Contents tagged with Business Info
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Outlook Makes It Impossible to Report Phishing Scams to PayPal and Ebay
If you are like me, you get a couple phishing scams every week. Where most folks just delete them, I like to report them to the company they are trying to impersonate. Microsoft has this page dedicated to helping individuals determine phishing scams, and how to report them. The problem is that most of the phishing emails contain images, which Outlook will, rightfully, not download (so that the person that sent the email doesn’t get a ping that you actually read the email). If you try to forward the message, Outlook requires you to download the images (thus alerting the phishing party that you read the email). So in the Microsoft guide, they tell you to create a new email, include the suspected email as an attachment, and manually copy the headers over to the new message. But, to report a phishing email to EBay or PayPal they want you to forward the email to them, not send it as an attachment, which is the exact opposite of the MS guide. If you try to follow Microsoft’s suggested method, and report the email to EBay or PayPal, you will get a response asking you to forward the original email, not include it as an attachment. Do you see where I’m going? You can’t use Outlook to forward the email without downloading the images, and EBay and PayPal will not accept it any other way.
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Consultant Rate Worksheet
I know this really falls under “Business Info” and not the typical tech discussions, and I hope it isn't too far in the noise category.
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Object Constraint Language
Geez, I don’t know why I haven’t bumped into this before, but while doing some research on Test Driven Development for my current client, I ran across the Object Constraint Language. [corrected his name from Josh to Jason. doh!] Jason Gorman has released a cool slide deck on OCL for .Net developers that you should check out (plus check out the other slides on UML for .Net developers). You use it to supplement your UML diagrams. Instead of having free form text in the UML constraints, you use OCL instead. The thing that I like about it is that it is totally declarative. It is an expression that can only evaluate to true or false. OCL is also a C like language, so it is easy to convert to C#. Josh talks about the different ways we implement constraints in our code. There is the Debug.Assert() method, which most C++ programmers use (Design By Contract), and the Defensive Programming version, throwing Exceptions. Since Debug.Assert isn’t a viable way to implement constraints in .Net (it throws a PopUp Box and is meant for debugging only), most .Net developers use the Defensive Programming style. That is, before you do any real work in a method, you check the pre-conditions and throw exceptions if there is a problem. This is the style that I’ve been using in most of my apps.
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re: Why Do You Code?
Rory doesn’t shy away from asking the hard questions, and this time it is a real brain twister – “Why do you code?”
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Current Reading (or Re-Reading) List
I’ve been concentrating so much time on learning new technologies over the last couple years that I’ve been remiss in reading my non-computer books. So to help get me back in the swing of things, I decided to hit my personal library and pull out some of my favorites from just before I stopped. I got 2 science and 2 business books that I recommend highly.
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Blogging Reducing the Potential Benefits of the PDC?
I’ll continue the Your Career thread, but with a different twist. First off, I’m going to the PDC, and as an indie consultant, I’m taking the time off (without pay), and paying my own way. The major reasons I go to events like this are:
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Sobering Thought Of the Day
Dr. (colonel) Richard Colin Campbell Ames in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Robert Heinlein:
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MS Looking for a Graphics Software Architect
A great way to see into the inside of a company is to check out their public job postings. With all the rumored work being done on the Longhorn UI, I was surprised to see this posting on the MS job site. It is one hell of a job req, and this person will be critical in developing the future architecture of Graphics on the MS platforms. Here’s a section that would be of most interest to the general developer:
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Networking to Stay Employed
Here’s the last in my series of non-coding blogs. As someone who has done some hiring of programmers over the last couple months, I can say from experience that it is not just a case of too many programmers and not enough jobs, or outsourcing causing the problems in the current tech job market. It's a multilevel problem that starts with lots and lots of inexperienced programmers (who flocked to IT during the dot com boom) looking for jobs. These inexperienced programmers are flooding the market with resumes, just trying to make something stick. These resumes are making it impossible to try to find the good quality programmers' resumes. To make matters worse, you can't even go thru a recruiting agency or a consulting firm, because any recruiter that was worth anything got out of that field when the jobs got scarce. So the recruiters aren't doing their jobs and just push the bad resumes along.
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Business Analyst – The Lost Art Form
Continuing my trend of business related blog entries, I thought I’d comment on Martin Spedding’s latest blog entry, “Outsource Coding, When Not If”. Some of what he is saying I agree with, but outsourcing has been around forever, and has had limited success. I can’t see the outsourcing success rate increasing in the near future. The major reason is due to the lost art form that was the Business Analyst’s role. The way it is suppose to work is the business analyst understands the business process, the system analyst talks to the business analyst and builds those needs into a corporate wide systems approach, and the programmer analyst talks to the system analyst to make sure the program meets the needs of the business users, and the corporate systems needs. During the 90’s the business analyst’s role was slowly diminished to the point that the position is rarely used anymore. The death of the analyst role was also fueled by the mass exodus from these positions to development positions during the Dot Com boom, and once things went bust, out went to developers, along with their analyst role. I have not seen a come back yet, but believe that in order to survive, companies will need to revive these roles. There was a time in the late 90’s where people predicted that a Systems Analyst with an MBA was the career choice of the future, but the future is here, and I still don’t see these positions, and my consulting clients are Fortune 100 companies. If they are ever going to get outsourcing to work, they are going to have to bring back the analyst roles.