So, I decided to release it myself. This way, I can directly speak to torrenters and ask that if they like the DVD, to tell me why they didn’t buy it. I guaranteed them that I would never ever personally go after them for copyright infringement, and in fact, to please spread it far and wide. I offered the steepest discount codes I could in the torrent so that if people DO want to buy it but price is a bar, I get that information too. Here’s the letter:

_______________________________________________________________________

TECHINTERVIEWHELP.COM

Hi!

My name is Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack, and if you’re reading this now, it’s because I haven’t created the right kind of value to get you to buy my DVD and booklet online instead of downloading it from Isohunt or Pirate Bay or Demonoid or wherever.

You can find my DVD/booklet product at techinterviewhelp.com. I made this video to help women get jobs in technical fields; women are TERRIBLE at negotiating with and interviewing for men. I want to show the ladies how to communicate well with their future bosses, and I think that as a senior coder and experienced development manager that I have a lot to offer them.

I had a lot of fun and a lot of pain making this video. It’s been several months since the day I shot this video, since it takes quite a while to write a good booklet and have editing done. I spent over $1600 of my own money just on the video shoot; I paid the folks you see in the credits to help me make a great product. We worked on that day for 16 hours straight to get me made up (high definition powder itches fiercely, people), get the video shot with retakes and scene changes, and lighting changes. I brought in some of my good friends and a few people I hadn’t met before to help me. Then, I spent several months getting the booklet written, the video edited with music, and marketing campaigns developed. I do my own web development; techinterviewhelp.com is all me including backend work and analytics on the site.

Between you and me, there’s a solid reason I know where to post this DVD and booklet packet online. I know where the torrents live, because I’ve been there a time or two myself

I like to think that I contribute to authors and content creators as directly as possible. I have a moral code that doesn’t let me go jack Wil Wheaton’s books from Demonoid, because he directly publishes them and gets paid directly. I donate directly to Hijinks Ensue; that’s a badass web comic and Joel Watson makes me laugh every day. I get a little fuzzier on whether I think that giant studios who have already paid off the talent who made their movies should continue to get paid years later through residual royalties, even though all the people who worked hard on their product are long since gone. I really get cranky when operas that were written by Mozart and recorded fifty years ago by the London Symphony Orchestra still cost $200 because someone bought the back catalog.

I am personally releasing this DVD and booklet to the torrent sites. I have a whole new perspective on my work being used and enjoyed without any compensation coming my way, but I also know that it’s better to be heard than ignored. I think that the people who feel the way I do about content creators will pay for this DVD and booklet, knowing that I’ve done the best I can to make a great product to help women get technical jobs. I think that there are people out there who would never pay anyway for my work, and though I disagree with you, I still want you to hear what I have to say.

Finally, as your reward for reading this, I want you to know that I will never, ever personally pursue anyone who torrents this (though I’ll ask you to keep these files intact, including this message). In fact, I am going to occasionally offer coupon codes for you. Right now, you can go use the code “LIVEFREEORDIE” on my site to get a 60% discount on my DVD set. I’ll release 20 or so of these codes at a time; I can’t afford to cut more than that off the price, or it doesn’t pay me to produce and ship the materials.

I want to know why you didn’t buy this DVD and booklet; please go to my site and give me some comments. You can consider that your payment if you cannot help me out any other way. Or, tweet or Facebook me. That helps me…not as much as cash, but you would be giving me a hand.

https://twitter.com/#!/techinthelp Hashtag: #TechIntHelp
https://www.facebook.com/technicalwomen

I look forward to hearing from you, and I wish you the best of luck in your interviews!

Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack
http://tarahwheeler.com
http://thecowgirlcoder.com

TECHINTERVIEWHELP.COM

__________________________________________________________-

It’s more important for women to hear what I have to say than it is for me to go after people who can turn into my fans when I publish future books and study materials.

• Apt-get ‘kcron’.
• Open Task Scheduler and set the following bash script to run every five minutes:

#!/bin/bash
J=`wget http://checkip.dyndns.org/ -qO - | grep -Eo '\<[[:digit:]]{1,3}(\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}){3}\>'`
K=`date`
echo "$J $K" >> ../Dropbox/ANYDIRECTORYYOUCHOOSE/output.txt

• Ensure the script is executable, and test it in a shell.

Now, you can always see what your home computer’s IP address is in any browser window; I use this in case there are issues with SSHing into my home box.

We run a very special, niche service for Northwest small businesses and charities. Specifically, we help very small businesses (even one-man shops) look very big on the web. Sometimes, you need to appear to be a much larger company than you are in order to credibly get business and make the contacts you need. Often you need people to talk about you on social media services and have that be readily apparent to casual visitors to your site.

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A week ago, I rewatched The Dark Knight with two of my gaming buddies, both of whom are skilled developers. While we loved the movie, popcorn was thrown when Christian Bale rasped that a certain database was null-key encrypted. NKE is total fiction. It turns “Hello World” into “Hello World”, in case you were wondering. At least in the movies, they bother to invent some techno-jargon.

Now for the painful admission: I watch Gossip Girl. It is a vapid soap opera that I positively adore, and part of the major season story arc is the loss of control over the Gossip Girl website by the original (anonymous) owner, voiced by Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars fame. [See? I have legitimate geeky reasons for watching GG!] Any developer can see that there’s some sort of CMS that is used to post information; it’s likely the TV equivalent of WordPress. In a moment of brainmeat-deadness, Serena is IMed by Gossip Girl, and asked to return “the password to my site.”

Now, this is totally imbecilic on several fronts. First, if you’re the person who set up the CMS, you have administrator rights on an account that is different than your posting account. All GG would have to do is login using the alternate CMS admin account and change the password herself. Second, if she’s lost the admin account, she can tunnel to the server and change the authentication for any account through either the MySQL (or whatever DB) admin prompt or PHPMyAdmin if you’re as lazy as me. Third, if she’s the one who set up the site, all she has to do is nuke the site at the server level after copying or exporting the DB and template files, and rebuild it (or talk to the hosting company). Fourth, and the worst-case scenario, if her hosting account or cloud server itself has been hacked, she can simply build another server and redirect the DNS to that location. In none of these cases does she ever lose control of the URL itself.

I am irritated here because I see Gossip Girl as a show that is primarily targeted to women and young people; I know I’m stirring up a tempest in a teapot, but I would like to see the same level of effort put in to creating fake technobabble in shows directed at young women as when they’re pointed towards a male demographic. I guess that may be unreasonable, but the truth is that we all absorb messages from pop culture, and the lack of care taken in shows like these betray a feeling amongst the show writers that no femmes would notice the difference anyway.

Well, I did. So there.

PS: To Gossip Girl; I can hook a sister up with RSA-encryption and a 4096-bit key. That would keep nosy socialites out of your site. Also, more Bass, please.

XOXO, Cowgirl Coder.

I use Rackspace as my cloud service; I was moving a few sites from one server using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) to a new one using 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot). I hit a few issues, so I thought I’d tell you how to export a WordPress site in its entirety and move it between two LAMP servers.

1. Open a file manager on your local machine, and open both remote locations.
2. Copy the root and all files of the site to your new server in the same location.
3. Copy the sites-available virtual host file from /etc/apache2/sites-available/ directory to the same location on your new server.
4. Create the symbolic link in sites-enabled by changing into /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ and using this command: “sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/yourhostfile yourhostfile”.
5. Open PHPMyAdmin for your old server in a browser window. Login, and open the database for the site you want to move.
6. Go to the Export tab. Assuming you’re using UTF-8 encoding (and that’s a very safe bet), all you have to do is ensure that the Add DROP TABLE / VIEW / PROCEDURE / FUNCTION / EVENT box is checked under Structure, and that all options are highlighted in the Export box. Export the uncompressed database and save to a convenient location.
7. Open PHPMyAdmin in your new server, login, and create a new database with the same name as the one you’re importing.
8. Import the database you exported.
9. Create a user on that database with the same name and password.
10. Edit the DNS zone file for your site to point to the new IP address for your new server.
11. SSH into your server, and use this command: “sudo service apache2 restart”.

Hit Ctrl+F5 once you think the DNS records will have propagated, and ensure it worked.

I listened with pleasure to the Superman theme, to some music from Avatar, and heard some great stuff from Battlestar Galactica. All excellent shows.

Then, after a long day of dealing with the unfairness of life, I heard Jonathan Frakes conduct the original Alexander Courage theme to Star Trek, and I burst into tears.

Life isn’t fair, and we know it. People die of misunderstandings based around the color of their skin, the garments they’re wearing, the message they’re sending. In the name of business, we fail to promote hard working people because their skin color or gender or sexual preferences “might not contribute to team fit and cohesiveness.” Those born to privilege misuse it while those born to poverty rage against the machine that grinds them.

But there is still hope, as Arwen likes to breathe elfinly at us. In a country with the most volunteers in the world by far (56% of us volunteer regularly, and we volunteer 3.5 hours a week on average), we have a nation of people who are generally aware of social discord and inequality, and work genuinely to improve ourselves and our neighbors. Change will come from here, and it will come from our example, both good and bad.

Simply seeing a world on screen where a person’s competence isn’t judged by the number of probosces and ocular implants they may possess–much less anything so irrelevant as skin color and secondary sexual characteristics–gives us hope. In that symphony audience of bluehairs, I may have been the only person who grew up in the world that Star Trek improved upon by its existence.

Not only does Star Trek itself inspire us, but the actors who participated in it serve as fine examples of people and artists. Frakes is an excellent musician as anyone who’s heard him play the trombone knows. Wil Wheaton‘s volunteer work for Child’s Play and mentorship to the gamer community make him a genuinely decent human as well as a terribly funny writer. John DeLancie is an innovative opera director, and I don’t need to tell you about Sir Patrick Stewart’s and Robert Picardo’s acting chops both on- and off-stage. George Takei may be the best example of all; his perpetually humorous messages of tolerance to the fan community and his leadership in social media communications for LGBT teens add to all our lives. I am so Takei for him. Plus, that brokering of Star Peace is one of the most priceless moments in sci-fi fandom history.

**** Trek, **** Wars, Battle**** Galactica, ****blazers, **** Cops, ****gate. It doesn’t matter which Star show you love the best; they all show us something about our future. I choose to believe that some serve as a warning, and some serve as a goal. I want to live in a world where universal ethics about the value and quality of human life trump individual morality while still respecting it. I want to be evaluated on my performance, not my appearance. Finally, I want to live in a world where great achievement is rewarded not with security, but with even greater responsibility.  Sign me up for the world where we live long and prosper.

PS: It’s The Next Generation, in case you were wondering. Argue if you want, but I will stomp on you.

I’ll start by saying I got my San Diego Comic-Con badges just fine. Two 4-day with preview night badges successfully purchased for myself and my husband…but it nearly didn’t happen, and it certainly didn’t happen because I followed instructions.

You may all remember the giant cluster that was last year’s registration process. Comic-Con spent an extra five months trying to fix their problems concerning server balancing and site overload. They set up a system using preregistration for member IDs that had to be verified in advance. I applaud the effort; it seems that with a few hitches, this year went much better than last. There were two serious issues, however.

In a predictable moment, the link included in the Comic-Con registration email (http://www.comic-con.org/cci/badge_sales.php, for all of you who maniacally clicked it hundreds of time) went down due to tracking on the URL from the email. Their tracking and analytics system was their bottleneck. As a dev, I had some advantage here, since I expected that to happen and had already set up two machines in front of me with two different browsers and the link pasted into the address bar ready to hit ‘enter’. I popped in at #1906 in line on my main box in FF and #3222 on my netbook in Chrome.

Turns out that in a moment of epic (pun intended, as Epic Registration is the in-use system) failure, San Diego Comic-Con Member IDs created by people with spaces or punctuation in their names were utterly useless. In the badge registration email, I was told to register with the last name of VLACK, though my last name is Wheeler Van Vlack. After VLACK didn’t work, I tried WHEELER VAN VLACK and was deeply fortunate that it worked. Chelsey St. Juniors has a space and period in her last name, and missed out on her badges entirely, since the information in her badge registration email was incorrect.

Others complaining on Facebook say that people with a space in their last names have not received confirmation emails. One woman’s comment (Lisa Wong Rodriguez, if I remember correctly) concerning her Member ID and last name not working has been deleted.

People on the Comic-Con International’s Facebook page who are commenting on this issue are being deleted, or so they claim. In a bit of investigative journalism, I’ve posted a comment there as well and already received a response. Far from deleting my comment, Comic-Con has acknowledged that they screwed up people with multiple last names. Still, note Tina’s comment at the bottom.

I want to congratulate Comic-Con for acknowledging their fault, but really–how many men have two last names like these women do? I’ll pay Comic-Con the compliment of assuming there were no talented female devs or DBAs available to do a quick smoke test for stupid.

__________________________________

QUICK UPDATE:

Comic-Con has responded to my post on Facebook, and they say that the system was broken for all people who had strange last names with any spaces or punctuation. I absolutely agree: their system was broken. They assert that because men sometimes have spaces and punctuation in their last names (Sr., Jr., etc), that they were affected too; I heartily concur. I never said that this was a deliberate attempt to keep women out of Comic-Con; what I said was that hiring a woman to look over the system might have prevented this problem. Women were, I think, disproportionately affected by this error–and I’m open to refutation on this point. I think that, proportionately, there were more women with multiple or hyphenated last names who didn’t get their badges than men who have a Sr. or Jr. tacked-on.

Good recruiters look for people to fit a position, and pursue them individually. I’ve mentioned before that my name and resume pop on Google search results when a recruiter is looking for a senior web architect or development manager in the Seattle area. The best experiences I have ever had with recruiters come from these approaches, and they are instantly distinguishable from the usual.

One recruiter, Shannon Anderson from NuWest Group out of Bellevue, personifies this approach. She’s professional, spectacular at her job, and rarely presents more than a single candidate for a job. She matches people perfectly, and as a result, she gets a near perfect return on her investment and an ongoing relationship. It’s more like talking to a very friendly and competent matchmaker, and I’d encourage anyone to work with her or someone like her.

She makes personal connections, and takes her time getting to know her candidates.

Other great recruiters have a large database of positions, and instead of matching a candidate to a job, they match a job to a great candidate. Tara Gowland runs Startup Recroot, a Seattle-based firm, and her approach is to find spectacular and competent people, and try to pair them with positions that she’ll seek out. Her approach to me was diffident, even shy, which was a refreshing change from the normal TRUMPETS BLARING approach.

Now, while I can recommend each of these firms, and most specifically these two recruiters, I can’t tell you about the positions for which I was either hired or interviewed, since that breaks some confidentiality agreements. However, if you find recruiters like these ladies, I heartily recommend that you not only work with them, but that you give them all the social media and blogging help you can. Firms that are ethical, helpful, and who have recruiters with personal and competent approaches are few and far between.

Find these firms, and work with them. They’re full disclosure, honest, and they’re great at what they do. Please feel free to leave other firms that you’ve been happy to work with in the comments.

Recruiting must be the most outsourced, underfunded, middleman-heavy profession there is. There are several frustrations that go along with being heavily recruited by people who do not know or care whether you fit a given job description, and they range from the merely careless and time-profligate to the truly unethical.

(1) CARELESS: Recruiters who mass email everyone on CareerFinder and Monster with the word “Ruby” in their profile for an Austin, Texas-based junior web developer 3-month contract gig specializing in Ruby on Rails.

I am not a Ruby developer, I will not move to Austin, Texas, especially for a three month contract, and I’m not a junior ANYTHING. I have some skills with Ruby, meaning that I can install the necessary scripts, edit them, run them to operate a site, and I know enough to know when I need to call a specialist. This makes me able to list Ruby as a general low-level skill on my resume, but does not in any way qualify me for a development job on a site that solely uses Ruby for an environment. However, that keyword hits big with recruiters, and I get probably 15 emails a day from recruiters trying to get me to take a job for which I am unqualified and in a location to which I would not move. A simple glance at my resume with the words “Senior Development Manager and Web Architect” emblazoned across the top and a brief scan of my skillset tells anyone I am a skilled coder who has been moved up the chain to management, and would likely help those recruiters to target me far more efficiently.

(2) CARELESS: Recruiters who speak such poor English that their emails are unreadable–and that sometimes includes native English speakers.

I am glad that you’re “pleased for making time and hoping you will be helping me networking to fill VERY IMPORTANT positino immediatly in NEW YORKCITY as JAVA DEVELOPAR” [not a joke; I seem to be perpetually emailed by the recruiter version of Paul Christoforo], but I don’t need it filling my day. At the very minimum, have your job posts reviewed for content and grammar before sending them to thousands of developers.

(3) UNETHICAL: Recruiters who are paid by the emails they generate, not by the positions they fill.

This is a common problem among firms that have outsourced to the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia…in fact, name your popular outsourcing destination in Asia, and you’ll find these recruiters, who are paid to send out as many emails as possible. They’re no better than spam, but because they’re targeted to you and have your email address, you can’t filter them the way you would filter a Cialis or pr0n ad.

(4) CARELESS: Recruiters who have not paid attention to your preferred location–and don’t care.

I will not take a job in South Dakota; I’m sorry. I’ve lived in several midwest states and think that South Dakota is quite eerily beautiful. I will not be transferring my life, my career, and my love of well-produced opera to Sioux Falls any time soon.

(5) UNETHICAL: Recruiters who expect you to do their job for them.

My final post will be the most egregious example I’ve found, combined with a horrific example of #6. The most common variety is this:

——————————————————————————————-
To better represent you, kindly fill out the skills inventory below. Thank you

1) Agile/Scrum (Beginner/Intermediate/Expert) (Years of experience/Date Last used)
2) Software Development Proj Mgmt (Beginner/Intermediate/Expert) (Years of experience/Date Last used)
3) Web-Based Application architecture knowledge (Beginner/Intermediate/Expert) (Years of experience/Date Last used)
4) Test Driven Development / XP (Beginner/Intermediate/Expert) (Years of experience/Date Last used)
5) Java development principals (Beginner/Intermediate/Expert) (Years of experience/Date Last used)
6) Release Management (Beginner/Intermediate/Expert) (Years of experience/Date Last used)

——————————————————————————————-

Remember that I get about 50 or so of these emails per day; this person doesn’t even want to read my resume, and instead wants me to fill out his paperwork for him. Note: this was for a position in California, making it irrelevant anyway.

(6) UNETHICAL: Recruiters who expect you to prep and interview with no information about the company.

This is the worst one. How can I know if I want to take a position if I’m not told: (1) what the salary will be, (2) where the company is physically located, (3) what benefits are available, and (4) to whom I would be reporting? This is just another version of wasting my time. I don’t talk anymore to recruiters who are secretive; they are occasionally fronts for disreputable companies who want a chance to sell you before you find out what their online reputation looks like.

Next, the traits of successful recruiters.