Warren Seen

It’s funny how things work out. When I made the initial version of hashjobs live back in January, I mentioned that I wasn’t really sure how or if I could make anything from it. As luck would have it, it turns out that I managed to catch the “post jobs on Twitter” trend in its infancy.

Almost immediately I started getting offers to buy the domain name. Each inquiry I got, I would knock back as I have always had plans as to what I wanted to work on for future versions of the site. Most of these seemed like tire-kickers who I never heard from again.

But there was one guy who kept coming back asking about the site. Early last month, he forwarded a very specific offer via a 3rd party to me that made me realise he was VERY serious about acquiring HashJobs. After a bit of back and forth negotiating, and consideration of what I could make from the site in the next 12-18 months if I had a serious go at it, I happily accepted his offer.

So I’m pleased to announce that as of this morning, the final installment of our transaction has cleared, and Jason Davis of recruitingblogs.com is the new owner of HashJobs. I’ve had a sneak peek at Jason’s plans for the site and I think he is going to do it far more justice than I could have, given his position in the online recruiting community. I wish him all the best.

(As a side note, I am amazed how quickly incoming wire transfers clear, compared to transfers between local banks!)

As for my plans, well at least I’ve filled a GFC-induced hole in my previous 6 months cashflow. People who I’ve told about this always ask me, “Can yo do the same again in a different field?” The answer is, “Probably not, it was more luck than good management.”

I think I’ll just start another side project (I have a few ideas) and see where the wind takes me…

I’ve just pushed the initial version of Hash#Jobs live. The site is a quick and dirty twitter filter to pull out all the job-related tweets from the twitter stream.

from the about page:

Hash#Jobs aggregates tweets that contain the following tags from twitter:
#job, #jobpost, #NAJ, #HAJ, #employment, #recruiting, #hiring
If you want your tweet to appear here, simply add one of those tags.

Some day, in the future, Hash#Jobs might be smarter, through the wonders of bayesian classifiers and other cool things like text clustering. No promises.

I built Hash#Jobs initially for myself, since I’m looking for new gigs, but figured, what the hell, for $12 bucks worth of domain registration, I might as well share it with the world. If one person gets a job out of it then it will have been worthwhile. It was also a fun excuse to play with Sinatra, I think someone said it’s like camping, but without the magic mushrooms. I’d have to agree…

I haven’t considered whether I could or should make money off something like this… I doubt I’d turn over more than the cost of the DNS or hosting, so not sure if it’s worth the effort.

I’d like to improve the system over the coming days to include clustering, as re-tweets show up and can very quickly fill a single page with repetitive information. I’m also toying with the idea of a Bayesian classifier to try and weed out what is and isn’t a genuine job post. It remains to be seen if 140 chars will be enough to get a meaningful result out of a Bayesian tool.

So anyway, there you have it, if you find it useful, feel free to drop me a comment and let me know. Also, please pass it on to someone who’s looking for a job if you think they can use it.

I’ve forked the Rails auto_complete plugin to add support for the following usage:

<% form_for(@foo) do |f| %>
  <%= f.text_field_with_auto_complete :bar %>
<% end %>

This fork also supports nested fields_for calls:

<% form_for(@foo) do |f| %>
  <% f.fields_for(@foo.baz) do |baz_f| %>
    <%= baz_f.text_field_with_auto_complete :quux %>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

You can find my fork on Github, here.

Sick of economic turmoil? Do something drastic about it!

Coincidence is a funny thing. I’ve just finished reading Richard Florida’s Flight of the Creative Class, and it’s scary how timely this book is right now. The US is coming to the climax of an election year where (AGAIN!) the politics of class is playing a central role. Meanwhile, their economy has seen fit to start collapsing, which has a knock-on effect being felt in the rest of the world.

In the book, Florida talks about what the US can do to secure its future as an economic leader, and where it currently fails in retaining members of what he calls the “creative class” (a superset of the more well known knowledge workers).

Opportunities
As an Australian, I had a tendency whilst reading the book to look at the opportunities where Florida perceives “threats” to the US. In particular, I noticed that for a country of 20-odd million, we seemed to rate consistently well on many of Florida’s criteria for supporting the creative class. I suspect that a lot of our Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s policies are driven by this kind of research (he is, after all, an arch-policy wonk), he loves to waffle on about the need for developing Human Capital, and the correlation of things like literacy improvements to GDP growth.

So, assuming that we’re heading in the right direction here, and again, assuming that Florida is right and the US isn’t, now seems to me to be the perfect time to aggressively recruit US citizens to move on out here to the land of Oz.

Reason the First – Economy
While our economy isn’t bullet-proof, we proved 10 years or so ago during the Asian Financial Crisis that we are well placed to weather downturns compared to some of our trading partners. In networking terms, our economy is “dual-homed” on both Wall St, and China. The resource boom has seen a lot of capital flowing from China into Australia, and while the Chinese economy may be momentarily slowed by what’s happening now, I think it’s going to recover a lot faster than the US and pull us along with it.

Reason the Second – Florida’s Three T’s, Talent, Technology, Tolerance – We have it
At the risk of sounding like a bad TV show, Australia’s got Talent. We’ve got some world leading researchers in biotechnology, clean renewable energy and other high tech growth industries. Australia is becoming a hotspot for international students, a factor that Florida identified as playing a part in increasing the quality and depth of the talent pool.

In terms of technology, we compare favorably with the US in terms of broadband market penetration, speed, etc. Major cities like Sydney and Melbourne have nearly ubiquitous 3G cellular coverage (soon to be 21Mbps in the case of Telstra), and while the pricing may not be spectacular, it’s heading in the right direction. We’re of course, also on the doorstep of SE Asia, home to the world’s semiconductor manufacturing industry.

Tolerance is Florida’s third T, and I have to say I think we do pretty well here too. The fundamentalist right doesn’t have its hooks deep into our political system and I feel fairly confident in saying that in terms of social equality, many Australians just don’t care about what people do in the privacy of their own homes these days.

Reason the Third – lifestyle
So maybe I’m a tad biased here, but compared to the European nations listed in Florida’s book that match or exceed Australia in terms of the creativity index, Australia is going to produce the least culture shock for a US “refugee” moving here. I mean, most of what’s on TV comes from the US, most of the music you’ll hear played on local radio comes from the US, fast food franchises, the list goes on.

The climate is milder too, we think snow should stay where it belongs – on mountains and not on the streets where it’s just frankly in the way. As a bonus, if you move here now, you’ll get two summers in 12 months, how great is that?

This concludes our presentation…
OK, so you might think I’m, to use a local expression, pushing shit uphill, trying to convince Americans to move halfway around the world in the middle of an economic downturn. I certainly do. But while the premise of this post is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, maybe it will serve as a reminder that if you’re not considering doing something drastic, then things probably ain’t as bad as you think?

Repost of a comment submitted to this piece on Business Spectator, in case it gets edited or does’t end up being posted at all.

Hackles raised, set phasers to KILL.

You had me nodding my head until the last paragraph, what a ridiculous conclusion! The argument that all the Internet is used for is piracy and porn has echoes of Richard Alston, our former comms minister who was illustriously crowned the “world’s biggest luddite” for making a similar assertion.

First, I want to cover off this porn argument: basically, you’re making a moral judgment here – the vast majority of porn on the internet, whilst tasteless and lacking in artistic merit, is actually legally created by consenting adults in jurisdictions in which it is legal to operate. Raising this as being in anyway relevant to the FTTN debate is a straw man argument designed to tug at conservative heartstrings.

Secondly, piracy: Where did you source the figure of 60%? Has it been independently verified? Because it smells funny to me. If you really have concrete evidence that all of this data is illegal, then why is there not an enormous backlog of court cases prosecuting these alleged pirates?

I would submit it’s because “60%” is a made up figure promulgated by an industry group such as the RIAA or MPAA in the US, who are trying to tar many legitimate users of software distribution systems such as bittorrent, as pirates.

The fact is that many of these groups are threatened by the internet, not because of piracy, but because the participatory nature that high-speed networking enables means that the existing music/motion picture/television industrial-complex is currently being smashed apart.

Consumers, tired of being treated like the personal pocket book of these industries in exchange for pitiful offerings are becoming producers of content, cutting out the fat middle-men and engaging their audiences in new media ventures that are far more relevant, personal and engaging than anything the TV or motion picture houses have ever produced.

The “mainstream media” is dying, they just don’t know it yet.

Please, explain to me why, in 2008, you cannot design a washing machine that has a fail-safe mode of operation when filling?

Yes Simpson, I’m looking at you and your alleged “Ezi-Sensor” upright washing machine that we bought 3 weeks ago, which has proceeded to flood once, and attempted to overfill a further 2 times – luckily I was there to stop it. Since you know, walking across a tiled floor with standing water on it to operate an electrical device isn’t on the list of things I do for kicks.

Seriously, how much would it cost to add a cutoff to the solenoids if, you know, water is gushing out of the bowl and onto the floor? I would have thought that would indicate a non-standard mode of operation!

It’s not rocket science. It’s not even software engineering. It doesn’t even require any electronics!

FFS.

Dear Ubuntu. Please don’t go blacklisting the prism54 driver on me again? kthx!

For some reason, the v1 of this card (aka the Made in Taiwan version) doesn’t seem to work with the new p54 drivers…

For reference, in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist change this:

# replaced by p54pci
blacklist prism54


to this:


# replaced by p54pci
#blacklist prism54
blacklist p54common
blacklist p54pci
blacklist p54usb


I mentioned Morfik a while back, the little Tassie company that was taking on Google with a number of patents.

Today they were featured on Qik, interviewed by Scoble himself. Check it out.

Telecommunications in Tasmania pretty much sucks. It’s expensive, choice is limited and we’re at the mercy of a certain incumbent with monopoly on interstate connectivity. The state government is dragging its feet and has been for the last 5 years, wasting our money in the process.
We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more.

It’s Digital Tasmania. Come, join us… *

* Void where prohibited. No purchase required to enter. 5c refundable deposit in SA.