Natashia

Today, I saw a photo of my niece, Natashia. She looks like a happy little kid, and I'll get to meet her at the end of April when we take a trip to the UK. Because I've never seen her, I sometimes forget that I have a niece, so it was a nice surprise to get an email this morning full of photos.

Interview hell

I've had a few interviews recently. Well, no one is prepared to call them interviews: they're just quick chats; a get-together over a coffee; an informal introduction. If you're not offered a job, then you can't be disappointed because it's never made clear whether there was any job to be offered. You're just left asking yourself - 'was that an interview?'

When Sara was looking around for jobs, she'd come back from interviews and say "I thought it went really well - like we agreed about a lot of things", but I've never had an interview like that: it's always excruciating. I leave the interviewer to do a lot of the digging and I'm pitiful when it comes to selling my CV. It's not that I have low self-esteem. In fact, quite the opposite - I have a very-high opinion of myself. It's just that, in front of strangers, I'm incapable of talking in glowing terms about why I'm so wonderful. At the back of my mind is a voice shouting 'come off it, big-head'.

On Wednesday, I had my worst interview to date. I'm never too hot on introductions - I speak too fast and never know what to do with my non-shaking hand, but in this instance I also managed to criticise the interviewer's choice of school for his child. We were chatting (the awkward bit after shaking hands, but before sitting down) and it just came out. He asked - 'I hear you have a son - have you got him settled into a school yet?' I replied, rambling, that we'd been applying to schools, and there were basically three that were any good, and hopefully we'd got into the one that was within easy driving distance of the compound. Inevitably, his child's school was not among the three. I dug myself deeper - 'well, not to worry' I said.

It went from bad to worse. The first interviewer was American, but his Aussie boss arrived after about 10 minutes and asked me about what I could do. "Well - I'm basically a coder. I'm not bad at Perl, but I can get by in most languages. Most of my work has been on Unix, but I hear that there's no jobs for Unix coders in Doha, so I'll do anything really." He gave me a look that said 'no way, mate' and then asked "when you say you're a 'coder', do you mean that you're a computer programmer". He then did a mental calculation of how long he'd have to talk to me before leaving. I got another 15 minutes, during which time I told him that I hadn't done any real work in three years, and didn't have any salary expectations. At one point I said "really, most of my skills are outdated, and it's difficult to match my CV with any current job". The most embarrassing part was that we both knew how awful it was, and I'm sure he was trying to avoid laughing until I'd left the room.

When I met up with Sara afterwards, she asked how it went. 'Not too bad,' I said. The horror was still sinking in.

Are sites ever unblocked?

To: censor@qatar.net.qa

Sir

The following website has been blocked by the filter run by Internet Qatar:
  http://taipei.pm.org/
I feel that this blocking is in error. As far as I am aware, this site
is devoted to discussing the merits of the Perl programming language,
and supporting users who live in the Taipei area.

I assume the site was blocked because your filtering software was
designed for use by the Chinese government, and a simple rule has been
enforced that blocks all Taipei sites.

Many thanks

Nigel Gourlay

Creating PDFs for the Sony Reader

Chris sent me a few pretty pictures. He also reminded me about the ebook reader from Sony, which takes a (closed) format known as BBeB as well as a 600x800 PDF. Finally, sourceforge's shell service has been repaired, so I can now upload again to readng.com.

Tomorrow, there's the first meeting of QISF - the Qatar Information Security Forum. Although it's going to be an introductory talk, with a very general topic, it'll be interesting to see how many people turn up for a get-together.

Slow progress

I spent some of last week with a potential employer; they're into packet radio and need someone to look after a bunch of computers - some of which were familiar and some of which were new to me. Interesting stuff, but they haven't made me an offer, so I won't be counting my chickens just yet.

Sara's been out of the country most of the week, but I managed to get along to the first QSTP tech-talk. It was an entrepreneur who talked about Arab start-ups, venture capital and incubators. There wasn't much talk about the IT side of things, but the audience was full of technologists from the new universities. It was a good place to chat, and I met a couple of people who I'll try to keep in touch with.

Not much has happened with readng. I've been wrestling with font issues on my SuSe system, which are now solved, and I've been trying to put together some sample pages for the site. Unfortunately, mocking up a single page with groff is proving almost as difficult as typesetting a whole book. I keep telling myself that the second book will be easy.

QSTP tech-talks

Ben Figgis has invited Qatar Perl Mongers to the QSTP tech talks. RSVP to info@qstp.org.qa.

Unix text processing

My new task is to read the relevent chapters of UTP (1.7MB; source available here) and TUM. In particular, I need to get my head around troff, the Unix typesetting system (now, mostly known as groff). I'm convinced that I can secure groff and use it in the typesetting chain for readng.

Here's what I think will be the sequence: (1) ASCII or HTML; (2) groff mm or mom format; (3) postscript/PDF; (4) PNG image.

I know it's a little nasty, using an image format to display pages of text, but that's just tough. HTML in any flavour doesn't give the necessary control for pretty typesetting, and readers want books to look pretty.

ReadNG - it's like reading, but without the 'i'

So, out of the much nonsense that was spoken over the past week, the silliest is probably this. After several beers with the camel gang, we decided that readng was the next flickr, and that all we needed to succeed in the web 2.0 world was poor spelling. I've registered the domain name readng.com, and written a blurb - let the flood of offers begin. It was Sara who was the first to note that maybe avid book readers might find intentional illiteracy rather annoying. What does she know. Pah.

Camel soup

Chris and Paul have now left. We spent a time in the desert, where we survived on our wits and wild berries. It was touch and go, but when we returned to civilization, we were changed. I was reborn, and dedicated the rest of my life to small-to-medium-sized animals. I salute you, my furry compatriots! Chris and Paul have decided to travel the world as nomadic programmers. And then we went for a chicken biryani, with milky tea, but the smell of the camels remained with us, forever...

Java, Perl and toy planes

Got a few hours work done this morning. Managed to update my java geolocation code for the first time in 18 months. I haven't really done much java in the past few years, so I'm always a bit frightened about changing my old code. I'm not convinced about my abilities to spot bugs any more.

I updated the perl geolocation code at the same time, and fixed a bug that had been hanging around for 6 months. I might have a bash at update instructions - since I became a dad updates haven't been particularly regular.

I was disappointed to receive this email responding to a lecture invitation. What an idiot.

Chris and Paul arrive tonight. Paul emailed yesterday to say he's flying the first leg of the journey in a Fokker 50. I suggested he might have to make plane noises on takeoff. Chris is bringing me a slug, which I'm going to turn into a cheap fileserver.