Ryan Byrd's Tech Ramblings

The open position is for a senior technical engineer. Requirements include a bachelors in CS or IT and 5 years experience in enterprise development.

I got a resume today from an individual applying for the position, with the following:

Skills & Training:

• Hostage Negotiations Training
• Security Officer Basic Training Course
• Tactical Site Survey team member
• Massage Therapy Training
• Electrocardiograph Technician
• Survivalist & Emergency Preparedness Instructor
• Primitive Skills Specialist (bow making, pottery, tanning, weaving, etc )
• Published a fishing news letter and report that I emailed to over 200 people

Interests:

• Singing and song writing
• Studying plant, animal, survival, and medical reference materials
• Martial arts and weapons study
• Ancient weapons collecting
• Handicrafts (leatherworking, woodworking, metalworking)
• Writing poems and stories

I’ve been interviewing technical people for an open support engineer position these last few weeks. As a consequence, I’ve scanned through at least a hundred resumes, searching for good candidates. Today I found these two lines on a resume and I thought I’d include them below for your benefit:

(under Expertise/Certifications)

• Programming Languages: BASIC (similar to C++), PERL, C++, ObjectRexx
• Database web programming (WEBWIZARD)

Thoughts?

write a pseudocode function that implements the following:

• when passed in a number that is evenly divisible by 3, return “wiz”
• when passed in a number that is evenly divisible by 5, return “bang”
• when passed in a number that is evenly divisible by both 3 and 5, return “wiz bang”
• otherwise, return the number passed in

here are two solutions:

string function DumbWizBangCheck(int number)
{
	string output='';
	if (number%3==0) output='wiz';
	if (number%5==0) output='bang';
	if (number%5==0&&number%3==0) output='wiz bang';
	if (output=='') output=(string) number;
	return output;
}

string function BetterWizBangCheck(int number)
{
	if (number%15==0) return 'wiz bang';
	if (number%3==0) return 'wiz';
	if (number%5==0) return 'bang';
	return (string) number;
}

Maybe you’re thinking you’d like to cut stuff out of a big piece of plastic. or metal. or wood. You’d like a computer controlled milling machine. Well, you could go out a buy a ready-made version for a few thousand, but that would be ENTIRELY too easy. You’d like to build your own, wouldn’t you?

Part list:

• Two-Speed Variable Bench Mill/Drill Machine — $621.23 (harborfreight.com)
• Mini Mill CNC kit #4 — $559.00 USD (cncfusion.com)
• CNC 3 Axis Package with 425 oz-in motor and KL-4030 Bipolar Driver with 36V /8.8A Power Supply — $404.49 (kelinginc.net)
• Male-male 25 pin parallel cable
• Hookup wire, 12 gauge & 18 gauge (radioshack)
• Mach3 and LazyCam software — $150.00 (machsupport.com)
• Starter Kit, Mini Mill — $79.95 (littlemachineshop.com)
• Heat shrink tubing
• Plastic wire tubing
• Die grinder $20

Steps:

1. Install CNC kit onto Mill
2. Install/wire CNC 3 Axis package
3. Configure Mach3 software

Useful reading: http://littlemachineshop.com/info/MiniMillUsersGuide.pdf