Wed, 01 Dec 2004
Google Talk -- London
Google recently held a short talk in London (they are recruiting for their
'new' Dublin office) that covered a couple of interesting topics such as
redundancy using commodity technology (LOTS of cheap machines with the same
data), how to create rolling brown outs (rooms packed full of 80 1U servers
in every rack seems to do it) and how to horizontally scale everything to
meet their needs.
The one slide that really caught my attention was mostly flippant but makes an important point about the kind of traffic they are dealing with:
- 1000 queries per second ...
- ... at 2am ...
- ... on December 25th
And the killer reason to work at Google? Each staff member is encouraged to spend 20% of their working time looking at new technology and areas of interest. Imagine being given a day a week to work on things that may, at some remote point in the future, positively impact the company.
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Posted: 2004/12/01 16:42 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
PHP Easter Eggs and Version Disclosure
There has recently been a thread about PHP easter eggs on the webappsec security list. In
essence if you call ANY PHP page with certain parameters custom pages will
be returned.
Here's an example of the PHP Credits Page. It may seem a little petty to complain about such a small thing in a code-base provided for free but there is a more serious aspect to this, the pages returned vary depending on the version of PHP you run so it's possible to use this to determine which version the server is running; even if you've changed the ServerTokens directive to something more restrictive than the default.
While you can disable this using 'expose_php = Off' in your php.ini file, easter eggs in Internet exposed production code annoy the hell out of me.
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Posted: 2004/12/01 16:41 | /security | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
apt-dupdate -- Smaller Sources Files
I wasn't going to mention this but I'm on dial-up this week and so dog slow
down-loading has become an issue for me and this tool might be useful for
people in a similar position. The short version is that the
packages/Sources file is quite big, down-loading it each day can actually be
quite a big hit in terms of bandwidth, apt-dupdate plans to get around
this using bzipped diffs rather than re-sending the whole thing. For further
details have a look at the apt-dupdate announcement
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Posted: 2004/12/01 16:36 | /operatingsystems/linux | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Never Negotiate With Yourself
This may seem obvious but the number of people that break this simple rule
never fails to amaze me. Let's look at an example, you are meeting with a
potential hire and you are discussing salary, as an aside if they are good
pay them above the going rate; thats a different post!
You make an offer of 30 thousand a year, the other person doesn't look too impressed. What you should never do (and ignore any uncomfortable silences) is then make another, higher, offer. Suppose you then offer 35 or 40, the candidate may be willing to settle for 32 but you've just lost the difference. You should instead wait until they make a counter offer and base your next move on the new information.
The other useful tidbit (also common sense) concerns negotiating when facing a deadline. Don't do it, the other party will stall and then force you to either make concessions at the end or you'll have to pay in time and money to rearrange you schedule in order to stay in the discussions. Following this logic you should always try and negotiate when you are in a position to out wait the other party.
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Posted: 2004/12/01 16:17 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
(More) System (and less) Administration
I started out in IT as a developer working on financial systems using VBA,
after a very short period of trying to do flexible string manipulation I
stumbled on to Perl, Regular Expressions and the Win32::OLE module; I was
hooked. About a year later I had the chance to work at a mostly Perl shop
(at the tail end of the dotcom boom) and I was exposed to Unix systems,
thats when things got interesting for me.
In my last few jobs I've worked as a Systems Administrator rather than a coder (I still write bits and pieces but nothing truly huge anymore) and I have to say I enjoy it, the work is diverse, you get to meet a lot of people (both internal and vendors) and it's often satisfying. So what am I posting about?
In my last few jobs I've noticed a disturbing trend concerning my average daily tasks, a bit of support, some tweaking and tuning and then paperwork. Shit-loads of it. While I've always been involved in licensing, documentation and similar as my experience increases I seem to be moving further and further away from the parts of the job I actually look forward to, solving problems. It's weird to think about how this works, I don't know any systems people that think "I love to fill out forms", it's always been a necessary evil, not the main focus. So where am I going with this? Well by writing it down I've had to think through what's annoying me about it and I have some ideas on how to reduce the paperwork; with automation and technology of course ;)
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Posted: 2004/12/01 16:06 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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