20-IV-2009.

All of a sudden, an email from Sindie...

One of our companies is looking for a mathematician/programmer. Some of the developers work remotely out of their homes from various states (Oregon, New Mexico) so I immediately thought of you. The office is actually in Raleigh, NC (mine is elsewhere in NC). I’m not sure what the primary language requirement is but they hope for C#, Visual Studio, Delphi, etc. I think the stress is more on the mathematician qualifications/skills.

Then there was a link, which I obviously followed. My reply:

Sorry for not responding earlier, but we took off on Thursday for a long weekend.

Thanks - this would be very welcome if I didn't have almost all of my time taken by the current not-really-a-contract and not-a-bit-of-a-job. Which lasts for more than two years now, and there seems to be quite a lot of work ahead. For whichever reason they decided to keep the members' identities offscreen on UA, but FYI, Jan, Das and George are on the team, plus one more guy who's a keen fox guy but not on UA.

The ad does look damn attractive... finally applying something beyond addition and multiplication, wow... probably even some spherical geometry niceties... Anyway, decided to stick to the bird in hand. Thanks again

She

Sounds interesting! What is the project? Assuming by the participants it is a fox project? Will it be something available to developers or is it geared towards users?

Nah... just your run-of-the-mill huge medical application for IVF (yep, in-vitro fertilization) clinics, riddled with layers over layers of legacy code built on amateur doctor-gone-foxer code. Most of the time, a nightmare. Imagine "Set rant on" in about 72px font before I start describing what's wrong with it... first, it was never refactored.

But it keeps the bills paid and seems to generate endless work, so I'm just prone to vent a bit here and there. Over there. Right.

On the surface, though, it looks quite good - with Aleksej Grigorjev's commandbars, and scrollable containers by Carlos Aloatti (IIRC, may have been some other Roman guy... from that part where they speak american latin), and a few other gadgets. And it's got some good logic inside - it tries to set intelligent defaults, to remind the user of the missing pieces of data, it has extensive validations etc etc. It's just that below it you have code which says thisform.container1.pageframe2.page3.container1.shcont3.command3.click (never adds parentheses on a method call, grr) which is quite obviously doing... what exactly?

So, a bit of interesting life, just not to become too complacent...

In another thread, the rasejani are having fun for days commenting on Donald Knuth's (wish I knew how Amers pronounce that) website where he collected rhomb (aka diamond) shaped road signs, of course paying the most attention to ridiculous ones. The one they proposed to be put on the roads in Serbis is „number of holes halved“... and the only way that happens is when two smaller holes are joined into one bigger.

Out of thirty emails a day, about twenty are related to Firriver - Kimberley arranging a talk with Laura, some irish clinic asking for a visit, probably by Suez, etc etc. Some six or seven are rasejani or oldwave, the rest is mine.

The patio doesn't look bad after this paving, even that unusable bike we keep for spare parts looks good, so blue against all those bricky tones. And the handrests on the deck chairs, painted with the remainder of the paint we mixed up for the bathroom, actually look quite good, much better than the original krmkasta (v. house dictionary). Despite it being just a wall paint and this being permanently outside in the weather, there was never a scratch on them.

Mentions: Cindy Baumgarten (Sindie), Firriver Fertility (Firriver), fox, George Whiteley, house dictionary, Jan Brenkelen, Kimberley Clarke, Laura O'Hare, Mohandas Raj (Das), oldwave, rasejani, Suez Lima, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian

4-V-2026 - 14-V-2026