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Article posted on Jun 30
Google, Round 1
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 30, 2005, 5:06 pm
A couple weeks ago, I received an email from a Google recruiter who found my resume and encouraged me to apply. I sat on this for about 1.5 weeks, until last night when somebody on IRC mentioned the same thing (different recruiter, different part of the company). This got me off my ass to compose a reply saying basically "I'm happily employed, but willing to look around". He replied in 10 minutes with a proposed time for a preliminary phone interview for today.
Well, today came and the interview happened. I went out to my car to take the call (it's bad form to interview for another company at your office (even though my boss knows I'm applying (and encourages it ("dude, it's google!")))). We exchanged pleasantries, I said a little bit about myself, he said a little about his department (Site Reliability Engineering). He confirmed that yes, I have no college experience whatsoever. This scared me a bit, since I've heard that to work at Google, you either need to be a bonafide genius or have a BS. However, his comment at the end eased me: "well, as long as you know your stuff..."
Then the questions. This was a preliminary interview, so it wasn't a "grilling" session, it was just to make sure I wasn't totally inept, and to help determine what jobs I'd be qualified for.
1) Name the 3 parts of a TCP handshake.
Without missing a beat, I replied "SYN, SYN/ACK, ACK". Simple.
2) How many servers could you put in a /17?
Now, he prefixed this by saying "well, I know you're not at a computer, so this might be hard", so I didn't feel as guilty for taking as long as I did doing it on paper (I suck at doing math in my head, but suck slightly less on paper). I worked backwards from /24, and came up with 2^7 * 256 - 2 = 32766. Correct of course, but took a lot longer than I would have hoped for.
3) What power of 2 is closest to 2 billion?
Damnit, another binary math question. More time passes, I (eventually) get 2^31.
4) Rate in order of speed (can't remember which direction): CPU register, disk seek, context switch, main memory page operation.
CPU register is obviously the fastest and disk seek is obviously the slowest, but I kinda blanked out on what a context switch was (hey, I do script programming, it doesn't come up that much), so I guessed (correctly) that it was faster than a memory operation.
Next he asked me to rate myself on a whole slew of topics; C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Shell, Unix, Linux, SQL, and TCP/IP are the ones I remember. He explained the scale as so:
0 - I've never heard of it
1-3 - I've read about it, maybe know how to use it, but not proficient
4-6 - I'm proficient at it, but not an expert
7-9 - I am an expert
10 - I invented it, or wrote the book on it (hey, this is Google)
The only ones I placed in 1-3 were C (3) and C++ (2). No 10s, but I gave Linux and PHP a 9, and TCP/IP an 8.
We agreed on times for a second interview (next week), and then the call was over. Not too bad...
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Article posted on Jun 29
fo0bar's South Bay Fuckwad Theory
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 29, 2005, 3:18 pm
fo0bar's South Bay Fuckwad Theory: Whenever a casual meeting (LUG meeting, etc) is organized for the "bay area", it is invariably held in SF, since it is central to most everyone. However, you will always have one or two people say, "This is unfair for people in the south bay! I demand it be held across the street from my office in Campbell!"
I coined this years ago while living in the east bay and working in SF (though I'm sure many others have realized this as well), but was reminded of it while reading a tribe.net thread recently.
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Article posted on Jun 26
Earthquake
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 26, 2005, 12:11 pm
4.8 close to Truckee; I felt it in Reno.
It was exciting and disappointing at the same time. Despite living in the bay area for a few years, I never felt one. (A big one in Napa I was out of town for, and one in San Jose I slept through.) I didn't hear a rumbling. It felt like the house was on conveyor rollers, and someone was rocking the house back and forth.
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Article posted on Jun 24
No Title
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 24, 2005, 11:05 pm
My friends, I have found jesus.
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Article posted on Jun 20
It's coming.
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 20, 2005, 11:41 am
The Great Fo0bar LJ Friend Adding Consideration Thingy will be held in 2 weeks. Here's the deal: I'm a lazy ass. I also have standards. Somehow those two things don't contradict each other. I hate livejournal for using the term "friends", rather than "subscriptions" or something. I may consider you a personal friend, but your postings bore me. Likewise, there are some people on my lj "friends list" who I don't particularly like, but I do like their writings.
What is this all leading to? Over time, people have added me to their friends list. And of course LJ etiquette says "if you add me and don't announce it, you are a creepy stalker; also, if you add me, I must add you back or I am a very mean person". This directly contradicts my beliefs. However, I am willing to give you guys a chance. 2 weeks from now, I will check the postings of people who have friended me, but whom I have not yet done the same. If they meet my rigorous standard, I will add you as a friend.
What can you do to ensure I add you as a friend?
1) Add me, or at least reply to this post, stating your candidacy.
2) Post good stuff. And by good, I mean good. And by good, I mean not bad. Something above the level of a 13 year old girl.
3) Cash donations couldn't hurt.
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Article posted on Jun 19
No Title
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 19, 2005, 11:14 pm
I can always count on Linode to provide professional, courteous service.
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Article posted on Jun 19
No Title
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 19, 2005, 1:37 pm
Update: The banner takes up a lot of real estate, so rather than remove it, I figured I'd fill the whitespace with useless crap. I present to you, the contents of my firecow tab bar, from left to right:
* LJ Friends list
* Bandwidth test result
* Penny Arcade
* Bad cabling photos
* SF Chronicle
* Pic of some train thingy that imploded
* Porn
* USGS earthquake map
* Defcon photos
* More defcon photos
* Slashdot
* Reno Gazette Journal
* Weather.com report
* Google calculator
* Blank page
* Don Marti article
* This LJ update
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Article posted on Jun 18
No Title
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 18, 2005, 11:06 pm
My first Google Maps project: Real-time Nevada earthquake map
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Article posted on Jun 17
Yeehah
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 17, 2005, 12:08 pm
The test:
make clean
make defconfig
time make vmlinux modules -jcpus
The results:
P4 3.2GHz HT, 2MB L2 cache, 1GB memory:
real 4m32.770s
user 8m27.865s
sys 0m34.566s
Celeron 500MHz, 128K L2 cache, 192MB memory:
real 25m35.821s
user 23m48.540s
sys 1m43.540s
See also: hammer-time
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Article posted on Jun 17
How long till we have "Dairy Queen Fire"?
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 17, 2005, 10:23 am
It seems wildfires around here are named according to a strict guideline: "stuff the fire is near".
Last July, a massive fire threatened Carson City. They named it Waterfall because it started near a waterfall.
A month later? Andrew Fire, because it started near Andrew Lane, south of Reno. (It was fun climbing on top of the building at work and watching firefighters fight the fire. What wasn't fun was realizing that highway 395 was closed the next day, while I had to drive down to Washoe Valley to pick up Burning Man supplies.)
The year before was Robb Fire, again, Robb Drive. (I had a good view of the fire from my house.)
And this year? Truck Fire, since it started near a truck route that bypasses Virginia City.
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