Entropy Reducers Amalgamated

(I never said my blog would be wholly noncommercial!) Yes, my company, 3 Phase Computing, is hiring (that link will expire in May). Whenever we hire, I like to provide a first-pass "clown filter" to weed out the obviously incapable. When hiring for Unix people, one way you can do that is to require that they provide their résumé or CV in PDF (OpenOffice will generate one for you); only the clueful under Windows will have a PDF generator installed. I prefer to have a line that reads:

• ...
• You must be able to think on your feet, and you must be able to read and follow directions.

And then require that all submissions be in plain-text or HTML format. That serves several purposes:

1. It saves me a step when reading through the piles of incoming mail--plain text and HTML are rendered in-line in Thunderbird.
2. It forces people to think a second before sending out their CV in the standard DOC format
3. It makes it easier for me to search for text strings through my email using my email client
4. Finally, it makes it plain and clear who does and does not actually read and follow directions

Other people favor requiring a bizarre subject line or text line in the body of the email (one of my clients likes doing that and it works well for him) but my method is slightly better insofar as it also serves the other purposes I listed. One of my friends (who wishes to remain anonymous) also warned me:

(19:09:30) xxxxxxxxxxx: PREPARE fo da Indians

(19:09:34) xxxxxxxxxxx: ROFL

which I had hoped to avoid by saying in my post "in-office", but alas, I probably should have said (in the great tradition of Craigslist postings in NYC) "NO ONE FROM OVERSEAS! IF YOU'RE NOT IN NYC, SORRY." Subtlety is lost in the classifieds...

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, yes, it's a shameless plug, but www.veotag.com -- allows you to annotate videos online on the fly. Very very cool. It's a service run in part by my martial arts instructor Arkady Dudko. It's very cool; he's shown me some video clips of martial arts forms that he's taken and annotated (they're copyrighted, so I can't re-share them).

Browse through it at http://www.veotag.com/browse/.

I wish him and Scott Rhodes the best of luck with the service, it looks pretty cool.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OK, so I'm on the phone with Yahoo! customer service now...on hold in between trying to explain a problem to a customer service representative. In fact, I've typed up almost this whole entry while listening to the music-oh-hold, while my rep "researches" my issue. It also turns out that they're not allowed to leave you on hold for more than 2-3 minutes, which, I have to admit, isn't a bad thing.

One thing I should mention: I did put in time in the front-line customer-service ranks, I was a student consultant in Columbia University's student computer labs back from 1986-1988, and I also was responsible for email and phone support in Spanish at a previous employer for a while, so I know a little bit why they call it "helldesk".

THE PROBLEM:
I am trying, ostensibly, to figure out how to deploy Yahoo!'s domain keys for a client's domain.

The twist is: the domain in question is managed by Yahoo!, even though we've moved web and mail services away from Yahoo! itself. DNS services and domain registration are still through Yahoo!.

Are you still here with me? Because I haven't gotten to the good part yet.

It turns out that Yahoo!'s interface won't allow you to add the TXT records to the DNS you need -- at least, not through their web interface -- as a first step towards deploying domainkeys. OK, so off I go to call up Yahoo! customer service to figure this out.

Yahoo! does not make it easy to find their contact numbers (like Amazon.com), but the trick is to log in and search for "866" -- that leads you right there to the customer support numbers.

Now, I finally get to speak to a rep, named M_ (names obscured to protect the clueless). I explain my problem to him, two or three times, until he's finally beginning to get some small notion of my problem: we're sending mail to Yahoo! users from outside of Yahoo! and the mail is ending up in the Bulk folder. (As an aside: it's amazing that Yahoo catches these rather innocuous emails, since it lets through so much other stuff that is so blatantly spammy that one wonders if they play games just to anger the non-paying users. But I digress.)

M_ asks me, "do you have a link that talks about this [domainkeys] feature?" Yes, yes, I do. It's at http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys. (Another digression: I'm not going to get into whether or not DKIM is a good idea or not, it's been beaten to death in places like NANOG and SPAM-L, and I'm just not that interested in rehashing the arguments pro and con here. Suffice it to say, it's somewhat controversial.)

"So what's your problem?" Well, you see, I need to implement this, and it requires tools I don't have. "How do I find that link on the page?" Well, you search for the text "How do I deploy" on the page.

"How do I do that?"

OK, going through my mind is now: HOW DO YOU #%!#@% SEARCH FOR TEXT ON A WEB PAGE? Don't they teach you anything? I cannot believe that you had to ask me that. By the way, M_, when it says "lather, rinse, repeat", you don't have to spend forever in the shower. There is an implicit break statement in there.

"Well," I respond, "you hit 'control-F', then type in the text 'How do I deploy', and hit return."

OK he's back. It turns out that "it's a server issue" [DUH] and "you don't have access to that" [DUH] and he can't help me. "But it's Yahoo!'s solution!" I cry. "Well, maybe you can tell your users to specifically whitelist your address."

That might work, if we knew who all of our users were. Or we can say "quick, before you finish and we send you a registration email, go to your email provider and whitelist support@[domain here]".

Can you connect me with someone who can help me? "No, I can't." OK M_, let's talk to your manager.

"But the manager isn't technical!" Yes, I understand that, however, I do want to mention about your inability to search for something on a web page...

OK, I'm talking to the supervisor J_ now.

First: "I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience with M_. He's new." Well, maybe you should "how to use a browser" in training before releasing him onto newbies -- especially since this particular support number is for their small-business domain control panel, etc.

He goes on: "[You] might -- and I emphasize might -- be able to get this changed via e-mail support." However, the e-mail support team just moved from near [Houston] to "places unknown". Most of the clueful people in the e-mail support group went to customer service.

How very disappointing. "To be blunt, the people on the other end may not understand what you want...and it's very unlikely that they'll be able to help you." But if they do understand, they'll get your request to the engineering team, who, while they are clueful (and I can attest to that; my experience with Yahoo! engineers has been uniformly positive) are busy and inaccessible.

It is refreshing to hear this type of bluntness and honesty. Kudos to J_.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Frequently, after a good karate class, I'll send an email off to my instructor with my take on the evening's events. It is one of many little arrogances of mine, but he doesn't seem to mind. (This is especially good as there are many classes that I attend given by his instructors that I am expected to attend for my own progress. That's the way it is in my system.) Here's my somewhat expurgated version:

Sorry I didn't send you anything after Monday's class; I was pretty wired and actually, oddly enough, couldn't type. My fingers just did not want to work. I'm sure you went to sleep perplexed and unfulfilled.

Just for weirdness's sake: class was lightly attended. The trip up was through horrible rain, but it didn't much matter, because when we got up there, the power was out to most of the block. Class began at 9:20 thereafter.

$INSTRUCTOR gave us his usual excellent instruction--by and large our corrections were "you must work on your kicks".

Some personal material deleted, and then:

We did Heian 4, and we received interesting corrections. One: to pull the fists all the way behind the kidneys when doing the final grab-and-smash-into-knee. (Yes, yes I know you do it differently; when in $HONBUDOJO do as the $HEADHONCHO.) The other is that, in the immediately following move, the right arm goes straight up in the air (not back at an angle) before the turn and knife hand block. This is not something I've noticed much before, maybe my eyes are just not seeing it. When I see you next week, could you go over it?

More personal stuff deleted.

One thing we did spend time on up there was bag work -- about 25-30 minutes of practicing it. It is something we REALLY need to work on, in my arrogant opinion, since it taught me a few really important lessons. One, I'm not forming the fist as tightly as I can and I'm letting my second knuckles (i.e. my proximal interphalangeal joints) hit as well and my first knuckles (i.e. my metacarpophalangeal joints) . Two, my wrist isn't locked all the time: sometimes I lose focus and it collapses. Three, hitting something feels very different than hitting nothing (e.g. air): you feel whether or not your body alignment is correct or not, and it becomes much more apparent whether or not you're leaning, or locking the rear leg, or even whether you're throwing a punch with your whole body, rather than just your shoulder muscles. (Maybe when I'm a yondan I'll feel alignment as well hitting nothing as I do when hitting something, but for now, I need the גשמיות not the רוחניות.) Since we don't spend that much time on breaking in our dojo, it becomes even more important (to me) to hit something.

For what it's worth, I also see this a lot when I'm helping teach at $KIDSINSTRUCTOR's class: the kids' form is GREAT when there's nothing in front of them, but put a focus mitt or a pad in front of them and *poof* all the strength goes away. They realize fast that it HURTS when they don't lock their wrists, and they hit a bag, and it doesn't happen when they hit the air; they realize fast that they FALL OVER if they don't bend their supporting leg when they kick a bag, and it (usually) doesn't happen when they kick the air.

Of course, we've got to get some bags for our local dojo, so I mention that to him...

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My cousin, Eric Rose, had, about 4 weeks ago, a horrible skiing accident in Vermont, not too too far from his home there.

He broke his back (!), was medevac'ed to Dartmouth, and thence to the Magee rehab center in Philadelphia (near his parents and my family).

He broke his lower two thoracic vertebrae (T11/T12) and has permanent spinal cord injury. He's going to be wheelchair-bound for the foreseeable future.

He's hoping for release on April 20th (so he'll be spending the first two nights of Passover in the hospital, it sounds like) and for a speedy return to Vermont thereafter.

There are people sponsoring a bike-a-thon to help raise money to help Eric (figuratively) get back on his feet.

My heart goes out to Eric, his saintly wife Chris and their son David.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)