Kevin’s Vent

My inlaws are moving and need to be near a Veterans’ Hospital. I tried to find which ones were nearby but couldn’t find an easy list. I ended up writing a script that took all of the addresses from the VA website and mapped them online at batchgeocode.com

Click on the image to browse the map yourself. The Blue pins are clinics and the Red pins are (usually) larger hospitals.

I just discovered that my blog was hacked. It kept redirecting users to Chinese websites. If you were sent there I apologize. I was freaked for a few minutes, but it was a pretty easy fix, I just had to update my theme.

I hate hackers.

There’s an opening at my work for a new position. If you know anyone that would be interested have them give me a call.

The opening is for a Support Engineer. Our software products target developers and they are our main clients. So there will not be questions like “How do I plug in my mouse”, the questions are more along the lines of “How do I specify my projects include paths in your program?” or “Why aren’t my overloaded functions resolving correctly?”. It is not strictly a programming position but the candidate will need a strong knowledge of programming concepts to interact with the customers more effectively.

The job consists primarily of working with our current and prospective customers via email, web and phone to answer questions, troubleshoot issues, and discuss requests; then working with our engineers to help prioritize the work. There will also be some Perl scripting involved, so Perl experience is a plus.

The applicant needs to be a good communicator, both verbally and in writing. They also need a good disposition. We are a small company that believes life is too short to work with folks that are hard to get along with, so if you are amiable, have a CS background, and enjoy working with people, we would love to hear from you. Contact me – resume@scitools.com or 627-2529×205. You can learn more about us at scitools.com

Update: The Position was actually filled the next day

This post is more work related than most. After using the open source project Console for several years, I’ve come to loathe the normal windows command line (cmd.exe). Dynamic windows resizing, tabs, alpha transparencies, automatic text selection, what’s not to love?

So when I got a new computer this month, it was one of the first programs I installed. What, it doesn’t work?!?! Some research found that there was a known bug with 64bit Vista, and there was a workaround, but it meant recompiling the entire application. Nobody wants to do that if they can help it – it means hunting down all the dependencies and  building it from scratch. Anyways with some help from this post I ended up getting it to compile and now I have Console again on my machine. Thanks, Thomas!

Since Console is licensed with the GPL, I though I’d post the modified binary here, you’ll still need the rest of the files from the release version (2.0 build 141), just replace your console.exe with this one. Let me know if you find any problems with it.