Subj : Re: How much should I charge for fixed-price software contract? To : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.lisp From : rem642b Date : Sun Aug 14 2005 11:47 pm > From: "Phlip" > if you treat potential hirers the way you treat this newsgroup, Vague derogatory innuendo is of no value in tracking down a bug and fixing it. You need to state the precise bug-behaviour you observe so that it can be tracked down and diagnosed and possibly even fixed. For example, I don't bash Yahoo! Mail with vague remarks about how it sucks. I point out specific features that used to work years ago but were dismantled in May of last year. Just today when I was on an InterNet terminal at the public library trying to a very important search, namely to find all instances of a certain class of spam within certain folders, I discovered that the checkboxes for selecting which folders to search is now totally broken. I checked only four of those boxes, and then initiated my search, but it searched *all* folders, just the same as I had done check-all-boxes. And I don't bash Google Groups 2 vaguely either. I point out many really serious bugs they've introduced compared with GG1 that was in effect until the beginning of this year and in effect on some foreign sites until just a couple weeks ago. So please stop bashing me with derogatory generalities. If there's a specific WebPage that I wrote which you don't like, cite the exact URL and state your exact problem with it. (I see you did this just below, thank you, but your derogatory remark above is not of that quality.) > > http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/WAP/WhyInactive.html > ... completely lacking the tags to save us from the > Windows default ... Is it impossible on Windows to set your own local default to override the factory setting? If so, yet another reason to put MicroSoft out of business so that other companies are no longer destroyed by Bill's preditory tactics, so that better companies can have a chance to produce much better software than what MicroSoft produces. Oh, you want *me* to make up for your cruddy MicroSoft-ware by providing *your* favorite color as background in every one of *my* WebPages? Fine. Please make an appointment to come over here with your laptop MS-Windows computer and local (from Sunnyvale) PPP-access ports, and we'll connect to the InterNet from here and simultaneously run TELNET to my shell account (for editing the HTML) and MS-IE/HTTP to my Web site (for viewing my Web pages), and I'll put what you want in my style sheet and link it from one of my Web pages, and then later I'll have the bgcolor stuff in a known working state so that I could easily link the same stylesheet in any other WebPage of mine that you suggest. Am I willing to edit my WebPage blind using VT100 mode from my apartment, then bicycle to the public library and sign up for an hour of InterNet MS-IE time just to view my work, write down on paper in what way it didn't work, bicycle back home to try to guess how to fix, again without being able to see the result as I make the edit, then another day bicycle back to the library to see if I have it fixed yet, make more notes how it doesn't work, then bicycle back home to try to fix it again, then back to the library to view it again, as many times as necesary to get one command in one WebPage the way you like it? No, no, and never. The last time I suffered 24-hour turnaround on submitting batch jobs was in 1968, and I never want to suffer that ever again, especially for something like this. So I hope you don't mind if I put your critique on the back burner until such time as I ever have fast turnaround on submitting changes and seeing the result of such matters? > this page doesn't seem to discuss why anyone would want to review a > resume in a cell phone. Correct, because that's not the purpose of the WAP pages, hence irrelevant to my explanation of why I'm dismantling almost all my WAP work. When I had a cellphone (2003.Nov) I tried one of the WebSites that was supposed to be designed for small screens of cell phones, which was supposed to show a map of any selected city in California. It had about ten or twenty names of cities in alphabetical order, with a NEXT link to the next group of ten or twenty, with a NEXT link to the next group of ten or twenty, etc. I wanted to find San Jose, which would have been about a hundred screens down the list, and on a cellphone it takes about a minute to step the cursor one link at a time downward and thereby scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the NEXT link, and I lost patience after about ten screens like that. That's when I decided even the most feeble effort on my part could do better than that already-existing small-screen WebSite that had been touted. But the first step was simply to make *any* WAP-compatible WebPage whatsoever. It took several tries before I got the size of the file below the limit of 2k bytes or whatever it was, but once that was achieved (my "Hello World" for WAP), then I knew what the size limit was, and I started coding a few more useful Web pages for WAP, and tested them all on my Nokia cellphone. That's when I got the tinyurl to link to it, because on a cellphone it's very painful typing alphanumeric characters by multiple presses on the telephone keypad, but if you have to type only four characters after going to your bookmarked tinyurl.com or google.com starting point then it's not a pain at all to select my Web site. Since then I've tried to build a Web site with that uh3t as my home page, by making very small Web pages, but in regard to making it work with WAP I've been doing it blind, with never again even one chance to see my work on a cellphone, to see if it even worked at all (within the 2k bytes limit) much less whether it actually looked reasonable on a cellphone screen. Still I tried. But today I gave up. There's no reward, only rebukes, for my efforts. > please provide a link to a single resume, neatly formatted in > high-quality HTML, Please tell me what you consider "high-quality HTML". If I can't view it with lynx, then I can't do it unless and until you bring your laptop over here so that I can see the results as I edit the HTML source. HTML is not anything that is easy to do blind!! Ignoring the HTML aspect for the moment, which of my plain-text resumes do you like best, for content, not presentation style, so that I might use that as a starting point for conversion to HTML format? Also, still ignoring HTML formatting, what changes in content would you like in my best-so-far resume to yield a better-than-ever resume? > What you seem to have now is a maze of links to fragments of multiple > resumes. I have online 11 complete resumes, plus one set of reference notes: Specialty resumes, sent only regarding particular kinds of jobs: http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.921-LISP.txt http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.92Mac.txt http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.921-CAI.txt http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.92Util.txt http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.93Games.txt http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.947-ISR.txt General resumes, sent when none of the specialty resumes is appropriate: http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.91C.txt http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.928.txt http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.942.txt http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.98B.txt http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Robert_Elton_Maas.doc Reference notes for filling out appliations, never sent to a potential employer: http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/RESUME.REM.txt Please tell me in what way (other than HTML formatting) each of these resumes is, in your opinion, not complete. > http://flea.sourceforge.net/resume.html > See resume.doc I can't read that online. Please provide a plain-text version. I support high quality and responsive process. That's not grammatically correct English. If "process" is plural, it needs to be spelled "processes", but if it's singular, then you need the word "a" before the word "high". I keep you in the driver's seat Bullshit, unless your profession is driving instructor where your student is literally in the driver's seat while you sit on the passenger side with your foot ready to hit the emergency brake if needed. I would toss this in the trash can at this point if I were screening resumes. So far you've beat around the bush with metaphor but you haven't given me the slightest idea what kinds of projects you have done (landscaping/gardening, driving instructor, DMV person who administers driving tests, astronaut trainer, etc.). and give you a system that you can steer accurately towards business goals. More stupid metaphor. Maintenance had a laugh when they were emptying the trash can and your resume happened to blow out of the catcher so they had to retrieve it and they happened to glance at it. I have worked in many industries and solved every kind of technical problem imaginable Fucking liar. It's unlikely you solved more than one percent of all the technical problems imaginable. from inventing languages OK, now you're finally getting down to specifics, too late for the resume screener to see it. But what kind of languages?? Experanto? CAD? Klingon? to debugging embedded hardware, Aha, something actually useful! Do you debug it after it's already embedded, or so you debug it in a test rig before it's ever embedded in an actual device? (That would be an interview question if you hadn't already shot yourself in the foot earlier.) using adaptive planning and sustainable, disciplined techniques that hold value and enable teamwork. That's a little bit too vague for my tastes. Is "adaptive planning" a buzz phrase that everyone in that particular industry knows, so it doesn't need to be explained? Or is this more handwaving, beating around the bush as to what you actually did? For example, do you set up a dependencies graph for the whole project, and then use dynamic programming or branch-and-bound to optimize the allocation of resources toward finishing the project in minimal time with maximal effective use of your teams? "disciplined techniques" sounds like something appropriate for a book review for the book "Positive Parenting for Teens", not anything about computer technology. This is getting back to sounding like Bob&Ray's interview about the Komodo Dragon, or the standard bad example of a term paper that is all fluff but no substances, or the live game commentary (in a Chess match) that I saw on PBS about 15 or 20 years ago where the host was asking pre-teens for their analysis of each move as it occurred, and the pre-teens gave comments similar to"WOW, that's strong. No, that's very very strong" with not the slightest explanation why it's strong, leading me to believe the pre-teen hadn't the slightest idea what was really happening either tactically or strategically in the game. Compare that to high-quality kibitzing of a live game such as "I think that was a mistake. Now his queen is vulnerable to the following sequence .... I think he should have played ... which would have given his queen an escape route." or "That takes advantage of his mistake. Now the queen is in danger." > requirements gathering That is an important thing to do in commercial projects. An interview question would be about how that process breaks down. For example, do you explicitly brainstorm with the customer about use cases, or do you talk more loosely with the customer, and later try to guess which use cases he/she really wanted in your product? (Note that use cases usually refer to application software, showing the transactions between user/client and software/server. But analagous requirements occur in hardware design, transactions between the CPU or other controlling device and the device under question, such as CPU issues a READ operation on memory-mapped-register CTLSTAT which then returns a 32-bit word of status data in the following format with the following meaning in terms of the function of the device, or CPU issues a WRITE operation to CTLSTAT with the CONFIG bit turned on, then issues consecutive WRITE operations to the DATA register with a configuration record in the following format, then issues a WRITE operation to CTLSTAT with the CONFIG bit off and the DOIT bit on, then waits 3 microsceonds then ussues a WRITE operation to CTLSTAT with both CONFIG and DOIT bits off. The effect is to establish a new configuration for the device.) Programming ( click any item:) You've mixed together in a single menu, as if they were somehow brothers in concept, all of: programming languages, text formatting languages, Web browsers, operating systems, serverside frameworks, software application suites, data communication protocols, admin tools, software development frameworks, software development methodologies, and qualatitive aspects of work. Furthermore you've run them down one very tall and skinny vertical column, wasting an awful lot of paper if anyone were to print this as offline familiarization and then handy reference when online to browse the links more fully. The only one of those which interested me was: Test-Driven Development but clicking on it took me to: http://flea.sourceforge.net/resume.html#anonymizer For Anonymizer, I used TDD to build a DHTML web page hosting a CAB file providing an OCX control and a helper ATL DLL file. I was hoping for more description of what flavor of TDD you used. These two lines are completely useless in deciding whether you even know what TDD means much less whether your use of TDD if any is in any way compatible with the way we do it here at our company (the garbage collector saw past the humorous crap at the start and noticed this TDD mention, circled it in brightly colored highlighter, and put it on my desk, so I looked at it, went online out of curiosity, and was disappointed). Test Engineer Linkname: Broadband Feedback URL: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?BroadbandFeedback OK, so the primary thing you test is animation interfaces for games, by capturing a sequence of screen shots while the game is being played and later building them into a animated GIF? I still don't see how that qualifies as TDD in the sense that I saw it defined/described. Used Test-Driven Development to write test scripts in Ruby and Perl, via CygWin and XML, to generate HTML reports. How exactly did you get from TDD to test scripts and HTML reports?? TDD, OO, HTML, refactoring, tracking, and acceptance tests. Again you mention TDD like a buzzword but give not the slightest indication that you know what it means much less telling the reader which type of TDD you were doing. The book extends the Test Driven Development concept into GUIs, demonstrating tests, written at the same time as the source code, aggressively resisting bugs and preventing the need to operate a debugger. That's still too much fluff and not enough saying what people really did which you described in this book. SVG Canvas - Combining Ruby, Tk, XML, XPath and GraphViz via Test-Driven Development to display graphs in a canvas. Again you use TDD like a buzzword, never saying what you really did. Family Tree - Extending the previous case study to add interactive editing. Embedded GNU-C++ Mophun) Games - A tiny game for color cell phones. Fractal Life Engine - Grow rotating fractals in OpenGL. Why is this in the TDD section?? It seems to all be orthoginal to TDD. SYSTRAN Software Was, arbeiteten Sie auf dem Entwickeln der BabelFish Technologie? Eingef|hrte Software-Produktserien, Tageszeitung Bauten und die automatisierten Tests, zum ihrer desktop Produktserie zu stabilisieren und zu beschrdnken, geschrieben |ber TDD in VB und in WTL, verbanden durch ActiveX mit kundenspezifischem MS B|ro und Internet Explorer toolbars. F|hren Sie die Logitech Toolbar Bem|hung. Kundenspezifische HTTP Transportschichten. Vorger|cktes XML und XSLT und vorger|ckte Internationalisierung Techniken und Bauindexe in Perl, das auf Linux und MS Windows arbeitet. Automatisch konfigurierbare, mehrsprachige MSI Installateure. [ TASTE Pas de comment. Back to the main "resume": After two full screens of one word per line: Mission Objected-oriented design, advanced user interfaces, art, and "Agile" development. OOD is a methodology, not a goal, so it doesn't belong here in your mission. The rest here is appropriate. By the way, virtually all my software from as far back as I can remember was "Agile" development. Should I mention that in my resume, or is that just fluff? (Yeah, I have you in a double bind here.) Experience This seems to be the same information that I got when I followed the TDD link. .