Overall, I'm happy with Optimum Online as my ISP, it is consistently rated as one of the faster internet providers, and I've never had much of a problem with them as far as that goes. We use Optimum Boost Plus, and consistently have a great low latency high bandwidth connection, 50Mbps down, 8Mbps up. I mean, that's not South Korea or Google Fiber speed, but it's pretty darn good for USA.
Their hosting and domain registration is terrible, however. I can't believe it is this complex. Boost comes with a free domain, and free hosting, so I felt that useful for private file storage. It's incredibly limited though. Last I checked, I had to pay extra for anything beyond static pages. 12GB of space, no Python or Ruby backend. I'm sorry, that's not web hosting, that's just public file serving using http. But whatever, it's free and I'm cheap. Where I made the mistake was in paying for extra domains through them, I figured it simple to have it all in one place. But the management service they used was awful. No nameserver, nothing. I owned a domain for a year that, couldn't actually be used. After spending a bit too much time on the phone (for me, any time on the phone is too much time on the phone), I got the answer that yeah, I could buy domains from them but they won't really do much, if I wanted to manage them it was all through email/phone. Im still unsure how that really works, I would have had to pay a fee to transfer it to someone to actually use it, a fee bigger than the original ownership fee.
Thankfully, the management portal for my domains was completely redone (no doubt they knew it was terrible) not too long ago, and it looks like I can actually use my domains. It's still slow to use though, and I'm waiting over 48 hours for domain forwarding to point to this blog.
The default 'microsite' at jstocher.net is laughable, currently. I mean, it may be free, but I *am* paying for it. It also seems impossible to transfer my free hosting from one domain I own with them to the other. That may be possible over the phone, I don't know. But I shouldn't have to make a phone call to do something trivial. So while I would ideally set up wordpress on my own hosting, I'll have to do with my domain pointing to my blogger. Any day now, that forwarding will come through.
Update: That was harder than it should be. A week after filing an issue, I get a call from level 1 support, it gets escalated to level 2 after a few days, and now domain forwarding on the managment website works. I got the vibe that I was the first customer to ever use the feature? Out of millions of subscribers, that strikes me as a bit odd.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Templates can be Awesome
Scratch that. My revised opinion on the matter of using a template is that you simply ought do your homework and find the right tool for the job. The right tool for my job is moderncv. Really clean, classic LaTeX resume template with just the right amount of little flourishes. The 'classic' theme seems modern without being too fancy, it seems right for a tech position.
It's not fully fleshed out, the documentation is sparse, but easy enough to understand when you run through some examples. Certain commands expect a certain # of arguments and bark if they don't get it.
\cventry expects 6 fields, and most of mine are just empty {} fields to get it working, I put most data in the last field separated by linebreaks.
\cvcomputer expects 4 fields for two tech categories, so I use multiple entries to break things into 6 tech categories
But otherwise, I'm happy with this package, at least until I need my resume to do something that it cannot, and then I'll have to redo everything over again.
It's not fully fleshed out, the documentation is sparse, but easy enough to understand when you run through some examples. Certain commands expect a certain # of arguments and bark if they don't get it.
\cventry expects 6 fields, and most of mine are just empty {} fields to get it working, I put most data in the last field separated by linebreaks.
\cvcomputer expects 4 fields for two tech categories, so I use multiple entries to break things into 6 tech categories
But otherwise, I'm happy with this package, at least until I need my resume to do something that it cannot, and then I'll have to redo everything over again.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Frustrations with Templates
So after a fun excursion working in an industry outside of my core competencies, it's become increasingly clear that I need a career shift. I'll write on that more shortly. I'm a trained software engineer, it's time I act as one.
So the first step in that dreaded job finding process is to brush up the resume, and I had some brushing to do. It's been clear to me for a while that having a resume in LaTeX could be quite useful, and made easy to track with git to boot. Looking around, it seems that many people seem to recommend a popular resume class from RPI, (res.cls). As I soon discovered, it has some problems. Firstly, it isn't in Tex Live, due to some licensing issues surrounding it. Easy enough to acquire via google, but it does mean that it isn't a package that one can expect all the time. It's also a bit dated I fear... the class doesn't allow a user to define an email address, and the general address definition allows for at most 3 lines. You can define a second address and get an extra 3 lines of contact info, but you are still limited in its formatting. In the modern resume era where a link to your github or whatnot is commonplace, this just doesn't cut it.
After wasting an hour trying to modify the class to let a user try to easily define an email address separately, and let the user define where it will go, I decided that this was folly. I've been here before. We've all been here before, you find a bit of a template for a document, or some default code framework or package. 'res.cls' is pretty easy to get off and running with making a somewhat decent resume quickly. Want to enhance it somewhat? It's just not worth spending the time becoming a master of someone else's LaTeX, and keeping this additional dependency around with me so long as I want a functioning resume.
So it's back to refreshing my knowledge of Tex itself, I wrote a number of reports using it back in uni. It's honestly simple enough, should have done that from the start.
So the first step in that dreaded job finding process is to brush up the resume, and I had some brushing to do. It's been clear to me for a while that having a resume in LaTeX could be quite useful, and made easy to track with git to boot. Looking around, it seems that many people seem to recommend a popular resume class from RPI, (res.cls). As I soon discovered, it has some problems. Firstly, it isn't in Tex Live, due to some licensing issues surrounding it. Easy enough to acquire via google, but it does mean that it isn't a package that one can expect all the time. It's also a bit dated I fear... the class doesn't allow a user to define an email address, and the general address definition allows for at most 3 lines. You can define a second address and get an extra 3 lines of contact info, but you are still limited in its formatting. In the modern resume era where a link to your github or whatnot is commonplace, this just doesn't cut it.
After wasting an hour trying to modify the class to let a user try to easily define an email address separately, and let the user define where it will go, I decided that this was folly. I've been here before. We've all been here before, you find a bit of a template for a document, or some default code framework or package. 'res.cls' is pretty easy to get off and running with making a somewhat decent resume quickly. Want to enhance it somewhat? It's just not worth spending the time becoming a master of someone else's LaTeX, and keeping this additional dependency around with me so long as I want a functioning resume.
So it's back to refreshing my knowledge of Tex itself, I wrote a number of reports using it back in uni. It's honestly simple enough, should have done that from the start.
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