devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

Rony Kahan, one of the founders of Indeed (a search engine for jobs) e-mailed me about their new Salary Search Tool which is currently in beta.

Here are a few interesting examples which I tried out:

ColdFusion’s biggest employer by geography seems to be Washington DC metro area because of all of the goverment related entities using ColdFusion. According to the Indeed Salary Search Tool, the current average salary for a ColdFusion position in DC is $81,000. Also, for each search you do, it gives you another interesting statistic like this:

“Average salaries of ColdFusion job postings in Washington, DC are about 30% higher than average salaries of ColdFusion job postings nationwide.”

It can do this relative to other jobs as well. For example, entering the job keyword of Java without a location (which looks to have an average of $74K nationwide) will give you this statistic:

Average salaries of Java job postings nationwide are about 56% higher than average salaries of job postings nationwide.

It’s too bad that most job openings don’t seem to post salary ranges, but the Salary Search will at least give you a rough idea of what the average salary is being listed in the market. Personally I think it’s a bad idea for an employer to not post a range as they could be wasting both theirs and a candidates time if the range is not what a candidate is looking for, but I digress.

Now that Indeed seemingly has a lot of the parsing/storing/updating of jobs completed and has for awhile, it seems that we can expect many cool tools from them just like this one. The Salary Search in particular is good to see if you’d like a window on the current salary of the job market of your choice. I really need to get around to implementing some ideas I have for the various API’s which they offer, such as Pete Freitag’s JobMaps.

Being a lifelong geek, I’m usually an early adopter of various technologies, and Linux has been no exception for me. I started using Linux sometime in 1997 after hearing about it on IRC. I first installed RedHat on a 486 without XFree86 to play with it and force myself to learn *nix by command line and vi. After using Linux for a year or two I got pretty decent with it and ended-up ditching it for FreeBSD because of “dependency hell”. Anyone who’s maintained a Linux system is probably familiar with what I’m talking about, which mostly has to do with the way glibc is implemented. On a side note, if you’re a Linux user, here are some differences between FreeBSD and Linux and which might persuade you to give FreeBSD a try. To this day I still use FreeBSD for my server(s) and I don’t really see a reason for me to switch anytime soon other than I think Java is better supported on Linux. I continued playing around with Linux from time to time just to try and keep up with it’s changes, and even got certified in Linux Configuration and Installation in 2001. I’ve also admined and setup numerous Linux and FreeBSD boxes for core services like DNS, HTTP, SMTP, etc, including helping out with the mailservers at NetIdentity a few times (now owned by Tucows).

Off and on over the years I’ve tried to switch to Linux as a workstation but found it very buggy or lacking in functionality and couldn’t ever bring myself to switching. Some of the versions/distributions I tried include RedHat 5 & 6, Mandrake, Corel, SuSe, Debian, Slackware, and now Ubuntu.

I gave the Ubuntu Live CD a spin on my laptop a couple of months ago and was pretty impressed. Ubuntu has been getting plenty of coverage lately, and after seeing a demonstration of XGL on YouTube, it was the straw that broke the camels’ back; I decided it was time to give Ubuntu a try on my workstation. I decided to leave it as dual-boot into XP Professional in case something didn’t work-out or I wanted to play Half-Life 2, so I used these instructions. I did the installation this past weekend while working on homework, and it really didn’t take long at all nor much custom bit twiddling to get “normal” things to work.

Everytime I install Linux I’m very impressed how far the installation process has came. This time not only did it pick-up every piece of my hardware correctly, it even installed GRUB correctly to dual-boot with Ubuntu and Windows XP without messing-up anything. If you ever tried doing this back in the day manually with LILO, you’ll have an idea how much easier it is to do dual-booting now.

I’ve been doing my homework on it, have Eclipse and Skype installed, and even found a great audio program which handles my 165 GB / 21,800+ song Mp3 collection without any problems.

Since getting Ubuntu installed, I haven’t had a reason to boot back into Windows other than to make sure it was still working okay. Ubuntu really is a solid package. Given the terrible reviews of Windows Vista as well as all of the DRM built into it, I think I’m pretty much sold on not purchasing a Microsoft OS again.

I’ll try to post some more information about the Linux software I find useful in the days and weeks to come, and I’m sure at some point I’ll find many things to be critical about with Ubuntu as well.

I’ve always been a huge open source software proponent– this blog is ran by FreeBSD, PHP, WordPress, Apache, MySQL, etc., yet the PHP language has never really sat well with me. It’s always reminded me way too much of a derivative of C for the web, becoming more C++ like with it’s carnation of “Object Oriented Programming” introduced in PHP 5. I really tried to like it long ago back when it was still being called “Personal Homepage” or whatever, but it just never really congealed for me. Granted there are a great number of open source PHP projects that I will continue to use until something better comes along, but I’m glad my income is not dependent on writing PHP. I dabble in it every now and then specifically for this site, but eh…

So on to what inspired this post… A couple of days ago I was looking up something on Wikipedia and was presented with this error message (click to enlarge):

Not that it’s necessarily a good empirical reason to not like PHP, but it certainly does make the baby Jesus cry (much like Perl does). Granted you can write bad code in any language, but wow. If you’ve ever even tried to install the MediaWiki software, you probably have an idea what this codebase is like.

I think my favorite part of the code that my co-worker pointed out is the LoadBalancer.php file listed in the trace. I assumed loadbalancing was already built-in to PHP with functions like loadbalance_on_linux_with_apache(), send_load_to_array(), or cache_connection_to_mysql(), but I guess not, so it needed to be implemented into the MediaWiki code base.

I was just cleaning up some stuff out of the recycle bin in one of my GMail accounts when GMail gave me this “Recycling Tip”:

Someone who reads Slashdot at Google must have added this “suggestion”.

In case you’re reading this article with confusion, you can read more about tinfoil hats here.