Like many busy people I used to politely decline requests to join LinkedIn – a social networking website for professionals. A few weeks ago I finally gave it a try and on uploading my Gmail contacts a whopping 70+ people I knew were already in LinkedIn, wow it has really taken off! Check out my shiny new LinkedIn profile here:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/PaulLockwood
What are the main benefits I see from the site? Luckily I have never have trouble finding contracts, but every so often I find myself working for really bad managers – incompetents seem to cluster, why is that? With LinkedIn I hope to avoid making such mistakes ever again:
LinkedIn should enable us to observe any company’s rate of turnover, especially to discover if competent senior developers are leaving in droves or only staying for a few months. As more and more people joined LinkedIn it will become pretty easy to contact someone who used to have the job you are interviewing for – what better way to get to the 411 on why they left than ask the individual themselves?
One thing I have found is that not every member responds to an invite immediately. After three weeks I sent a reminders to the few stragglers and all but one responded within the day – perhaps they missed the first ‘bulk request’ due to spam filters? Whatever the reason don’t forget than you can easily resend an invitation to an existing member.
Paul Lockwood Technology
Steve Gibson of GRC fame spits out another useful tool:
It simply displays if some newer hardware features are available on your PC. The screen-shot is verification that the 64bit PC I built almost three years does support DEP.
DEP: Prevents buffer overflows in hardware – this a very big deal. Of course the operation system must support DEP too. Which versions of Windows support it is unclear, but 64bit Vista and XP should support it. Hopefully Steve Gibson will extend his utility to test DEP with an actual buffer overflow
Hardware Vitalization: Hardware support for running Virtual Machines – they should run with no speed degradation
You can see all of Steve’s free utilities at his circa-1995 website:
http://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm
After a period of dumbing down his Security Now podcast is again one I highly recommend:
http://www.grc.com/SecurityNow.htm
Paul Lockwood Podcasts, Technology
When re-hosting this blog I decided to go with an engine that published plain-jane html. The main reasons are:
. Simplicity of hosting
. Speed of pages to appear (i.e. no ASP.Net engine to ‘warm up’)
. Should be simple to migrate to another engine in the future
Unfortunately I decided that Linux is a simpler and faster choice than windows. I say unfortunately because it appears Apache on Linux is case sensitive, i.e. Index.html is different from index.html.
This means there are few dead-links on this site right now, and they will have to stay that way until I return from vacation. Probably I’ll swap back to IIS hosting. Anyone else who looking to move their blog don’t make the same mistake!
Paul Lockwood Technology