Recent Readings

Web

Fixing UNIX Filenames – An interesting discussion of the non-standard handling of the “standards” in UNIX filesystem naming, such as newlines in names.

An ‘Accordion’ of Wood and Glass – A look at where all the money you spent on your calculus textbook went.

Strace – the Sysadmin’s Microscope – An excellent article on using strace(1), the best way to find out what your process is really doing in Linux.

Print

Garner’s Modern American Usage – Okay, I’ve not read the whole thing, but I keep it on my desk at work to figure out if my word choice is correct, or if it makes me sound like an asshole (and, all of the usage examples are from recent media, including great references to Superbad when needed).

Web Operations – Allspaw is listed as the author but this book is written by many people in the DevOps community (and hey, I reviewed Patrick DeBois’ chapter on monitoring). This book offers excellent practical advice to people doing web operations.

Rework – The 37signals guys wrote this book about the lessons they’ve learned running a successful startup, and while the book is pretentious, it does have solid advice (for example: don’t hire fast; don’t worry about being “professional”, build software you want to use).

August 22, 2010 devops, linux

Nerd Pub Trivia @ ITA

Every year ITA Software sends us all out on a boat to eat, drink and make merry, and this year I thought it would be fun to host a Nerd Pub Trivia. The idea came when, while playing regular pub trivia, the picture round category was “Famous Nerds”. My friends and I thought we were a lock for a perfect picture round score, but instead of pictures of Turing Award winners we got pictures of movie and TV nerds. We joked about how awesome it would be if there was real nerd pub trivia, so that’s what I made happen on ITA’s booze cruise.

The format was a shortened pub trivia, with songs played after reading each question:

  • 1 round of 4 questions with each question being worth either 1, 3, 5 or 7 points (you decide, you can only use each value once)
  • 1 special picture round (2 points for each item correctly identified)
  • 1 round of 4 questions with each question being worth 2, 4, 6 or 8 points (akin to the first round)
  • 2 final questions on which you wager up to 10 points each (win or lose what you wager)

Without further ado, here are the questions:

Famous Nerds: Who wrote in a famous RFC, “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others”?

Databases: What does ACID stand for?

Networking: How many bytes are there in an Ethernet address?

Systems Programming: What is the only UNIX syscall that returns twice?

Data Structures: This colorful binary tree is self-balancing and contains no data in the tree’s leaf nodes – what is it?

Operating Systems: Which process typically has the PID of 1 on a UNIX system?

Computing History: Which of these technologies was not invented at XEROX PARC: Ethernet, The Mouse, The Windowing GUI, laser printer?

SciFi/Fantasy: Who is the Kwistaz Haderach?

Video Games: What item must you retrieve from the Dungeons Of Doom in Nethack?

Role Playing Games: What does THAC0 stand for?

And of course, we had a picture round: ID The Programming Language & ID Carrier/GDS By IATA Code (hey, we’re an airline software company, I have to have some airline trivia).

I won’t post the answers here but feel free to post your answers in the comments (and be aware there’s a few correct answers to some of these questions).

Also, if you’re a nerd looking for a job at a cool place to work, check out ITA’s current job offerings. Not to spam my readers but it really is fun to work at a place where you can host a nerd pub trivia and 10 teams join the fun.

August 6, 2010 fun, hiring, ITA