One Way to Find Qualified Candidates

This is about data mining information about students, be patient I will get to my point.




I was talking with Dan, a friend of mine that works as a recruiter. He was complaining about the quality of applications he gets-- if he gets them.

Between the client asking for everything under the sun rather than the top five skills required and the applicant doing a poor job presenting himself when faced with the opportunity to just echo back the job requirements in the form of work history & formal training; he is in a tough place finding candidates to put forward even though in his gut he could match four to five satisfactory candidates to each of the jobs in his pool of opportunities.

I've had a little over a week to think about his dilemma. The good news is that I have had a decent related idea, the bad news is that Dan's employer may be too small potatoes to take advantage of it.

I've recently enrolled in an introductory Linux edX course over at edX.org. It got me thinking about how the Linux Foundation is sponsoring the largest free Linux educational offering for people willing to take the time to consume the content EVER.

The Linux Foundation via edX now has access to a wealth of data about all the people registered for the course-- their contact information and, if they wished, a lot of telling information about the student.

Some of the information may indicate whether they would be a good asset to an employer.

What if larger organizations put out quality, meaningful educational opportunities related to the technologies they wanted to gain some popularity? What is win-win about it is that they could create a larger audience and demand for their technology while also having the opportunity to find candidates to fill positions-- that specifically have studied the critical information from the curriculum they built. Allow people to gain skills and then have the chance to cherry pick the leaders of the pack-- assuming they warm to the idea of being employed by the sponsor of the class. Worst case scenario, it could still be called contributions to the greater good, making the world a better place through quality self improvement opportunities.

Let's do something sloppy and crazy-- possibly meaningless. Let's just search for IBM, Oracle, & SAP on dice. These are my raw quantity of otherwise unfiltered results for the respective searches:

3,498 - IBM
13,479 - Oracle
5,278 - SAP

So, clearly HR at these companies could use some help.

I am a great employee. Good luck getting me to spend 2 hours on a 'simple' application when I am already well employed. But, I know I would spend several hours across a few weeks learning new skills or even sharpening existing skills in a course put together by the right people. The Linux Foundation making a Linux course available has garnered a whole lot of attention.

Unknown class 'foo' -- Geppetto not recognizing dependencies in your puppet code?

Check your Modulefile. Update your dependencies there via the tab on the bottom and verify the change in your metadata.json .

Poof, your puppet include finally will be recognized as a valid class that was found and when someone installs your script, then it will dig up the dependencies if necessary.

rebeccapurple, digging into mozilla firefox

Why? Digital-remembrance for a life taken too early and in support of a man that unbenknownst to me makes my life better and easier. But, also that we share friends, who tapped me. And I got on board.

My first two files ready for committing:

./aurora/content/base/test/test_html_colors_standards.html

./aurora/content/base/test/test_html_colors_quirks.html

However, I have no commit access to the mozilla firefox repos.

(Womp womp womp woaoamp. Play the sad music.)

The rest need tweaked still. Currently mulling over whether Mozilla Bug Report 456826 applies to my source editing task.

HP LaserJet 2015 Ethernet Conversion

So, I ordered a HP LaserJet 2015dn from ebay. The seller wasn't quite the worst at packing packages. (A contender, a close second for sure.) That in conjunction with the shipping company obviously using it for a few frames of bowling practice left it in the condition I received it in.

I obviously didn't learn anything from the encounter. After I got all my money back free and clear, I go ahead and order a second printer from the same seller. (Say it ain't so.) The second printer was a 2015d, i.e., no networking feature.

Feast your eyes on the photos below. The only changes are the stickers, a little removable plastic cover where the Ethernet plug gains entry to the device, and the formatter board. That last one being most important detail.

To save you a minute or two, pry the side panel off from the rear along the vertical edge. You'll need a #2 Phillips from there.

Spritz Reading

I read about Spritz a short while ago. And I thought it was really cool. The problem is that Spritz Inc., the innovators behind Spritz weren't going to provide an implementation or SDK or whatever that I could use in the timeframe I was interested in. I assume that their implementation is better, so definitely check on them as they said implementations are coming and they will possibly be free to use.

In the mean time, I have made a JavaScript implementation that you are free to use or modify under the MIT license. I will pencil in that it is the "don't ask me" license as well. You can use it more or less in any way you see fit if you don't ask me anything about it. My slowly evolving code will be posted to Github. I also have it on CodePen and jsFiddle.

Also, for the Android crowd, be sure to check out Glance. It is a neat project which also has it's source code that can be found on Github