Alas, Chuck Norris Facts appears to be down and has been down for many days now. It could be gone forever, which would REALLY be a bummer. So while I am enjoying the Einstein quotes, I'm going to have to find something else that will fill the top slot. That's a crying shame, because the Chuck Norris Facts were always pretty good.
Oh well...at least we can have some fun with fonts now. For the next few posts, I'll be experimenting with different fonts until I find the one I like most. Oh, and keep on the lookout for some changes in the tired old template of this page. I know the red background gets old after a while, even for me.
And while we're talking about sites that are down, what's up with Gmail? It's been having trouble off and on all day. Has anyone else noticed? I'm really curious to find out what might have happened that would cause such a serious long-term outage for what is arguably the most popular webmail site on the Internet. I smell something security-related...
So I had a couple of firsts this past Friday. The first one was my first interview that went over three hours. This four-hour-long beast is by far the longest interview I've ever had. The second was the key component of that mega-interview: the technical interview. It was the most challenging technical interview I've had in my career, and that's in 9-1/2 years of experience in a technical field. I felt more like I was taking an oral exam for my Masters degree in information security. Let me tell you what the first two questions were (and I don't necessarily expect anyone reading this to know the answers...I almost didn't for these). Here's how it went down:
The three technical interviewers walk into the room. We have our introductions and sit down. The first interviewer hands me a sheet of paper. It contains a text sentence and a line of hexadecimal digits. He asks, "You see a plain-text string and a string of hex digits. Is the hex string the encrypted or hashed output of the plain-text string? What algorithm was used and how did you know?" Now, it looked like a hash output to me because it was relatively short, and fortunately, I knew that hash algorithms put out a hex string of a fixed number of digits. Two hex digits is equal to eight bits (short for binary digits, the 1s and 0s that computers think in), or one "byte" in computer terminology. So I counted the pairs of hex digits, and there were 32 pairs. Thirty-two pairs of hex digits means 256 bits of output. There is only one hash algorithm I know of that has a 256-bit output string and that is SHA256. So I guessed that, and fortunately, I was right.
The same guy takes that sheet away and hands me a second sheet. It has a few snippets of what looks like C language computer code. Now, I'm not a programmer and I tell them as much. But I know enough of code to say that I can guess about it. I see numerous references to "shell" and so I guess that the code is trying to spawn a shell (a shell is a command line that a user can run commands from). I also notice, with a bit more prodding, that the code requests UID=0 and "root". "Root" is the superuser on a UNIX or Linux system; that account basically can do anything, any time, anywhere on the system. He cannot be stopped. So the code was trying to spawn a root shell, meaning that if someone had run this code on the computer, they would have full access to every resource and bit of data on it. This is a common goal of a hacker. So again, fortunately, I got that one right, too.
And that was just the first two questions of what ended up being an hour and a half of technical interview time. Can I just say....WOW. The good news is, I feel I did relatively well. Some areas I was short, other areas I did OK. I hope they liked it, too. I'll let you all know as it goes along. (And I hope you all enjoyed the small glimpse into some aspects of what I do for a living.)
So a few more great hilarious videos, just for some fun:
Who could ever forget Twiki from Buck Rogers, starring Gil Gerard as Buck? "Booty booty"???
Check this out...Homer Simpson would probably say, "This is so much like my dreams, it's not even funny." I had no idea this sort of thing was available.
Finally, you all know "Superfreak", by Rick James, right? Big hit about 20-25 years ago. It was so great then, and it's been REMADE!!! By none other than Ricky Skaggs, Bruce Hornsby, and John Anderson.
Now, I know what you're thinking. "Chris, you're an IDIOT!! Ricky Skaggs, Bruce Hornsby, and John Anderson would NEVER get together to remake Superfreak by Rick James. Oh yeah? Well, they might, if they could remake it into a BLUEGRASS VERSION!!!! CLICK HERE TO SEE THE INCREDIBLY AWESOME RESULT OF THEIR WORK.
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