I have been doing nothing more than interviewing the last few weeks. The interviews have all been set-up by technology recruiters for the most part. I am finding that I am being sent to interview for jobs that are not under my skill-set for the most part. For instance I interviewed with a company who told me the position was a front end developer position. I could have completed the tasks required for this position however when I was on the call I was asked only one question about front-end development.

Have you ever used the Blueprint CSS Framework?

I had never heard of this nor had I heard of a CSS Framework. Really all CSS is are definitions so a framework struck me as odd. I was also interviewed by a Java Developer who said our backgrounds have nothing in common so he was not sure what to ask me for questions. This is when I went over my background and what I had been working on.

My question for my readers is this. Since most interviews are not asking technical questions, how can I probe for them to show the Interviewer that I have the knowledge necessary for the position? What are your thoughts and what have your experiences been?

Over the last few weeks I have had potential employers ask to see a code sample. I have not had any recent code that I could share and out of all the code samples I have written the one that got the most inquiries was the YellowPages Content Grabber. This code does not work any longer however. The code is using curl to scrape the HTML and extract the content from the site. I created this a long time ago when I was creating a “local” list of businesses which I could contact to offer my services.

Starting today I am going to completely revamp the code and also fix the regular expressions so that they will actually grab content. I am going to add a front-end to the code so that you do not have to alter code and run this manually from the browser by altering the query string in the URL.

I have started on this today and will be working on it heavily over the next few days until it is completed. At this point I have finalized the fetching of categories and storing them in the database. Now because this code is just for sample code which I will probably turn into an article on this site I am not going to use any special database abstraction layer. I am going to keep it simple and just use the php mysql_* functions.

Stay tuned for more information if you are interested in a complete rewrite of the code I linked to above.

The other day Steven released another video on the TMC website. This video is all about Key Value Coding and using Bindings in your interface. I finally got the chance to watch the rest of the video this morning and I have to say that it is a great starting place if you are looking into bindings. He goes into detail about KVC and explains how it all works. I do wish however that he went into more details on the magic of Bindings and how they work behind the scenes.

There are many developers (myself included) who have not yet adopted bindings because they see them as some magical functionality. At some point I will have to read deeper about bindings and actually learn how they work so that I can use them properly in my project. I do know how to implement a table view without using bindings and I have to say… Bindings looks *much* easier to do. It was a short process for getting the data into the table view in this video tutorial. When doing all of this without bindings you need to have all the table view methods in place to return the proper data.

This is another good release from TMC so be sure to check out the KVC and Bindings video tutorial if you want to start learning about KVC or Bindings

The other day my friend Steven from Thoughtful Tree Software released a new version of his Inspector Framework. This new version includes both the framework and an Interface Builder Plug-in which makes it extremely easy for you to integrate this into your own projects.

After reading his blog post and watching the video that he has created it looks like a very nice addition to any application that would require an inspector style window. I might have to look at using this in my project the TomTom POI Manager. I am not yet sure what I would use this for but surely I can find a reason to use it.

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My friend Steven just launched this site. It is a site based on WordPress that will host video tutorials on how to use Cocoa called TeachMeCocoa.com. Currently it has just launched and only has one video Files and Collections which talks about different collection types and how to use them. It also discusses how to save and read data to and from files.

Steven is doing something great for the community by offering up these tutorials for free however he will accept donations. He mentioned that he needs better equipment such as a nice headset that will cancel out the background noise as he has a few little one’s running around.

I have yet to watch the first video but I am going to do that now. A BIG thank you goes out to Steven as I am in the process of learning and I AM SURE that these videos will be very helpful for me. Watch your donation box Steven

While I was looking into the TomTom POI’s I started to wonder about incorporating Google Maps into a Cocoa Application that could handle creating custom POI sets for my device. Well it led me on a small detour but I figured out how to incorporate Google Maps into a Cocoa Application and explain how in my article titled Google Maps in a Cocoa Application. While I cannot say that I am an expert on Cocoa Development I have been learning a lot. With that said you may find issues with my code, I don’t doubt that. I just figured since I figured out how to do it I would share with everyone.

Today I asked a co-worker if they had an e-mail regular expression that they used all the time and the response I got was this
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=email+regex

While I have seen that site before it is designed and programmed much nicer and even made me laugh again.

In a hope to keep visitors on my site and decrease my 80% bounce rate I have installed a plug-in that will show related articles on every article detail page. If you want to see what I mean just click on an article to go to the detail page. The related articles are listed below the post information box.

Do you like this idea?

Over the last week I have been using MoneyWell for managing my income to setup a budget. I will be taking a few weeks or months to review the product on my end, taking notes of what I like and dislike.

Once I am done reviewing the application I plan to write a pretty lengthly review on the site. If you will be in the market for software like this keep checking back over the next month or so for my review.

What I can say right now at this moment is that I like the software so far. I am still early in the stage of entering transactions as they come up so I am sure I will run into some issues or even a feature that I really like. I was going to work with the beta version that they have out however I do not think it will work with my bank account because it is a Chase Pay Card and not a “typical” bank account.

Anyway stay tuned….

Many of us spend quite a bit of our days searching the web either using Google, Yahoo or some other search engine.  These search engines make billions of dollars every year through advertising in your search results.  Why not do something so that you can benefit too?  Scour.com is a search engine that will return results from Google, Yahoo and MSN.  I am sure that in the future they will expand what engines they include in the results.  The best part is there is a points reward system for your searching.  The more points you earn the more money you can make.  While it takes a while to build up the points to get a reward why not take the time since you do searching anyway?

So how do you earn points and just how many points does it take to get a reward?  Well everytime you run a search you will earn 1 point.  If you rate a search result positive or negative you will earn 2 points.  You can earn 3 points by leaving a comment about a particular result that you found to be good or bad.  The more points you rack up the better so the more active you are on Scour.com the better.  Now it does take 6,500 points just to get a $25 gift card but what other search engine would give you this?

Another good thing is that for every person you invite you earn 25% of the points they earn as well.  You will both collect points.  The more people you invite the faster your points will build up.  Be sure to go over to Scour.com and check out what they have to offer.  They have a nice UI which shows the rankings of the results on Google, Yahoo and MSN so you can always see where the results rank with the engines.  Since I always use Google I think I will be using Scour.com from now on.  I get the same results and can even be rewarded for doing my searches.  Why didn’t Google start this themselves?