dow.ngra.de

A PHB + a startup + dilbert = SALES are up! October 31st, 2009 by Toomas Römer

Looking at the numbers I can say that it is working but wearing the extra nose is not as easy as it seems.

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1st of April Joke Gone Wild (updated) October 26th, 2009 by Toomas Römer

1st of April is a great day, lots of cool hoaxes all day around. We at ZeroTurnaround have contributed with DNArebel – Improve Yourself Today and JavaRebel Goes AI. Usually everything ends once the day is over.

This year’s dow.ngra.de hoax, Microsoft acquires ZeroTurnaround for undisclosed amount has amused us even months later. Couple of weeks ago we spotted a Chinese article that listed all the acquisitions of Microsoft during the past year. And we made the list!

Today we found the news from a business systems news & analysis page, FSN.

FSN provides finance professionals around the globe with independent news, vital analysis and deep insight about key developments in the world of business and accounting systems. We debunk the technical jargon of the IT world and present leading-edge issues in a way that is accessible and relevant to business decision makers.

We’re in the article Shifting Sands (EDIT: link is dead now) with players like Salesforce, Digita, Google, Oracle, Microsoft and HP :)

A fact taken from a blog post on 1st of April, not confirmed from either parties and presented in an article with vital analysis and deep insight.

Of course there is an easy fix. Either Microsoft acquires the Java productivity tooling company ZeroTurnaround or FSN notices a referrer from this blog and makes changes. I’ll keep you posted on who wins the race.

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Pointy haired boss & the HR lady October 21st, 2009 by Toomas Römer

A week ago I worked on a dashboard project. One of the dashboard views showed the SLOC and the size of the VCS of the company. Yesterday I overheard the pointy haired boss explaining the dashboard to the HR lady.

PHB: Here we have the lines of code in the repository and the total size of the repository shown through time in gigabytes.

HR lady had a puzzled look at the graphs and the numbers.

HR: How much more of those can we fit in the repository?

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.cn/.asia Domain Name Scam September 29th, 2009 by Jevgeni Kabanov

We just received an email offering us to register a domain name ahead of competition. First I took it to be the real deal, and replied, but luckily before actually doing anything I did a search in the internet. Ladies and Gentlemen, I almost was a scam victim :)

However now that I know this is a scam, I just might to try and turn the tables on the scammer. If I succeed to do anything fun, I’ll be sure to let you know :D

The letter is verbatim below to serve as a warning to those even less careful than me:

(If you are NOT CEO,please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent.Thanks.)

Dear CEO,

We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on Sep 28, 2009, One Japan company called Seed soft investment Corp” are applying to register(zeroturnaround) as internet brand name and domain names as below (zeroturnaround.net.cn zeroturnaround.org.cn zeroturnaround.mobi zeroturnaround.asia zeroturnaround.in zeroturnaround.hk zeroturnaround.cc zeroturnaround.tw in etc.).

After our initial checking, we found the internet brand name and these domain names being applied are as same as your company’s, so we need to get the confirmation from your company. If the aforesaid company is your business partner or your subsidiary company, please DO NOT reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you have no any relationship with this company, please contact us within 10 workdays. If out of the deadline, we will approve the application submitted by Seed soft investment Corp” unconditionally.

We would like to get the affirmation of your company,please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,

Kevin Wu
Senior Director
TEL: +86 21 69929440
Fax: +86 21 69929447
Website:www.govqipeng.org.cn
Address:Room 902,8th,nong 1518,Jinyuan 1st Road,Jiading District, Shanghai city.

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First day at work – owned by OpenSolaris September 23rd, 2009 by Toomas Römer

Two years ago a hidden video was made of the authors of this blog, Real Programmers Use Sign Language. In that video we were talking about the internals of JRebel and most of the time we were discussing using our hands. It was filmed by just placing a camera on one of the shelves in the room.

Two years later when a new developer was about to join our ranks it got me thinking. On the morning of his arrival we placed a video camera in one of the laptop bags opened towards him. We inserted an OpenSolaris Live-CD (was not able to get Plan 9 to boot :( ) to his new PC.

The OS was booted in text mode and a user with his name added so that it would feel warm at ~ home. He was placed in a javarebel folder and a VIM sessions had just ended (in text mode you very often see the old contents of the session). The first 5 minutes at the new office follows.

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