Yesterday was pretty fun, saw a lot of great talks and met a lot of awesome people. My particular favourites were Celeste’s usability talk, Peter Siking’s printer dialog usability talk and the Plasma Frenzy (is it just me or does that sound like a scifi themed wrestling match?).

The talks were interesting and I was positive on almost everything that was said. The only thing that slightly twinged my pragmatism was the suggestion that GNOME and KDE collaborate more on underlying libraries. I suggested to the speaker that the reason we hack using GTK/Qt is because they are far, far less painful than writing straight C/C++ and that until KDE is willing to depend on glib or GNOME on Qt I doubt we are going to see a lot of the developers developing cross-DE solutions.

The social event in the evening was a good laugh. Held in a brewery, I managed to make the stupendous faux pas of asking for Stella when they have some stupid selection of local beers there. Whoops. I particularly enjoyed recanting with Riddell the complete list of everything awesome about Scotland and particularly didn’t enjoy being repeatedly whipped in the nipple by Adriaan’s jockey whip (why the hell he has that with him I’ll never know…).

Looking forward to the rest of today’s talks and starting the furious coding on Monday!

I’ve really enjoyed the process and been doing quite a lot of reading from wise people like Joel Spolsky on the type of things that you should and shouldn’t be asking in an interview.

Two of the most important things Joel emphasises are that it is essential to have an applicant writing code in the interview and that you are better to not hire a good software engineer than hire a bad one. Thankfully our judgement has seemed good on the latter as everyone working at Mendeley seem to be not only great people but all of our software engineers (including me!) are really passionate about writing software that is more than just “good enough“.

I’ve found Joel’s first point an interesting conundrum. How should you get people coding in an interview? Obviously I’m not going to detail our exact interviewing process on my blog but I personally believe that getting the applicant to write out a solution to a simple algorithmic problem on paper (while you watch them) is a great way of seeing how they approach a problem, how quickly their mind works and how careful they are with validating their requirements. It’s interesting the sheer variation in the above exercise from people with very similar academic backgrounds and length of experience, even when asked a very simple algorithmic problem.

It’s an interesting experience as an interviewer looking at personally appeals to me about a candidate. This is by no means an exhaustive list or even that all of these indicate a good software engineer but just my own thoughts:

• A very solid technical understanding is obviously crucial. On these lines, however, I think it is important to not oversell yourself. Nothing is worse than someone claiming to be an “expert” in a technology and they don’t have more than a basic understanding of it. If your understanding is basic and you’re being interviewed, that’s ok. Just sell your other attributes. If it was a requirement, you wouldn’t have got this far!
• If there’s one thing I think is the number one attribute in a software engineer it’s the drive to learn new technologies and techniques. If software is clearly more than just a job to you and you are reading software blogs, listening to software podcasts or contributing in OSS outside of work, chances are you are going to take more pride in your work than someone to writing software is just a 9-5.
• No matter how good someone is technically, if they aren’t going to fit in the team then they shouldn’t be hired. The last thing you want is a new member disrupting the social dynamic of a group of people that currently get along. I think everyone wants to work with people that they’d be happy to talk to outside of work so if you’re a likeable person than that reflect well on you.

Also, as an interviewee I’ll share some of what has annoyed me in interviews:

• If you don’t ask me any technical questions, you probably have some software engineers in your team that suck at programming. I don’t really want to work with people like that.
• Please don’t keep me waiting for weeks only to tell me I didn’t get the job based on something that I said in my original CV/cover letter I sent to you.
• If I don’t get a job I want constructive criticism so I can improve myself.

I try to keep the latter points in mind when interviewing people so as not to annoy others as I was annoyed.

I’d be grateful for anyone else’s input as either an interviewer or interviewee.
Let the argument commence!

Unfortunately, the default ALSA device seems to have no way to access the “Line 2/Mic 2” channel on the front drive-bay expansion which I use for recording due to it seemingly being the lowest-noise channel.

If you point JACK’s “Input Device” to “hw:0,2” then it will pick up the 16 channel inputs and you can connect them nicely to be able to access this port (channels 9 and 10) in JACK-enabled applications.

I’m currently working on some voice acting for The Nameless Mod (which is looking like it’s going to be spectacular, check it out) and the best program I’ve found to do this recording in is Audacity. Audacity however seems to stubbornly refuse to let me use it’s JACK support (which is apparently buggy beyond use currently anyway).

I found that if I point Audacity to record 16 channels from “hw:0,2” then I can access all the Audigy’s input channels (as JACK does) but unfortunately this means that every time I record I get all 16 channels (a PortAudio limitation from what I can tell from the source). This isn’t ideal as it means, to record a bunch of lines in rapid succession, I need to spend huge amounts of time deleting the unwanted 15 other channels. As it’s not possible to select the channels to record from Audacity I needed to get a little more creative and ended up with this:

pcm.mic2 {
	type plug
	slave.pcm "hw:0,2"
	slave.channels 16
	ttable.0.8 1
	ttable.1.9 1
	ttable.8.0 1
	ttable.9.1 1
}

If you add the above to your “~/.asoundrc” or “/etc/asound.conf” then you will find that in Audacity’s “Recoding” dropdown you will now have the option “ALSA: mic2“. This is simply the same as “hw:0,2” but with the 9th channel swapped with the 1st and the 10th swapped with the second, thus allowing you to select “2: Stereo” or “1: Mono” from the “Channels” dropdown and get the Line/Mic 2 input(s) in Audacity without the need to constantly delete unwanted tracks.

Enjoy!

Note: You probably also want to ensure that Audacity records at the Audigy 2’s native rate or 48000Hz and using a 16-bit sample format.

Maybe it’s just me but when I was 15 I did some very stupid things. Some involved girls, some involved computers and some involved fire. I was a bit of an idiot.

Thankfully I was never in the wrong place at the wrong time and never did anything as stupid as throwing a grenade at an American soldier.

Even if this kid did what it is claimed he did, he was 15 at the time. 15! 3 more years of being a child. 8 more years before he can drink in the US. This Canadian citizen has been held for 6 years now and awaits the potential of life in prison. He is being held in a camp that seems to live outside international law and claims to have been tortured, something I don’t think many would be surprised by, given past reports.

After watching stuff like this I feel physically sick. It genuinely terrifies me that the US feel they have any even slight moral authority over any other regime with this torture camp still running. It sickens me to the core and I’m glad it does too.

Is it just me or should children be cut more slack than grown adults? They screw up and one (albeit huge) screw-up shouldn’t destroy their life.

Residents of the US, I really hope your next leader closes this camp down before the rest of the world becomes more disgusted that we already are at your flagrant abuse of human rights.

My employers Mendeley have made the recent wise decision of employing some excellent other software engineers, including KDE’s own Fred Emmott who is working in my team. He’s a great guy to work with but is annoyingly productive; every time I find something to do and get on with my own work it seems like five minutes before he’s fixed the bug/added the feature and is looking for more stuff to do! Any suggestions on how to make him less productive?

It was a nice surprise to view the 2.6.26 kernel changelog and find that some of the code I wrote at Wolfson Microelectronics two summers ago has finally been merged. I can now grep for myself in the kernel! Yey!

I hope to blog more regularly now, hopefully with less self-indulgent posts and more useful ones as I’ve been having some interesting battles with the mighty CMake at work that deserve sharing.

I guess I’m signing off for the evening as it is late o’clock but hopefully see some of you soon as:

Mendeley is providing a tool for managing academic and research knowledge, allowing people to be able to better find and manage academic papers and use a network of others to avoid mundane tasks when trying to seek academic knowledge. There will also be interesting benefits for those producing papers as well.

This consists of a desktop Qt application (for Windows/Mac/Linux and maybe other Qt supported platforms) which can plug into your Mendeley.com account and allows metadata to be gathered and shared. The desktop application and web application usage will remain free-as-in-beer but the desktop client will be (at least initially) proprietary.

We’re also looking for a talented PHP/Javascript developer with database experience (preferably MySQL) to join the team based in Central London. You will have a lot of responsibility from the beginning and must be passionate about the problems Mendeley are trying to solve and using social networks to solve them (*cough* Web 2.0! *cough*). You can read the full job advert on Mendeley’s site.

Although this may look like a blatant plug it’s also because I believe the sort of people that read a fairly technical blog like this may be more suitable for the position than on a random jobs board.

I’m enjoying Mendeley a lot so far. I’ve been able to make a real difference in my first two days and the other guys are great fun to work with and I look forward to learning more about academic research and Qt in the coming months!

Do you like computer games? If not then why are you reading a computer games post?

Anyway, those remaining like computer games. Do you have a computer with Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD or a GP2X, PSP or Windows CE device?

If so, goto the UQM download page and get it now while I tell you why it is such a great game.

I’m a real sucker for good stories. UQM is the open-source port of Star Control 2, one of the best game stories I’ve ever played (and I’ve played a lot of games). Humanity has been conquered by a brutal regime after attempting and failing to fight for their freedom. Their people are enslaved but safe on Earth and their allies have also been enslaved and trapped on their homeworlds or forced to fight for the Ur-Quan’s military. You come to Earth from a research mission on another world, cut off from Earth since the war and don’t know any of the above. The researchers discovered an ancient alien race and ancient technology. From then onwards it is your job to deck out your ship and kick some serious alien arse.

UQM is so good because it is full voice acted somehow, frankly amazing for a game released in 1992. The script is intelligent and amusing, each races having fatal flaws and how you talk to them has a real effect on your interactions with the races later in the game. You have multiple dialogue choices and a huge amount of dialogue available from every NPC if you choose to grill them.

As well as the discussion and interaction you need to gather resources to equip your ship by mining planets, some light trading or destroying enemy ships. No race is forced to be your friend and every race can be at least partially placated on occasion. Your ship can be decked out in the fashion you see fit depending on if you want to play in a bloodthirsty fashion, killing enemy ships, just carry lots of cargo or somewhere in between the two.

Every of the 10+ races has their own music, art-style, feel and area of space. The galaxy is huge with thousands of planets to explore and many nooks-and-crannies than can convey advantages through technology or pivotal diplomatic assets.

Combat is settled in a 2D shooter fashion, flying your little ship about with Newtonian physics trying to outshoot or flee from your enemies.

This game a strange fusion of adventure and action with RPG and RTS elements also thrown in. The bright, colorful graphics have actually aged reasonably well and don’t detract from the great game.

If you like computer games at all I challenge you to leave the Sol system in this game (<1 hour of gameplay) and not be enjoying it. I will be frankly amazed if you do.

This is a brilliant game, hats off to both the original developers and the open-source team that have made the game work so well on modern platforms.

Go and play it now!

There is something that open-source software seems to suck at and that is making good games. I play almost every OSS game I can get my hands on and the prettiest are graphically inferior to games from the average games of a couple of years ago, the audio is terribly mastered, the games are usually unbalanced and the stories are usually either ridiculously awful or involve Tux in some way.

Interestingly the freeware/mod scene on Windows seems to produce far better quality games than the open-source scene. I think this is because you where software fulfils a need for the user a game is a more creative act and needs a clear leader and a very undemocratic approach to aspects such as storyline and artwork. Games also tend to need to be “done” before they are released as no-one wants to play a story-driven game that just stops abrubtly.

I’m sure people are going to come onto this blog and complain that I’ve forgotten about all these great open-source games but I don’t really care. I’ve tried playing too many to find myself spending hours wishing I was playing even a poor paid-for game.

The only real exceptions I’ve found to the above rules are games which have been retroactively open-sourced such as Quake 3, Transport Tycoon, Tyrian and Star Control 2. These were all good games on release and open-sourcing them means they can be made more portable and keep being played for a long time. I highly recommend you check them out.

What if our “climate chaos” and all the weather changes we are seeing are just the fact that the rotation of the earth is at a slightly different speed so years are now the wrong length! That would explain the whole warmer winters but colder summers!

Disclaimer:
I make every effort to reduce my impact on the environment, this blog post is intended to be humour not a complex rebuttal of common scientific theory. However, I reserve the right to merciless mock the entire scientific community.

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