The Best Recruiting Software on the Planet. Really?

From the product website: "[Product Name] is Quite Simply The Best Recruiting Software on the Planet." I don't know about that, but you sure have The Most Informative and User-Friendly Error Messages on the Planet :-P

Monstrosity, or The Irrelevance of Relevance

I know better than to create profiles on job boards. Occasionally, however, when there is an attractive gig, and the only way to get in touch with the prospective client is through a job board, I do. As expected, the job boards immediately start bombarding me with what they claim to be jobs I am likely to be interested in. Let's take a closer look at some:

Do any of the ten jobs above look like tech writing jobs to you? I especially like the "Land Combat Electronic Missile System Repairer" :-P

Unless You Really Want to Look Like a Fool, Don't Save on Business Analysis

I have just heard Tom MacDonald's news report "Philly bike share glitch creating hassle for riders looking to upgrade" on the radio.

According to the report, Indego, a public bicycle sharing system in Philadelphia, offers two membership plans: you can "buy a monthly Indego30 membership at $15 that gives you unlimited one-hour-rides or pick the $10 per-year IndegoFlex membership and pay $4 for each trip."

But you cannot change your plan!

How to Create a CentOS 7 Minimal VM on VMware Player

By popular request, here is an updated (for CentOS 7) version of an older tutorial for CentOS 6. This post provides step-by-step instructions how to:

• create a VMware virtual machine from a CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-Minimal.iso using VMware Player 6.0.4 on Windows 7;
• bring the virtual machine to a minimally usable state, i.e. to be able to connect to CentOS mirrors in order to update your new system and install additional software packages;
• install VMware Tools 9.6.2 or open-vm-tools 9.4.0;
• open ports with firewall-cmd.

A Classic Example of "Broken As Designed"

This is an extremely annoying "feature" I keep stumbling upon in all kinds of software, be it customer-facing or "internal" business applications. I have been seeing this for years (if not decades) now, and it doesn't seem to be going away.

Imagine a web site that sells tours (just an easy to understand example). On a page, you see two dependent drop-down lists: one with continents and the other with countries (again, this is just an easy to understand example). Say, you select "Europe" from the first drop-down list and "Albania" from the second. The page refreshes and displays something like "Your search returned no results". You keep trying, and -- after 50+ attempts -- it turns out that the site only offers tours that begin in Germany (DE), Spain (ES), and Italy (IT). The other 50 or so European countries on the second drop-down list are there for absolutely no reason (except to annoy users). Sounds familiar, doesn't it?