the employer is taking these ay face-value, then maybe that's telling me something important about their hiring policies, and maybe that's the critical take-away for me.

In all my years, I'd never inflict this on someone. It's just not a useful metric for hiring a person. Going into a place that requires them means that I'll be forced to ask for them. Not necessarily a good thing, in my book.

UPDATE: I got a mid-40's percentile on the C++ test. From this, you'd think there are a ton of developers that are better than I am. As such, the employer that was asking me to take the test said I wasn't qualified. It hurts, I won't kid you, but in the end, I honestly believe it's saying more about them than me, and that's really what's important to me.

This evening I was reading a few tweets and this popped up. Not good news for me as I'm using Twitterrific on iOS and OS X. I have no desire to be forced to use the "certified" Twitter clients. They aren't as nice, and I'm really getting to like using the same client on both platforms.

I can certainly understand why they want to do this - they need to make money, and inserting ads to the stream is about the only way to get money without getting people to pay to use the service. But do that, and all the other "second tier" services will say they are free, and they'll get all the messaging flow.

No, from a client, Twitter has to be without charge, or it will fail. But it's got to make money, so it's got to be ads. The article says LinkedIn was first, but I wonder when the other clients will be on the hit parade?