For the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell discusses various indicators of how well interviews actually work for screening job candidates (in a phrase: not very well). The discussion of how we make our decision about someone in the first 2 seconds after seeing them and then use our future interactions with them to either reinforce our initial reaction or forgive as an aberration is particularly telling.

Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, discusses his thoughts on interviewing, include:

• “In an interview you can tell if a person is a pleasant conversationalist, and you can give some technical questions to rule out the truly inept, but beyond that you might as well be rolling dice.”
• “I’d like to note that in an all-male work environment hiring an attractive female is probably good for morale.”
• “Even though work history doesn’t correlate with job performance, being a lying sack of shit almost certainly does.”

Fun. : )

Kids these days have it so easy. They expect to do a quick search and bam! the solution is revealed. Like this post from Raymond Chen where he describes the various memory allocators exposed by the shell and COM and how they’re related. When I was a boy, we had to figure these kinds of things out! And we liked it! : )

P.S. I really did used to walk to school in 3 feet of snow up hill, both ways. I didn’t like that at all…

Ashvil DCosta, a software professional in Bangalore writing a book on outsourcing software product development, posts his ideas about how Longhorn, particularly WinFS, will change the way we think about and develop applications.

“The Longhorn speech API offers baked-in functionality for voice commands inside the operating system (OS). This is a giant leap forward in the functionality provided by an OS. With the addition of an alternate user interface, products in the future may have a much different mode of interaction than currently used. Through the course of this article, the basics of voice input and output will be shown, as well as the construction of grammar, and how to act on recognition.”

[via Paul Lamere]

Rob Chandler, a Microsoft Help MVP, has posted a look at where he sees User Assistance heading in Longhorn, both in the UI and in the new help system. I see Longhorn as an opportunity to crank user experience up a notch in every way and user assistance is an important part of that.

I’m a big cmd.exe user and was a big Korn Shell user before that, so command shells are an important part of my life and thus, I’m skeptical of new ones. However, I’ve been drooling over MSH (the Microsoft Shell — codename Monad) ever since I first saw it. In fact, when I saw Karsten’s post on getting the Monad bits for Windows XP and 2003, I was much excited. Then, I saw the Fundamentals Pillar topic on The .NET Show, which featured Jeffrey Snover (The Father of Monad) in the back half of the show and I was hooked. The way he told the Monad story motivated me to register for the public beta of Monad via Karsten’s instructions and wait impatiently over the weekend to be awarded permissions to download the bits.

Which I promptly installed on the WinHEC build of Longhorn (build 4074), even though it’s only supported for Windows XP and Windows 2003.

As it turns out, Longhorn comes with an earlier preview of Monad, but it’s much older than the latest Monad drop. So, I installed the latest Monad on the latest Longhorn, hoping that it would work and that I could follow along with my new hero Jeffrey.

And follow along I did, because not only did the latest Monad bits install and run just peachy under Longhorn, but the included Getting Started docs gave me hours of fun! With the functionality that Monad provides, I’m going to have a hard time going back to anything else.

If you’re a command-line person, I recommend getting on the Monad beta, taking it for a spin and letting those guys if there’s anything you don’t like (for example, I miss the “start” command, but I think I’ll go build it…).

Carl Franklin posts a fun segment from Michael Feldman's Whad'ya Know? radio program where 32-bit to 16-bit thunking is discussed.