chokma

On your last day, you (should) receive your letter of recommendation (Arbeitszeugnis), which by law needs to be a positive statement of what you have done, enabling you to get another job.

Slacking off in the last 4 weeks _may_ cause your employer to give you slightly less than a glowing review. Some employers take those letters seriously and if your last boss writes "he did the best he could with the tasks that were given to him", that's not going to reflect well on you.

edit: there is a whole "secret" language for those certificates of employment / recommendation letters, where employers may try to sneak in outrageous stuff ("He had an open ear for the concerns of his female coworkers" - grabbing them or being otherwise inappropriate towards them ), but since most companies do not want to haggle in front of a judge about the exact phrasing, it mostly is written in an okay way. Often you will be told: "Write this letter yourself, you know best what you did here, I am going to sign off on it."

Examples of this would be if you're caught stealing or harassing a coworker - or if your employer is breaking the law by repeatedly not paying you on time or endangering your health etc. You cannot be fired for being late once. Your employer has to document that he has told you "Do not be late again, or else" (and you have to sign off on this).

Work load may not be unreasonable. Usual work load is 40 hour weeks, and overtime is dependent on contractual definitions. Some people are (by union) not able to work more, others are exempt from overtime restrictions (managers), others will receive money or free time as compensation. You can enter contracts that specify a certain amount of overtime work, but unless they are specific enough, those clauses are void. You cannot get less than 24 days / year of holidays, you must not work on Sunday (unless: emergency or working in an exempt job, like healthcare), and employers risk fines/prison if they deny you those rights.

Overtime usually requires an explicit order, and is limited to 48h total work time /week. Anything more (for example: seasonal workers) needs to be compensated with free time in the following 6 months. So an employer can demand a death march for a project, but even that is limited to not more than 10 h/day.

That said, while the law may be on your side, people may work more than the contractually defined amount "because it's necessary / they need me there" or other strange reasons.

(note: there are exceptions for all rules. When your data center is down for some reason, you are not going to tell your boss "sorry, my 8 hours today are up, find someone else to restart those servers. I'll be back tomorrow.")

Note that depending on unions (rare in IT) and mandatory employee representation (Betriebsrat) for big companies, firing people can be harder, especially for long-term employees.

Some flaws are "easier" to manage than others (having large debts is a good story hook and not that problematic for adventurers, I think. A character having memory issues however is not easily compensated, but may make for interesting role playing).

A Dark Age of Camelot (MMORPG) chat log file analyzer written in Perl in 2003-2005 helped me land my first dev job.

I switched careers (due to lack of job openings) from becoming a protestant pastor to being a full time developer. I had almost no proof of having programmed in Perl for close to 6 years as a hobby, but the company desperately needed another coder and their senior programmer at that time had taken a look at my SF page. The boss was impressed when I said that my code had been downloaded by over a 1000 users, and so I got my first job, rewriting an SMS-messaging platform.

Now, over 10 years later, my GitHub profile only rarely comes up when recruiters try to reach me - some, I think, use web scraping to match profiles with LinkedIn / Xing to say nice things as a conversation starter in generic emails.

Using affiliate-like CPC click-through links on their social media accounts allows the ad network to observe exactly what is working. The problem is that social influencer status probably only really works for stars with a huge following of real life fans. One example (@work) was a celebrity posting about a nice pair of shoes. Those sold out within minutes, and the shoe company's store page crashed due to the unexpected demand. So it can work, but like most things in marketing, if everyone does it, it won't work for most.

I just do not see how this act of online vigilantism is going to change things or help. The cost that merchants encounter are opaque, they have mostly no control over the publishing side, if they even know where their ads are shown at all. So, advertising gets more expensive, but as one commentator here said: "I must advertise, else I will have no sales at all."

Lastly, to click on an ad, the user will most likely need to execute the javascript associated with the ad. At that moment, they already have been tracked, and any malicious drive-by-downloads will run on their machine. Clicking on all ads you encounter will just make your browsing trail that much wider (user reads HackerNews, browses late in the morning, stays long on sites with cat memes), and your unique browser footprint will be associated cross device with your profile so you get more targeted ads on your mobile devices.

From the perspective of the ad network:

Lower click quality drives up the merchant's cost of sale (COS). Sitting between the merchant and the publisher, the ad network tries to balance this out, by

  - mixing good and bad traffic sources
  - encouraging the merchant to spend more money 
    so they can buy better traffic and/or rank the offers higher on their publisher's sites
  - punishing the publisher for sending bad traffic by lowering the amount the publisher is paid for each click
  - filtering out extraordinarily bad traffic

I do not see the direct benefit of this for the end user...

(1) for example by paying more money to antivirus providers to send your browsing habits their way.

edit: formatting

  magnet:?xt=urn:btih:UGFLA4QNEXGEFKYYY5ZU37JIHWEEYY5R&dn=reddit_data&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80&tr=udp%3a%2f%2fopen.demonii.com%3a1337&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3a6969&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3a6969

If you want to work with this dataset on your workstation, there are some code examples in https://github.com/dewarim/reddit-data-tools

But it could be useful to look at the comment history of a user. When someone who is an overall positively minded contributor (with a high average positive sentiment) suddenly writes one scathing reply, this could mark a potentially interesting thread.

One problem I have is sbt - our projects are all defined in Maven, and for many library / dependency problems, Google leads me to sbt solutions which are hard to understand. Guess I will have to learn another build system.

I would like to use Scala again in a larger project, but there are so many existing Java frameworks out there that can solve the problems we have. So it is hard to define a business use case that requires experienced Java developers on the team to switch to Scala and use libraries and frameworks that are not as thoroughly tested and supported compared to the already known ones.

Tooling: The Scala plugin for IntelliJ is getting better, but it had some bugs like suggesting to remove required imports which broke classes. I like the easy navigation between Java and Scala libs - sure, you get "null problems" from using Java, but you can use almost all your existing Java code (Just don't try to use commons.StringUtils.join instead of Scala .mkString ;) ).

So, having an open WIFI is like painting a huge target on your back, albeit a somewhat smaller one when media companies are removed from the list of potential trouble makers.

(See also: http://www.lawblog.de/index.php/archives/2016/05/12/dein-wla... (in German), for a defense lawyer's perspective)

( http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/29/a_things_i_w... )

A bit more about that from a better source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surgical-exposure-...

When writing a LGPL licensed CMS server, I tried to find all sub-projects to make sure we could distribute the software safely. Sadly, not every framework and plugin does list its own dependencies correctly - often you will find components in the lib/ folder that require specific attribution with the author's name if the software is to be used legally.

http://cinnamon-cms.com/de/cinnamon-server/lizenz-ubersicht

And for a list of Giants and Dwarves:

http://cinnamon-cms.com/de/standard/riesen-und-zwerge

edit: clarification / fix typo

  root@x ~ # openssl version -a
  OpenSSL 1.0.1 14 Mar 2012
  built on: Mon Apr  7 20:33:29 UTC 2014

"There is nothing better for a man [than] that he should eat and drink, and make his soul enjoy good in his labor."

So the philosophy of Ecclesiastes is almost hedonistic (and views god more as blind fate than a benevolent force or being).

She also refused to upgrade from a 15" monitor to a larger model, so we had to keep the screen layout in accordance with her outdated screen format. (The cost of a new screen would have been negligible compared to the profits).

It will be interesting to see if educating a growing user base does scale (as more knowledgeable admins may ask fewer questions and can find their own answers on StackOverflow) or introduces more (and much more complicated) customer support requests over time.

Stuff I learn at work is often applicable in my side project as well - and vice versa. I can re-use the code (as most of the work-code is open source) and use the project as a testing / learning opportunity for things I may use at work.

The things which do reduce my motivation is the projects legal side (having signed a disadvantageous contract...) and not knowing if there really is a market for the kind of application I write ("$megaCorp can do this probably sooo much better.").

Thanks for the FPM-link, that looks interesting for packaging my own software :)

But sometimes the content will not load at all, because to show an article's text, the page uses Google's ajax, webfonts, a cdn, and the blog's master site @ wordpress.com or blogger.com etc. In that case, the content has to be really interesting for me to allow all those third-party connections.

"Personal licenses are not available to companies in any way or form. Transfer of personal licenses to any third party and/or reimbursement for personal license purchase by a company are prohibited by the Personal License Agreement"

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/buy.jsp#personal

The problem with outlawing encryption is: everyone needs it for business purposes and to protect public / private infrastructure. If SSL encryption were to be forbidden, e-commerce would become very difficult...

Also interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing ("Chaffing and winnowing is a cryptographic technique to achieve confidentiality without using encryption")

But a powerful LED light source is great as an additional gadget. (Although, at 4-6m range, this item is not sufficient to illuminate the road ahead).

"You gave AcmeFamilyPlanner 4/5 stars, Mrs Candidate - say, do you want to have a career or a family?" (Hm, of course this could help remove bad employers from your list of prospective work places ;) )