I got around to emailing some pre-interview questions to a job candidate today, something I’ve been meaning to do for a few years now. And while a simple questionnaire has limited value, I was able to dive into a few of his responses and learn the basics about him quickly.

In my limited sample so far, it’s far more useful than phone screening: it fills in holes in a resumé, uncovers basic preferences and dispositions, and proves if the candidate can write coherently.¹ I’ll have to try this on a few more people, and see if it’s as useful for other personality types.

By the way, if you’re an über-talented PHP developer looking for work around Vancouver, B.C, send me your resumé, CV, or a link to your portfolio site.

1. Or convince someone to write on their behalf ↩

Midori is a Webkit-based browser for Gnome. It’s new, and the artwork is a bit weird, but it means that other Webkit-esque browsers are coming. Yay.

Scoble hits the nail on the head talking about Moguls, the serverless internet company:

How did Microsoft screw this up so badly? Let’s get this straight. Amazon used to be a book store. Now they are hosting virtualized servers for Internet companies. So much for having billions of dollars in the bank like Microsoft does, some of the smartest people in the world working in your research arms and having “monopoly” market share in operating systems.

One of the best developers I know pointed me to a Django tutorial. Django is a Python-based Rails equivalent, that’s even less imposing than Rails. It’s a good corollary framework to Rails,¹ as the approach is different enough to make you think a bit.

1. Especially useful if you’re still trying to find a good framework, or thinking about design approaches ↩

Merb is yet another framework, a new alternative to Rails.

The E text editor is a “Textmate” for Windows. Finally, a great editor for Windows (and a Linux version is in the works).

Not that in-browser windows are a great idea, but here is a Javascript library for showing modal and non-modal Javascript/browser windows. The library includes window styling, dialogs, and performs quite well on my workstation.

Kottke hits it on the nail with Facebook’s lack of public content. Other people have suggested the creep factor, but I haven’t really seen much of it yet (cliques seem to keep to their own). In the end, its shelf life will be short, as is pretty much anything online.

Facebook does do something well that no one has been able to do yet, not AOL, not MySpace, or the others. They’ve captured relationships (networking in the business world) in a way that’s downright slick. It’s damned easy to use too, for the normal folk, and is providing a huge amount of entertainment for people who don’t normally hack at web stuff.

Redhat is working (with Ascender Corp) to develop a set of drop in replacements for the Microsoft core web fonts.

Some differences between Windows and Unix non-blocking sockets. Writing portable network code is not as easy as it should be.