Donner’s Daily Dose of Drama

A new 2006 law shifts responsibility for having snow tires on the car entirely to the operator. Most rental car companies do not equip their cars with snow tires by default. Extra charges of up to €15/day apply. If you do not specifically ask for snow tires before you pay for the rental, you will be in a difficult position to negotiate a fair price.
If you do not have snow tires and have an accident with the car in bad weather, insurance coverage can be declined. You can be fined by police if you are stopped driving on snowy roads.
So, if you are planning a trip to Germany or Austria this winter and will use a rental a car, make sure that you get snow tires. If you have already booked a rental car, follow up with the rental agency and make sure that you get snow tires. Request a confirmation in writing.

See this report in German for additional information.

The presentation slides from the 30th Internationalization and Unicode Conference are available right here.
The presentation slides from the Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies are available right here.

The boom of the 90’s attracted many moderately talented gold diggers to becoming software engineers. Consequently, after the bust, the IT labor market today is flooded with people who have no concept of engineering techniques and quality of design. At the same time in corporate-land, the software-development-as-a-commodity mindset has created a similar situation at a global scale, and the practices of staffing firms have severely aggravated the situation. In short, good software engineers, and even people with the potential of becoming good software engineers, are difficult to spot among the masses. A hiring manager who wants to find a reasonably intelligent person with the ability to think and code at the same time has to go through a lot of effort in order to find suitable interview candidates. Working with recruiting firms is particularily straining, because the hit rate is low, interviewing is very time consuming, and communication with the staffing firm requires a lot of effort explaining to the recruiter that a good software engineer needs more than just a list of hot skills and a few projects on the résumé. In my experience, this communication most of the time yields no results, because …