Jeff’s Blog

This weekend I was at the South Coast Plaza and stopped off at the Apple store to check out the much hyped Iphone.  This was Sunday afternoon mind you and they had the phone in stock, so there was no need to wait hours for this thing Friday afternoon.  They had a half dozen demo units and I had to wait and 20 seconds to get my turn at one.

The interface I must say is amazing.  It is the best I have ever seen for a smart phone.  Everything flows fluidly and there is hardly any noticeable lag when switching between applications.  The web browser is great, you can zoom in by double clicking and use your finger to drag around the page.  The orientation changes from portrait to landscape automatically as you flip the phone down or up.  I did notice that it got a little confused when I switched between the modes quickly 5 or 6 times, but it did recover in a few seconds without crashing.

The picture mode was equally as good, with much the same interface.  You had albums and you use your finger to flip between the pictures.  The next picture flows onto the screen as the old picture flows off of the screen as if you were looking through a negative roll.  The built in camera was alright; it was more responsive than most camera phones and the image quality was about on par as others.  There is however no video mode.

I checked out the Ipod mode and it continued the trend, but I must admit I didn’t try it out all that much.  I watched a short section of Lost and it looked fantastic and filled the entire wide screen.

Now onto the negatives of this phone.  Number one is the price $600 for the 8 gig model and $500 for the 4 gig model. You also have to sign up for a 2 year AT&T contract.  Considering that the phone is unsubsidized, as far as I can tell, this is ridiculous price.   Also the storage size is way too small for me.  I have a 30 gig 5G Ipod and it is too small for all of my music.  Considering this is the first Ipod I would consider watching videos on that 8 gigs would go real fast.  Also there is no memory card slot so you can’t add any memory.  The sim card is also hidden in the guts of the phone, so if one wanted to sell their Iphone it would be a royal pain to switch the SIM out.

The on screen key board was also a royle pain.  I have large fingers and I had lots of trouble typing.  The data is also EDGE or 802.11 WI-FI.  That is a real oversight as far as I am concerned.  I know the 3G HSDPA network isn’t as large as the existing edge network but the speed difference is huge. Instead of focusing efforts on improving their EDGE network they should have rolled out for HSDPA coverage and included it instead of EDGE.  The lack of A2DP is also a major oversight.  I want a wireless stereo head set with my $600 Iphone, but no dice for the first generation Iphone.  Also they should have throw in a car charger considering the battery life on these things and the insane price.  The biggest downside though is that it is a closed environment with no way to install 3rd party applications.  There are certain applications I need like a SSH client. It would also be nice to use Skype or some other SIP client to save some plan minutes.

So I will not be picking one of these up as I am a poor poor network admin, but even if I were rich I would wait until the phone is revised to have HSDPA support and support for third party applications even if those applications had to be apple approved.  I hold high hopes for Openmoko the Linux based open smart phone, but we will see how it fairs when it is released in October. I can’t seeing it being completive given the equally ridiculous price of $600.00.  It does have the advantage of being unencumbered and not locked to 1 carrier.

I love VMware I have transfered 8 servers onto 1 huge server (8 way (2 quad core) 16 gigs of RAM).  The machine isn’t even breaking a sweat.  I plan on moving a few a few more servers over so around 12 when I am done.  These aren’t heavily used servers or anything but we have so many servers that pop up all over the place because people don’t like to share.  VMware is the perfect solution all they have to do is pay the OS license for windows or free for Linux.

I also love VMware Converter.  It takes a physical machine and converts it into a vmware image.  I have transfered 3 physical servers and the users don’t even know.  The other great feature is that you can individualize  a  vmware image using sysprep.  I  have a vanilla  install of 2003 server with all the patches installed that I created.  I then use vmware converter and individualize the image and now I can have a fully patched and ready to go 2003 server in 15 minutes!  I am also making a base of Ubuntu and CentOS.  Now the only thing left to do is figure out to do with all the space in the racks when I am done, and what to do with all the old servers.  I vote lots of epoxy and make sculptures out of them to put out in front of IT.

Well I got a xbox 360 for christmas and am really enjoying it.  I even got to take a lovely crawl through my attic with some cat 5 fun fun fun.  As soon as it was all set up I then turned to its media sharing functions.  It can show pictures, and stream music and videos from your main computer.  The only problem is that it only support windows media format for video which is pretty lame seeing as I only want to rip my movies once and I already decided on on XviD format, since it is free looks great and should be around for awhile.  I am currently in the process of encoding all the movies I have right now using 2 spare computers with AutoGK (which by the way works great) running in my office churning out XviD videos.  It will be so much more convenient to be able to browse the movies I want on screen instead of getting on my hands and knees searching through a dark cabient with my head sideways trying to read the labels.  I searched the internet for a solution to the xvid problem and found a work around.  Most of what I found required a windows media server to use transcode 360 and VLC 360 I don’t have one and don’t really want to buy one.  I found Tversity which acts like a sling box, it takes all your media and will transcodes it to a format the device supports using the UPnp AV / DLNA standard; in the xbox 360’s case the wmv format.  I tested it and it works great, the only problem is it can’t fast forward or rewind only pause and play, if they add that in future releases that would be awesome.

So I was contacted by a Google recruiter a while back after applying for a position as a Linux System Administrators. A phone interview was set up and completed and I was subsequently rejected outright. I get flack for the hard interview questions I like to ask when I am on a hiring comity, I don’t even touch Google.
The first question was somewhat of a trick question how would you remove a file in unix that is named -f. It will be interpreted as a command line switch. I for the life of me could not wrap my mind around it at the time. The answer is of course retardly simple use the full path or relative path of the file so rm ./-f would do it since the first character is not a - it would not be interpreted as a command line switch. Then I was asked if I was designing rm how would I handle the case of deleting files named -f without having to use the full path of the file. This I got in a flash which is create a switch that will interpret anything after it as a file and not a switch. I was then informed that rm already has this built in and is the — switch so rm — -f would be the easy way.

I was then asked what would happen if I typed in mv * then hit enter at a shell. I got this with a little leading, at first I thought it would just give you an error, which it will some of the time. After thinking for a minute I got the right answer that the last argument to the mv command has to be a directory. So the bash interperter will expand the * to all the files in the directory that you are in, if the last file in the directory is a directory itself it will move all the files into that directory. If the last file in the directory is a file you get the error returned that the last argument has to be a directory and nothing is done. I think the interviewer was also going to dive into the case of a directory having thousands of files in it then what would happen if you did a mv * or a rm *, but I already mentioned it in my answer to them. Which is you would get back an error that there were too many files to expand since bash has a fixed buffer for this to prevent eating all the systems memory. The work around is using find and xargs like find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm, I happened to already know this as I had run into it a few times.

We then went into the different raid types. I was asked to describe the different raid types. I named the ones I know well which are raid 0 raid 1 raid 5 and I also mentioned raid 0+1 which I have never touched. I then was drilled on all the raid level 0, 1 , 4, 5, 6, 0+!, and 1+0. The interviewer explained the ones which I wasn’t familiar with and then asked how many drives you can loose without loosing data in each raid level. Raid 0 you can loose no drives its it simple striping, I was also asked why you would ever use this. My answer was in cases where the data on the drive is not important but the increase in speed is, my example was a slave database that is only used for reads on high transaction server, the data is already on the master so you don’t care if all the data is lost and you want the increase in speed. Raid 1 you can loose 1 drive in a 2 drive setup, the interview threw me a little on this one asking how many disks you could loose with 3 drives in raid 1, I said that you had to have an even number of drives to run raid 1, he said this was incorrect. So I had to ask if he was talking about all 3 drives mirroring the same data, which he said was the case. So you could loose 2 drives in this case. Raid 4 is striping with a separate parity disk so in the event that you loose the parity drive there is no read hit while the array is degraded you can only loose 1 drive. Raid 5 stripes data and parity across all drives and can loose 1 drive but reads will be degraded. Raid 6 has 2 parity drives which have different parity algorithms which will enable you to loose 2 drives with out any data loss. Then on to raid 1+0 and raid 0+1 which I have never dealt with. The main advantge of these is the write speed, since there is no parity information, the disadvantage is the number of drives you will use 2n + 2, raid 4 and 5 is n + 2, raid 6 is n + 3. So you really only see raid 1+0 or 0+1 in very high transaction database servers. The difference is one is a stipe of mirrors and the other is a mirror of stipes. Here is an example stolen off the web:

Raid 0+1

Raid 1+0

I was lead through a series of questions and asked which is better, which I struggled with I just could get my mind around the difference at the time. The answer is that raid 1+0 is better in that both can loose 1 drive with no problem. But the probability of a second failure being down the raid is much greater in raid 0+1. The probability in case 0+1 is (n/2)/(n - 1) in 1+0 it is 1/(n - 1).

After raid it was on to DNS, how does your computer resolve ww.google.com. The answer they were looking for is it depends on how /etc/resolve.conf is set. By default it looks as /etc/hosts then it will go to the dns server. Then on to server side dns what is the chain a dns server would go through to resolve www.google.com. Which is the dns server has a list of the root domain servers. These in turn will give the address for the .com dns server, the .com dns will give you the address for the google.com dns server. The google .com server will give you the ip address for www.google.com. Then I was drilled on the different types of records in dns and what they do such as A CNAME MX POINTER SOA and NS. Then I was asked if there is a problem whit the NS containing the name of the authoritative DNS server for a domain and not the IP. I said yes since you could not do a A lookup for the name server since I don’t have the address only the name of the name server. I was asked how I would get around this if I designed it and I said I would just return the IP in the NS record. This would work but it is not how it is done. When you ask fot the NS record a glue record is sent back which is a NS record and also the address of the name server.

I probably got 80% of the questions right off the bat 15% with a little leading by the interviewer and 5% with a lot of leading. Apparently not good enough though. It defiantly was a good experience and will defiantly help me with future interviews. I think I will work on getting a few certs before I move on to greener pastures. The goal is to either be out of California or have a job that pays well enough to afford tuition at a good private school before my son is of school age. I have 3 more years before I have to have this done, so realistically I have 18 months so that this will absolutely be done. It really is ashame that the cost of living has shot up so much in California and the quality of life has fallen so much.

Winco Foods is amazing!!  I never thought I would be saying this about a grocery store but it is true.  We bought groceries here last night that would have cost close to double that at Vons or Ralphs.  The place is huge and clean, they have tons of produce, dry goods, meats, cheeses and everything.  The best buy had to be small avocados for 12 cents each!  I don’t know how they do it but the prices are at least 10-40% less than a normal supermarket.  The staff was also very friendly, apparently it is an employee owned company which is always good.   That makes the employee actually care about their jobs, since the better job they do the better the company does, the better the company does the more your stock is worth.  They only have 3 stores in southern California, but if you are near one of these stores it is well worth shopping here for your day to day groceries.