DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Once or twice a year we throw a “pizza and Zinfandel” dinner party, where we eat lots of pizza and drink lots of Zinfandel. Last night’s episode succeeded in both respects. Here, in the style of Harper’s Index, is a recap:

I attended a presentation by two of the lead systems geeks from Google last night. The content dipped below my threshhold of interest when it got into the minutiae of their net-booting protocols, and we nearly throttled one guy who kept asking questions that were way too detailed to be of general interest (especially when it became evident that the guy asking questions had no idea what he was talking about).

Google is hosted on 10,000 Linux servers, most of which are half-depth 1U devices from rackable.com (no link — I thereby spare you the pain you’d feel from rackable’s awful Flash-based website). Each host has 2 Maxtor 40- or 80-gb IDE (!) drives accessed primarily via DMA. They didn’t use SCSI because it’s too expensive, and they can get comparable performance with DMA/IDE. Surprising!

Their web index and cache is replicated across many servers, meaning that a single “database server” has only a tiny fraction of the entire index available within local hardware. This is fascinating, and I guess it’s the heart of their scaling technology — to be able to break down a single index across many servers and query this cluster quickly and effectively.

Many of these architectural details are contained in this article: Google Defies Dotcom Downturn

In a humorous twist, Google presented attendees with Google-branded boxer shorts emblazoned with their appropriate and familiar slogan “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

I am stunned by the speed with which the Code Red worm propagated across the web.

I do not run any Microsoft server products, so my systems are not vulnerable to this particular attack, and yet the worm hit all my sites repeatedly in an attempt to replicate itself.

debris.com was hit from 16 different infected hosts. monauraljerk.org was hit by 26. An unnamed, unpublished, empty website that I use only for testing purposes got hit 18 times.

This is a good reminder to everyone who runs a server to keep up-to-date with vendor patches and bug reports. Subscribe to CERT and BugTraq. That’s the minimum sane level of paranoia; you’d be much better off actually becoming well-versed at server security, or hiring someone who is, to make sure your servers are at least difficult to hack.

So we decide to spend a romantic night in Sonoma, “next weekend.” Ha! laughed the gods of expensive inns, 2-night-minimums, and calendars booked months in advance. Even some humans laughed at me, like the “concierge” at the Sonoma Valley Visitors’ Bureau, who in response to my request answered Good luck in a tone so sarcastic her own kids would have slapped her.

But I was undeterred. I made many phone calls. I dealt well with rejection.

I cajoled and pleaded and, I’m not ashamed to admit, begged for special treatment. “It’s my anniversary,” I said meekly in hopes of winning the pity of some meekness-hardened innkeeper. They were polite, but firm: “We’re booked.” Or, occasionally, “We have rooms available, but only if you’re staying two nights.”

That’s what really upset me: enforcing a 2-night minimum, one week before the check-in date. You’d think they can’t make money on a $200 room if the guest only stays one night.

One very fancy bed-and-breakfast with a single open suite was willing to relax the 2-night restriction for us. My heart split with joy! Until I saw that the suite costs $500 per night. For that price, I’d be taking all the furniture home with me, in addition to the little bottles of shampoo from the bathroom.

I’ve been doing some recruiting lately. The process looks like this: I write up a job description, post it to a website or mailing list where qualified candidates are likely to see it, and then wait for emails to come in.

The job description lists specific requirements for the position, and instructions for candidates to follow. Some of the skills requirements are identified as non-negotiable, because although it’s a nice theory to “hire for attitude and train for skills,” small companies often don’t have time to train for skills, especially when the option of hiring for them exists.

In the place where I list my contact info, I request that candidates send a plain-text (ASCII) resume. I do this for three reasons:

1. my email program manages attachments poorly, so I hate receiving attachments
2. most people send Microsoft Word files, which are a common vector for viral infection
3. Approximately 25% of candidates eliminate themselves from consideration by failing to follow simple instructions, saving me valuable minutes of work

This is background info for the remarkable tale of The Applicant Who Was Smarter Than Me…

The other night I received a 17k email in response to my job posting. Attached to the 17k email was a 34k Word file. This is generally a bad sign, but I’m a sucker for personal narrative, so I began to read.

Contained in the 17k email were seven arguments, crushed together like vertebrae after a surfing injury, which dissected my job posting and argued just about every line as being unfair or poorly-considered in some way. Had this been a job posting for a position on a debate team, I’d have responded with an offer letter, forgoing the interview process entirely. Alas, this was not the case.

The candidate argued that his Word-file attachment was justified because Word is “the best tool for the job.” He then instructed me to download StarOffice, which although free and useful, doesn’t run on my Mac. Also it’s an 80mb download.

Next he admitted that he hadn’t worked on enough PHP/MySQL websites to qualify because he hadn’t “hopped across 16 different jobs in 3 years,” as if that is the only way to gain meaningful experience.

Next, the candidate ranted on for 50 lines about why our database software is inadequate. He assumed we’d been blinded by the hype, and that we’d done no testing to determine if this software would perform as we needed. He ignored the fact that we’d been in business for three years on this same database platform. He committed the sin he accused us of committing, in fact: without any basis for judgement, based strictly on hearsay, he concluded that our chosen database platform was inadequate for our needs.

Interesting case, these critical/analytical types who don’t appear to own a mirror.