Subj : Memories/CGI/tools/commercial (was: Resume questions, how convey?) To : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.lisp From : rem642b Date : Sun Sep 04 2005 12:37 am > From: Tim X > I also love the line where he says his supervisor may have asked him > to sign something, but he didn't know what it was for - imagine that, > signing things when you have no idea what you are signing away! No, what I'm saying is that at the time I would have carefully read what I was signing, but that would have been in 1977 (NMR) or 1984 (robot), both of which were more than 20 years ago, and I can't remember so long ago which particular papers I did or did not sign at some particular time. I have a vague memory of having to sign something back in 1984 in regard to publishing the robot paper, but it was so very long ago I can't trust that memory. And I have no memory at all of any 1977 paper-signing which would have been more than 28 years ago. Both are so awfully long ago you can't really expect me to remember them as distinct events I can testify to here. I do however remember that I did sign papers in 1978, in conjunction with the technology assessment office at Stanford, when they were agreeing to help me patent my data-compression invention. I was signing the dating of my description so it'd be a legal document in their files whenever needed for legal means such as proving that I was the first person to invent that particular algorithm, and they were signing a non-disclosure agreement, and witnessing my signature on the description on such-and-such date, or something like that, I can't remember exactly how many papers we signed 27 years ago, but it was a distinct thing I had make a special appointment to do with them so that memory is more distinct and definite than memory of other paper-signing events so very long ago. > My point is that CGI is NOT limited to Unix environments. You > have CGI support with most multi-purpose web servers, like Apache and > they run on multiple platforms. I never made any statement that all > web servers provided CGI, only that CGI is not limited to Unix > environments. Nice of you to agree with me now. Your original statement was unclear and tended to imply that CGI on Unix is nothing more than just Unix by itself because all Unix hosts support CGI and allow their users to use CGI. My original point was that programming for the CGI environment is quite a bit different from programming for the Unix stdio/stdout environment in either filter (*) mode or interactive mode, so that fact that I've written both CGI applications and regular Unix applications is better skillset than if I had written only regular Unix applications. But I was specifying CGI/Unix as the environment, because I've never had access to any networked host that supported CGI except this one that runs Unix, so if somebody is looking for somebody with experience specifically on CGI/Windows I don't qualify, and if I just say I have CGI experience somebody could easily mistakenly believe I had such experience on Windows. (*) Unix filter mode means you pipe some file or script or other data source into stdin, and pipe stdout to another file or process, such as with this command I wrote: ps | grep '\- ' | awk ' {printf("kill %s\n",$1)} ' | sh ps is the data source, while grep and awk are used in filter mode, and sh is used in final-destination batch mode. Note that *most* people who have written Unix applications have never written any CGI application, so my experience there is special, more than the average Joe's Unix programming experience. Also I specifically used Unix features from CGI, rather than writing 100% pure CGI that would run the same on Windows. In fact my first attempt at CGI/Perl ran fine on Unix but wouldn't work at all on Tripod because they don't have the underlying Unix that I was using, so I had to rewrite my CGI/Perl script to make it run in pure CGI/Perl on Tripod. But that very limited CGI/Perl experience was after I wrote that particular resume, so of course only CGI/Unix was reported there. That was also before I got my laptop running Linux, so of course my more recent Linux experience wasn't reported either. My very latest resume, which is after both my CGI/PurePerl and Linux experience, has CGI and Unix split apart, and Unix/Linux joined together as a single kind of environment, to better represent the range of my experience to-date. That part now reads: * Platforms (programming environments): Unix/Linux shell, CGI, Macintosh, MicroSoft Windows, and many others now obsolete Do you have any nitpicks about that wording now? > I would now say that NOTHING you say would ever convince me of > anything. That's a good skeptical attitude, not just for me, but for everyone who ever tries to convince you of anything, such as that if you invest only five dollars in a chainletter you can receive millions, or that male enhancement drugs will make you popular with women, or that some particular religion is based on the word of the Creator and therefore is better than all other religions put together, or that by mixing chemicals in a flask you can cause useful nuclear fusion to occur and thereby provide a cheap safe source of energy. Go with evidence, not with somebody claiming authority on some topic. Please tell me what evidence I could present to you to convince you to hire me to write software applications for you. > I would be very reluctant to employ anyone to solve my problems who > cannot even solve the simple problem of getting hs [sic] own > reasonable computing environment together. I actually had a reasonble computing environment from 1989 until 1999, able to develop Lisp applications on my Macintosh Plus, and wrote several really useful applications there. But my MacPlus died in 1999, and I haven't had the money to get it fixed, nor the money to purchase a comparable programming environment on my newer Macintosh Performa. Why didn't you hire me any time from 1991 to 1999 when I was unemployed but still had a reasonable programming environment on my MacPlus, or from 2004.Nov to 2004.May when I had a reasonable programming environment on my Linux laptop plus a working modem for uploading/downloading files between it and the net? (I still have that reasonable programming environment on my laptop, but without any way to move files between there and any other machine it's not of much practical use for showing you my recent work or for doing new work for you.) Most employers in virtually any profession provide all the tools needed by their employees. At most a company might require an employee to purchase a short-sleeved white shirt (as with my job at Round Table Pizza) or a uniform (advanced from first paycheque), but not the whole computer system where software will be developed. When I worked for SCU, they provided the IBM 1620 computer I used. When I worked for Four-Phase, they provided the IV/70 computer I used. When I worked for Stanford, they provided the PDP-10 and IBM-370 computers I used for the various jobs there. If you claim to be an employer, but can't do the common thing of providing a company computer for your employees to use in developing software for you, your company totally sucks. It is *you*, the prospective employer, not me, the prospective employee, who needs to get a decent computer system for your employees to use. > what I wrote earlier about only commercial experience being counted Please supply a clear definition of what *you* mean by "commercial experience". I have no idea whether you refer *only* to software that is sold in shrink-wrapped packs (CD-ROMs for example) in stores, or also software that is distributed invisibly over the net in return for e-money, or also software that isn't itself sold but which is used in-house to solve practical problems for the employer, or also software that is used in support of research that offers prestege to the employer, or also software that is commercial quality but which is written only for my own use to solve real life problems I face, or something else I can't even guess what you might possibly mean. > regardless of what you have done outside paid employment, it doesn't > count. Commercial contracting isn't employment, according to the IRS, it's in a completely different tax/income category. So it doesn't count?? Likewise all open-source software is a complete waste, because even if you eventually get income from supporting the software, it doesn't count because it isn't formal employment? > Work you do on your own is generally not reviewed by anyone, not used > by many people and therefore has no external evaluation, only his on > subjective opinion, That is a good point but only for *some* non-commercial work. Work for which I got paid, as part of a university research project, is not commercial in the shrink-wrap nor in any other software-for-sale sense, yet still is reviewed by my supervisor. Work for which I didn't get paid, but which is used substantially by other people, such as my document formatting for XGP, is reviewed by the users, who choose whether to use it for free or not use it. If they choose to make heavy use of my software, as Bill Gosper and several others did, I consider that a recommendation that my work is worthwhile. For some other of my work, I put up free demos on the net, so that random people could see my work and try it and announce how they like it. > which to an employer is worth very little. Do you speak for all employers there?? > if he had spent the last 10 years working on some open source > projects ... I already spent enough years of my life doing that in the past. Why should I spend yet another ten years doing the same thing? > In the last 10+ years, the only things he seems to have produced are > some pretty skanky CGi apps. You are quite ignorant of what I've done. I'm not going to waste my time posting the information about my accomplishments that I've already posted before. If you want to cease being ignorant, go look up what I already posted. .