Nick BartlettPHP Developer in Minnesota

By default mod_rewrite module is not enabled in apache with XAMPP.

To enable mod_rewrite in xampp first go to the directory of installation <xampp-directory>\apache\conf and edit httpd.conf. Find the line that contains
#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
uncomment this(should be):

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Also find AllowOverride None

Should be:

AllowOverride All

AllowOverride appears 2 or 3 times on the configuration file.  Change all of them.

My wife and I have been banking with Wells Fargo for ten years.  In my experience, they are only focused on big business couldn’t care less about the little guy.  As soon as you are viewed as a risk of any sort, they will hike your rates or terminate your accounts without negotiation!

Here’s why Wells Fargo sucks

1. Our Wells Fargo VISA credit card has the highest interest rate; triple that of our capital one card.
2. Wells Fargo will not give us a loan for a five year old used car at a decent rate.  They sent us to their “Wells Fargo Financial” branch and came up with a car loan for 16.9% APR, which is ridiculous.
3. Wells Fargo “was” the online merchant for my supplement business until somebody there performed a random audit and didn’t like some of the LEGAL product on the site.  My merchant account was terminated and marked as “TMF” (terminated merchants file).  Because of this, most other banks and merchants will not do business with me.  It’s like declaring bankruptcy on your credit score.  There was no negotiation or warning, just termination.  After discussions with the rep from Wells Fargo and convincing him that the products were OK, they still terminated the account because they didn’t want to be linked in any way to the product.  Why?  Because I was too minuscule for them to care about my lost business or change their thinking.

I’ve been interviewing developers on and off for most of the last year and have lead more than twenty five or thirty interviews in total.  A couple years ago myself and other inexperienced coworkers started interviewing developer candidates and made some critical mistakes in the our approach; we didn’t know any better.  Our interview at the time was generic and strictly verbal; it pretty much went like it would for a non technical position.  The two coworkers that came out of those first few interviews are fortunately long gone as they didn’t work out.  One of these guys had five years experience writing PHP and referred to himself a “senior” developer.  After hiring him (when I didn’t know how to interview somebody), we learned through looking at his code that he didn’t know how to return a value from a function!  This was just one example of the never ending blunders.  He had a difficult time learning new things.  You’ll need to evaluate the candidate’s skill level in areas and make sure they’re on par with where they should be for the duration of experience.

I was hired at VISI without showing any work I’d done on the web, code samples, or anything!  I was hired after a verbal discussion of the company and what I’ve been doing lately.  After being hired my boss and I went to lunch where he asked about my skills and when I replied “no”, “no”, “no” to nearly every skill he asked for he said “geez Nick!”.  I said “well, you hired me!”.

I have read other blogs and read books that cover interviewing developers.  From this I have put together an interview that usually takes 1.5 to 2 hours depending on the person.  After this time, I have a very good grasp of what the candidate is capable of.  Training a developer can easily cost the company tens of thousands of dollars in salaries of both the new hire and the trainer, not to mention a loss of productivity.  Hiring the wrong person, one who will never perform up to par, will also cost the company tens of thousands of dollars in productivity losses.

Below are some tips for successfully interviewing a developer and feeling confident about making an offer.  Don’t feel bad about holding a tough interview; hire the wrong person and it’ll be you sitting through a tough performance review later on.

1. Watch them write code.  It’s pretty simple, almost too simple, but you’ll be surprised how it separates those who can talk the talk and walk the walk in a hurry.  For the interview I hold, I have a simple open ended task where the developer will create a data structure of their choosing and write a loop to display the data in any programming language of their choosing.  Naturally, since I work at a PHP shop, that is the preferred language.  I recently had a 4 year college graduate with a computer focused degree, who was unable to even start on this code writing task.  Not one line of code.  He was a nice guy and a geek, but not a programmer by any means.
2. Give them a written skill assessment covering the areas of focus they’ll be working with at your company.  Cover a few areas of focus and ask and easier and more difficult question for each.  Again, it’s amazing what you’ll find.  Some people will ace it and their knowledge and experience will show.  Others will bomb it.  This is another indicator of how much training the candidate will require.  If the candidate has years of experience on the subject matter and bombs it, don’t hire them!  See paragraph one in this article for an example.
3. Try to identify a real “passion” for their work.  There are a couple  basic types of successful developers or computer geeks out there.
   1. There are geeks that like computers and are also good with business management.  MIS/CIS majors (like me) will usually be like this.  Asking about any side businesses or revenue producing projects they have to identify this trait.  They’ll use cpanel to setup their websites in a hurry because it’s easy, it works, and it’s fast.  They don’t care about all the configurations and settings, they just care about getting from point A to point B quickly.  These will be your development managers one day.  The tough part is, this person must start out at the bottom by writing code and much of their college training was on the business side of things and not so much programming languages.
   2. The second type are the super geeks.  Computer Science majors that do command line everything and do it because they just want to know how it works.  They get excited about bits and bytes and working on tiny performance tweaks for six hours that save 0.01second of processing time.  Their eyes light up when talking about their side projects and will go into great detail of what it is they’re working on.  If you’re looking for a brilliant coder, a good worker, fast learner that teaches themselves, this is the type you want.  The challenge will be to keep this person on task and focused on the company’s goal.  They have a tendency to spend way too much time on the little things and will kill your project deadline.

As the manager and person making the hire, If you’re not 100% sure about a candidate, don’t make them an offer.  If you’re 90% sure about somebody, only make them an offer if your circumstances require you to hire somebody immediately.  Just when you think you’ve looked at everybody’s resume, another great candidate always comes along with a little time.

I connected my iphone to our 2008 Toyota Camry tonight and found it fairly easy for not having used bluetooth before.  I was unable to find out how to import all my phone’s contacts directly into the car, but that’s another story.  I setup some contacts in the car’s phone book manually and started making some calls.  Immediately I was told “I can’t hear you”.  I was unable to find in Toyota’s manual how to adjust the microphone volume.  After some googling, I found a solution online here and here.  The images below were taken from these two sites.  All credit goes to them.

1. Turn your Toyota to the “on” position.  This could be a push button or key.  Don’t start the vehicle, just the on position as if you were listening to the radio.

2. Hold the “info” button on the vehicle’s display with your right hand and flip the lights on and off with your other hand.  You might have to play with it a bit to get it right.  This is why everytime you get your car back from the dealer your lights have been turned off.  After a couple seconds and two or three flips of the lights, the display will enter diagnostic mode.

3. The menu is probably different between Toyota models and years, but once you’re in diagnostic mode, get to the main menu.  On my 2008 Camry, I initially had to press a button in the upper right corner for the menu.  The menu will look something like the image below.

4. Press the “BT Voice Quality Set” button on the menu.  You’ll see an interface like below for the bluetooth adjustment.  The microphone volume is the “Send Voice Lv” entry.  Turn it all the way up to 5.  The receive voice entry is fine at 0, but you can always turn that up a bit as well.  I turned mine up to 3 and it was quite a bit louder.

5. I was unable to find an “exit” button, so I turned off the car from here and it worked fine.