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Open Storage at Sun

Mike Shapiro explains Sun Open Storage. I suspect 'Open' like in Open Systems rather than Open Source. Still interesting, though, a look at the upcoming SAS2 disks, and a hint like ZFS would go the cluster way.

Nestje

Aaibaarheidsfactor alarm !
Na de dood van onze Berner Senner was er geen houden meer aan : Martine moest en zou een nieuwe Berner krijgen. Na lang zoeken dan toch bij een kweker terecht gekomen, en via mail een teefje gereserveerd. En verleden zondag voor de eerste maal het nestje gaan bezichtigen. Schattigheid alom. Niet te geloven dat zo'n klein ding - niet veel groter dan een cavia momenteel - uitgroeit tot een hond van zo'n 45 kilo. Ook bijgeleerd : een groeiende pup eet tot tweemaal zoveel als een volwassen hond. Ah ja, de brandstof voor zo'n groeistuip moet ergens vandaan komen...

My Google job interview

2008 hasn't been kind to us, to put it mildly. But dark pages in the book of life come and go; I prefer any day a noisy line on the happiness scale above a flatline, it makes the ride so much more interesting. But I have experienced that in every dark period, there's a turnkey event, which clears up the dark skies, or at least restores my hope in the future. Knowing that these events *will* happen, no matter how grim the present is, makes life much more bearable. I guess this is what the elder people call 'life experience'.


This is the tale of such an event.


About two months ago, I got contacted by Google, if I wasn't interested in working for their Unix team. Working at Google. Wow. I'm quite happy with my current job, and I don't feel the need of working elsewhere, but this is G-O-O-G-L-E. You don't say no against Google.
Apparently, they had hit my resume online, and were impressed by my profile. But I wrote them an email back, saying that I had another type of work currently. Basically, I was telling them I didn't feel qualified. And I got a friendly email back, basically saying : 'Let us be the judge of that.'.


So I agreed in setting up an interview by telephone with someone from the San Francisco Bay area. This interview was a conventional job interview, in which I was asked to tell about my current job (I deliberately didn't emphasize on my Unix skills), and what my field interest in working at Google might be. We both agreed that a function as Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) fitted me the best, as this matched my current job and interests the most. The interview ended with 4 technical questions, from which any well-seasoned Unix veteran should be able to get at least 3 questions good.


I was approved, it seemed, and I would be going through the standard job application routine, which consists of 2 in-depth technical phone interviews and -if all went well- a half day visit to the European Googleplex in Dublin. I was also advised in brushing up on my computer science skills, which made me kinda panicking. Surely, I was trained in computer science, but my university days are almost 15 years ago.


So I decided to start studying. Hard. On a university level. I rebrushed TCP/IP, cause that was the area which I was most rusty in. I studied about the OSI model, TCP, SYN/ACK handshakes and made myself comfortable with tcp dumps. I rebrushed on Linux programming, syscalls and signals, filesystem layouts, and basic operation system concepts like CPU scheduling, threads and memory management. I revised basic algorithms and ways how to predict the throughput time. Data structures like B-trees, hashes and graph theory are indispensable for any decent programmer, so I studied them as well. I decided to skip Perl, object-oriented programming and advanced statistics and probability, as time was rather limited. For those who are interested, these are the study books I used :


- Beginning Linux programming, 4th edition, Wrox
- Handbook of data structures and applications, Chapman & Hall
- Beginning Algorithms, Wrox
- Operating System concepts, 6th edition, Wiley & sons
- Internetworking with TCP/IP, Prentice Hall


The first technical interview was with a programmer from the bay area. I got very in-depth questions about Linux and system programming problems. Any solution I proposed, got thoroughly revised, and I was asked to increase the performance of every solution I presented. It was a very difficult interview, but entertaining and stimulating in some weird way. I didn't felt good by the overall outcome of the interview, but the next day, I got an email that they got positive feedback, and a second phone interview was scheduled two weeks later.


The second phone interview was with a sysadmin from Dublin, and asked me more conceptual questions about networking and Perl, up to the point were I had to create a monster of a 3-line regexp in order to solve a problem. Overall, I had the impression that I performed this very well. However, I was very nervous during the second interview. It is not easy to think aloud about a difficult problem, while some little voice inside your head is screaming "OMFG, I'm being interviewed by Google !".


It took three agonizing weeks to receive feedback from this latest interview.


Anyhow...


I didn't get the job.


I still don't understand what went wrong. Maybe my nerves killed me, maybe I encountered the job interview anti-loop (read Steve Yegge's "Get that job at Google"), maybe I wasn't qualified after all. Oh well. Still shame, I really would have liked an interview at the Googleplex, or even better, working at Google in Dublin.


What did I learn from all this ? Possibilities are endless : one day you're down and out in Belgium, the next day you're applying at a brilliant company in Dublin. The sky is the limit. I'm an excellent Unix admin. And I'm determined to get even better. Smarter. Faster.


Do Zebra's get more spam than Aardvarks ?

A new study reveals that the first letter of your email address might be crucial to the amount of spam you receive. Analysis of traffic logs of email received by a large UK ISP shows considerable disparity between the proportions of spam received by addresses with different first characters. This disparity is quite marked when only email addresses that appear to be 'real' are considered. The root cause is likely to be spammers using dictionary or Rumpelstiltskin attacks to guess valid email addresses.

The particle adventure

Now that everyone and his cat is talking about the Large Hadron Collidor, and whether it will destroy the earth, few people seem to realize what the CERN scientists are looking for. The Higgs Boson, or God particle, is the prey scientists are hunting already for decades, and has become the Holy Grail of physics. Renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has bet 100 dollars that the LHC won't find the Higgs Boson.


Elementary particle physics was one of my favorite classes back in university. The particle adventure is a nice walk through this fascinating world of quantum dynamics.


Dropbox for Linux

A Dropbox client for Linux has been released.
Unfortunately, the binary is released as a Nautilus plugin, which means that every user on your computer will be forced to register on Dropbox after logging in. (there's even no "Cancel" button on the registration window).

Clynelish, 14yo

The name and the history of Clynelish are indissociable from the neighbour distillery, Brora. The Brora distillery has been named Clynelish for decades before closing in 1983. The Clynelish distillery faces the old one. Settled in a rural setting with a still house with great windows looking to the sea, the distillery is the exact replica of the modern Islay distillery, Caol Ila. Just 1% of the production is marketed as single malt, the remaining part being used in Johnnie Walker Gold Label blend.


Smell : malty, great spread of aromas from rich honey and malted barley. Floral and spicy. Highland Park, anyone ?


Taste : screams of malt. Lots of caramel and candy taste. Again floral, but with a sharp peppery aftertaste. Complex and challenging without ever losing its whisky character.


Oh yeah, before I forget : Clynelish is part of the Classic Malts concern of Diageo. If you're interested in whisky, I strongly advise you to subscribe to the Friends of the Classic Malts. You will receive a three monthly magazine called 'The Quaich', filled with well-written stories about your favorite (Diageo based) malts.

Pi in the sky

Past issues of Pi in the sky, a yearly magazine about math, are now online. The latest issue now even contains an article about more mundane problems, like solving sudoku puzzles.