Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Famous Sed One-Liners Explained, Part I: File Spacing, Numbering and Text Conversion and Substitution - good coders code, great reuse

Famous Sed One-Liners Explained, Part I: File Spacing, Numbering and Text Conversion and Substitution - good coders code, great reuse:

sed -- the superman of unix stream editing

This is such a great blog! I really liked his awk one-liners explained, but I see he has done the same for sed (I really never understood all the ones using "G" before):

"Inspired by the success of my "Awk One-Liners Explained" article (30,000 views in first three days), I decided to explain the famous sed one-liners as well.

These one-liners, just like the Awk one-liners, are compiled by Eric Pement.

You may download them here: sed one-liners (link to .txt file).

Most people are only familiar with one particular command of sed, namely the "s" (substitute) comand. s/comand/command/. That is unsatisfactory. Sed has at least 20 different commands for you. You can even write tetris in it (not to mention that it's Turing complete).

My sed learning process was actually identical to Awk learning process. First I went through Bruce Barnett's sed tutorial; then I created a sed cheat sheet; and finally went through sed one-liners. I could not figure one of the one-liners in the file, so I ended up asking for help in comp.unix.shell.

Eric's sed one-liners are divided into several sections:

1. File spacing (explained in this part).
2. Numbering (explained in this part).
3. Text conversion and substitution (explained in this part).
4. Selective printing of certain lines (explained in part two).
5. Selective deletion of certain lines (explained in part three).
6. Special applications (explained in part three).
7. Release of Sed One-Liners Explained e-book. "

and look at these:

No More Résumés, Say Some Firms - WSJ.com

No More Résumés, Say Some Firms - WSJ.com:

Union Square Ventures recently posted an opening for an investment analyst.

Instead of asking for résumés, the New York venture-capital firm—which has invested in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and other technology companies—asked applicants to send links representing their "Web presence," such as a Twitter account or Tumblr blog. Applicants also had to submit short videos demonstrating their interest in the position.

Union Square says its process nets better-quality candidates —especially for a venture-capital operation that invests heavily in the Internet and social-media—and the firm plans to use it going forward to fill analyst positions and other jobs.

Companies are increasingly relying on social networks such as LinkedIn, video profiles and online quizzes to gauge candidates' suitability for a job. While most still request a résumé as part of the application package, some are bypassing the staid requirement altogether.

A résumé doesn't provide much depth about a candidate, says Christina Cacioppo, an associate at Union Square Ventures who blogs about the hiring process on the company's website and was herself hired after she compiled a profile comprising her personal blog, Twitter feed, LinkedIn profile, and links to social-media sites Delicious and Dopplr, which showed places where she had traveled.

Enlarge Image

Matt Nager for The Wall Street Journal

StickerGiant's John Fischer, right, and interviewee Adam Thackeray shoot a video Monday. Mr. Fischer uses an online survey to screen applicants.

"We are most interested in what people are like, what they are like to work with, how they think," she says.

John Fischer, founder and owner of StickerGiant.com, a Hygiene, Colo., company that makes bumper and marketing stickers, says a résumé isn't the best way to determine whether a potential employee will be a good social fit for the company. Instead, his firm uses an online survey to help screen applicants.

Questions are tailored to the position. A current opening for an Adobe Illustrator expert asks applicants about their skills, but also asks questions such as "What is your ideal dream job?" and "What is the best job you've ever had?" Applicants have the option to attach a résumé, but it isn't required. Mr. Fischer says he started using online questionnaires several years ago, after receiving too many résumés from candidates who had no qualifications or interest. Having applicants fill out surveys is a "self-filter," he says.

A previous posting for an Internet marketing position had applicants rate their marketing and social-media skills on a scale of one to 10 and select from a list of words how friends or co-workers would describe them. Options included: high energy, type-A, laid back, perfect, creative or fun.

In times of high unemployment, bypassing résumés can also help companies winnow out candidates from a broader labor pool.

IGN Entertainment Inc., a gaming and media firm, launched a program dubbed Code Foo, in which it taught programming skills to passionate gamers with little experience, paying participants while they learned. Instead of asking for résumés, the firm posted a series of challenges on its website aimed at gauging candidates' thought processes. (One challenge: Estimate how many pennies lined side by side would span the Golden Gate Bridge.)

It also asked candidates to submit a video demonstrating their love of gaming and the firm's products.

IGN is a unit of News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

Nearly 30 people out of about 100 applicants were picked for the six-week Code Foo program, and six were eventually hired full-time. Several of the hires were nontraditional applicants who didn't attend college or who had thin work experience.

"If we had just looked at their résumés at the moment we wouldn't have hired them," says Greg Silva, IGN's vice president of people and places. The company does require résumés for its regular job openings.

At most companies, résumés are still the first step of the recruiting process, even at supposedly nontraditional places like Google Inc., which hired about 7,000 people in 2011, after receiving some two million résumés. Google has an army of "hundreds" of recruiters who actually read every one, says Todd Carlisle, the technology firm's director of staffing.

But Dr. Carlisle says he reads résumés in an unusual way: from the bottom up.

Candidates' early work experience, hobbies, extracurricular activities or nonprofit involvement—such as painting houses to pay for college or touring with a punk rock band through Europe—often provide insight into how well an applicant would fit into the company culture, Dr. Carlisle says.

Plus, "It's the first sample of work we have of yours," he says.

Write to Rachel Emma Silverman at rachel.silverman@wsj.com

'via Blog this'

Monday, January 23, 2012

The History of Happiness - Harvard Business Review

The History of Happiness - Harvard Business Review:

Artwork: Yue Minjun, The Massacre at Chios, 2001, oil on canvas, 300 x 220 cm

A modern Russian adage holds that “a person who smiles a lot is either a fool or an American.” It’s true that when McDonald’s arrived in Russia, in 1990, one of its first tasks was to train clerks to seem cheerful. I’ve spent time since with Russian friends, discussing cultural rules on showing happiness, agreeing that differences remain.

The point here is not to disparage Russians. Most East Asian cultures also have lower happiness expectations than Americans are accustomed to. Some Latin American cultures tend in the other direction. The point is that cultural variations on happiness are considerable, contributing to the findings of international happiness polls that dot the contemporary public opinion landscape.

Moreover, attitudes toward happiness don’t just vary; they change. Danes, the current polls suggest, are no longer so melancholy. Exploring the nature of such change not only illuminates our own context for happiness but also allows us to assess its advantages and downsides. Without historical perspective, American expectations seem so normal and so natural that they’re difficult to evaluate.

The fact is that the commitment to happiness in Western culture is relatively modern. Until the 18th century, Western standards encouraged, if anything, a slightly saddened approach to life, with facial expressions to match. As one dour Protestant put it, God would encourage a person who “allowed no joy or pleasure, but a kind of melancholic demeanor and austerity.” This does not mean people were actually unhappy—we simply cannot know that, because cultural standards and personal temperament interact in complicated ways. But there is no question that many people felt obliged to apologize for the moments of happiness they did encounter. Sinful humanity had best display a somewhat sorrowful humility.

.... More at

The History of Happiness - Harvard Business Review:

'via Blog this'

Friday, January 20, 2012

Overhead Bin - Worsening weather threatens Costa Concordia wreck

Overhead Bin - Worsening weather threatens Costa Concordia wreck:

'via Blog this'

Apply for a job and hear...nothing? courtesy of Ask Annie

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Fortune online <mailings@mail.cnn.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 12:01 PM
Subject: Ask Annie: When you apply for a job and hear...nothing

Ask Annie

When you apply for a job and hear...nothing

January 19, 2012. 1:30 PM ET

Many employers struggle to keep up with the flood of job applications coming their way and often leave their candidates dangling. Here's how to handle it.

By Anne Fisher, contributor

FORTUNE -- Dear Annie: The last time I looked for a new job, about four years ago, the most discouraging part of the process was applying for a position, even going through more than one interview, and then hearing nothing back. Now, it's happening again. I applied for an opening at a company where I've always wanted to work. They called me in for an interview, which I think went really well, about three weeks ago. I've followed up by phone and email a few times to reiterate my interest since then, but I've heard nothing. Nada. Not a peep.

Meanwhile, another company has offered me a job that I guess would be okay -- better than where I am now, anyway -- and I don't know what to do. I could accept this offer, but then what if the company I'd really prefer finally gets back to me? How long should I wait before assuming I didn't get that job? — In the Dark

Dear I.D.: Maddening, isn't it? I hear this question constantly, sometimes even from people who have flown clear across the country for a round of interviews and then have heard…nothing -- not even an email that would take 20 seconds to send, saying for instance, "Thank you for meeting with us. The job has been filled, but we will keep you in mind for future openings," or words to that effect.

Absolute silence is rude, inconsiderate, and makes people mad. "It's human nature to expect some kind of response," says Chris Forman, CEO of an application-tracking site called StartWire. "And when candidates feel an application has vanished into a black hole, especially if they've put considerable effort into it, they get p.o.'ed."

Demoralizing as it is for job hunters, leaving people hanging is bad for companies too. "What HR people and hiring managers are just starting to realize is that neglecting to let candidates know where they stand is damaging their companies' reputations and their brands," Forman says. A new StartWire survey found that 77% of jobseekers think less of a company that leaves them in the dark, and more than half would decline to buy or recommend that company's product or service.

Moreover, the Internet exponentially increased disgruntled candidates' ability to spread the bad word. "Before the Internet, if a company treated you shabbily, you'd tell maybe 10 people about it," says Forman. "Now, you can post your experience on sites like Glassdoor.com, Vault.com, and Facebook, and tweet all your followers. A negative experience can quickly go viral."

He adds that a typical big company starts with an average of about 30 applications for each opening it fills, "so if you hire 1,000 people a year, you're interacting, for better or worse, with roughly 30,000 candidates. And alienating 30,000 potential customers, plus all their online contacts, is not very smart."

The irony is that it doesn't have to be this way, again because of the Internet. Over the past five years or so, most large employers have adopted sophisticated web-based recruiting tools, which have built-in features that keep track of the status of each candidate's application.

"These features work the same way as when, for example, you order a book from Amazon (AMZN). The system tracks when it leaves the warehouse, when it goes on a truck, when it's en route for delivery to you, and so on," says Forman. "So the problem isn't that employers don't know where your application stands, how many other people are in the running, or whether the job has been filled. They know precisely."

They just don't tell you. StartWire's research shows that only 33% of Fortune 500 companies pass along any of the data they have on hand to candidates, even though 90% of job seekers surveyed said that getting that feedback would make their job hunt "less frustrating," and 96% said they would be more likely to apply for a job at a company where they know they'll be kept informed. "Companies that are notorious for 'application black holes' lose out on potential star employees," Forman says.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

IEEE:How To Get Congress To Give You $240 Billion

How To Get Congress To Give You $240 Billion

(fast forward to 8:44 for talk)

How To Get Congress To Give You $240 Billion

How To Get Congress To Give You US$240 Billion

In this program, IEEE-USA's Senior Legislative Representative for Grassroots Activities, Russ Harrison, discusses the intersection between public policy and engineering.
In 2009, Congress focused on engineers and technology more than at any other point during the past 50 years, perhaps ever. Your elected officials have been debating major changes to US policy in fields that employ or affect IEEE members including energy, space, education, intellectual property law, immigration, and broadband. This attention gives us, as professionals, opportunities, but also poses risks. Learn what IEEE-USA is doing in Washington to try to make sure Congress gets it right. And learn some simple things that you can do to influence your own elected officials.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Blackout day: Web’s ‘cyber tantrum’ already getting result - courtesy of GMSV

Fighting the good fight...

Cheers,

Connie

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: SiliconValley.com <e-news@newsletters.siliconvalley.com>
Date: Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 12:03 PM
Subject: Good Morning Silicon Valley: SOPA protest day, plus Yahoo post-Yang

Good Morning Silicon Valley

Blackout day: Web's 'cyber tantrum' already getting results

By Levi Sumagaysay

The Google search page has a blacked-out logo. Wikipedia's English-language website has gone dark. Over at craigslist, the home page message urges people to call their legislators and includes the following: "Corporate paymasters, keep those clammy hands off the Internet!" What's all the fuss about?

We've discussed SOPA and PIPA frequently on GMSV — including yesterday — but those who might need a refresher can check out the Mercury News Q&A on the anti-piracy legislation that's drawing protests by quite a few U.S. websites today.

Here's what the protesters are saying: The Stop Online Piracy Act and a similar Senate measure, the Protect IP Act, overreach. The legislation, which aims to crack down on copyright infringement, could lead to censorship, security issues and harm technological innovation.

"There are better ways to address piracy than to ask U.S. companies to censor the Internet. The foreign rogue sites are in it for the money, and we believe the best way to shut them down is to cut off their sources of funding," writes David Drummond, chief legal officer for Google, on the company blog. Other sites such as WordPress, Wired, Boing Boing and more are either dark or self-censoring their headlines. Wired explains its decision to participate in the protests, saying the legislation "threatens to usher in a chilling internet censorship regime here in the U.S. comparable in some ways to China's 'Great Firewall'."

The tech industry's opposition seems to be making a difference. The bills are facing obstacles and will have to be reworked, especially in the wake of the White House voicing its opposition over the weekend to some of the legislation's most sweeping aspects. SOPA author Sen. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, reportedly said Friday he would back away from the provision in the bill that would have required domain-name blocking.

The Hill's Hillicon Valley blog reports today that at least one lawmaker has changed his mind and dropped his support of PIPA, which he had co-sponsored. He has heard "legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet," said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

"The Web taking a stand against one of the most powerful lobbyers and seeming to get somewhere is definitely a first," Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, told the New York Times.

But Wired and others say the protests — which are also going offline, by the way — remain necessary because "it is almost certain their backers are already planning the next round, in a process that will continue in one form or another ad infinitum." Those backers are the music and entertainment industries, which claim that piracy are costing companies in the industry billions of dollars a year and threatening jobs. The true costs of piracy are tough to pin down, though, the Washington Post pointed out recently. And opponents of the bills say the costs to them would also be great. For example, among the provisions is a requirement to delete links to sites that infringe on copyrights — something that is sure to be easier said than done.

A Wall Street Journal editorial is calling today's protest a "cyber tantrum," and kills two birds with one stone by likening it to other recent expressions of discontent: "The offline analogue is Occupy Wall Street." The WSJ, which is owned by News Corp., echoes the sentiments of the legislation's authors, who say the bills' only aim is to stop online piracy and protect intellectual property. (See Quoted: SOPA author digs in.) Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. CEO, also slammed the Obama administration and Google via Twitter over the weekend for their position on SOPA and PIPA.

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QUOTED

"I've known plenty of couples who have shared passwords, and not a single one has not regretted it. It's the kind of symbolism that always goes awry."

— Sam Biddle of Gizmodo, in an interview with the New York Times, which wrote about couples who are are young, in love and sharing passwords to their email and social-networking accounts. Said one teen quoted in the article: "I have nothing to hide from him, and he has nothing to hide from me." But as the New York Times explored in a 2010 article, when couples' digital lives are too intertwined, breaking up becomes even harder to do.

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Yahoo post-Yang: What's next? A day after Yahoo announced that co-founder Jerry Yang has left the building — no more chief Yahoo title, and he has resigned from his seat on the board — shares of the Sunnyvale company continue to rise. After climbing sharply in after-hours yesterday, they are now up nearly 3 percent to about $15.90 as of this post.

Investors must be reading about how Yang was widely seen as an obstacle in selling off Yahoo's valuable Asian assets, Chinese Internet portal Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. And perhaps many of them haven't forgiven and forgotten that Yang was CEO when the company rejected Microsoft's hostile bid in 2008 — for $33 a share, about twice as much today's share price. But also, when Yahoo fired CEO Carol Bartz last year for failing to turn the company around quickly enough, there was accompanying grumbling about the board. Board member Yang, for better or worse, has been with the company in some capacity since he co-founded it in 1994. Some saw him as a contributor to Yahoo's inability to keep up with the growth of the newer, hipper Internet companies such as Facebook and Google.

Amid all the coverage about Yang's departure, two key points: First, some say Yang may be getting a bum rap, his legacy tarnished by Yahoo's recent struggles.

Writes Charles Cooper of CBS News: "If Yang's legacy includes blowing the Microsoft deal, then let's also include his myriad contributions in laboring to build one of the biggest Internet properties in the world. For whatever warts you want to pick at, Yahoo remains a company that weathered the dot-com bust, the post-9/11 slump, and the Great Recession." My colleague Chris O'Brien blogs: "Yang deservedly remains a Silicon Valley icon. He was there at the start of the Internet era, along with co-founder David Filo, building one of the first great Web businesses. It is a company that generated millions of dollars in wealth for founders and employees, created thousands of jobs, and helped pioneer the idea that the Web could be a place where businesses could be built." Yang's mistake, say O'Brien and the Mercury News' Mike Cassidy, was hanging on too long.

Second, the big question now is what the company can do to start anew as it battles Facebook and Google for ad revenue, and as it tries to appease long-frustrated investors. Cooper of CBS News and others are right to point out that Yahoo remains a huge force. Its properties continue to draw in hundreds of millions of viewers — who probably couldn't care less that Yahoo has lost its mojo in the tech world — and it remains one of the biggest and still profitable companies in Silicon Valley. But analyst Rebecca Lieb of the Altimeter Group recently told O'Brien: "Yahoo is a very vaguely defined company strategically. It has a million or zero identities. It's everything and nothing." Many believe that that lack of focus, more than anything or anyone, has been what has held the company back. On GMSV, we've talked plenty about Yahoo's identity crisis as it has struggled with the question of whether it's a technology company or a media company. With Yang gone, and with more board members reportedly on their way out, maybe a new regime can help reinvent Yahoo.

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Off topic: Faking it on Twitter, if seceding had succeeded, occupations of the 1 percent, office colds, remaking book covers: The alter egos of Henry Kissinger, Queen Elizabeth II and others make Foreign Policy's list of fake and entertaining Twitter accounts. U.S. secession movements mapped and compared against the rest of the country. (via Neatorama) The New York Times takes a look at what the 1 percent does for a living. (with infographic) Office colds: a flowchart, diagram of the "office hero" and more. And alternative book covers and movie posters.

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