2014-10 on Funky Si's Test

If you had £5,000 for technology

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 20:00:45 +0000

I listen to the dot net rocks podcast and they ask this question every show. (If you don’t listen then you should!)

I don’t know what my answer would be as there are so many gadgets and cool things that I like the sound of.

I might get a surface pro 3, it’s a tablet with attachable keyboard that’s more powerful than my current laptop. But at £600 it’s expensive so maybe not. Maybe instead I would install a SSD into my existing laptop to increase disk performance.

I’d like a new car with lots of gadgets built-in. A friend gave me a ride in his new BMW and it’s nice. Bluetooth so I don’t have to have an audio cable to listen to podcasts. Parking sensors so no chance the wife will prang it. Built in satnav etc

While we are on the subject of cars eventually I’d like a google self driving car as I think Google is a better driver than me. Think about it I drive to a friends I have a drink I sleep in the back seat as my car drives me home. Once all cars are automated I believe the roads will be much safer.

The last thing I would spend on is an intensive training course on development, I would really like to get further in dev and more training would really help. Specifically something that would help solve my current dev problems. I am sure it is possible for me to learn dev with self-study but that requires a discipline I don’t think I have, I easily eat my time up with my current job, wife and other interests.

I recently had £6500 to spend on improving my employers IT infrastructure. That was really hard. It sounds like a lot of money, but it really isn’t.

Once I started looking at the problems that I wanted to solve and what hardware I wanted I quickly used it all up and that was before I factored in license and software costs. In the end I just had to order what I wanted and hope that on a future date I could spend on other areas. I got a super powerful server that I could virtualize almost all our existing physical servers with it I needed licences, which left me just enough to get a NAS for file storage.

Top IT interview questions to answer

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 20:00:45 +0000

I have done a few interviews from both sides of the table, I’m not very good at either but thought I would have a go at answering my favourite questions.

Describe an IT disaster and what you did to turn it around?

The question is all about the turn it around bit. I’ve had lots of answers that emphasise the problem rather than what the candidate did to turn things around.

My answer would be: on a Saturday I was rearranging the server room and when I came to turn on our main file server and pdc it wouldn’t boot. My plans for the weekend went out the window it was all about getting this server back up. I tried the usual unplug everything and reconnect still nothing. I rang a friend to get a second opinion and between the two of us we formulated a plan of action. I then rang my director to tell her that I was having problems and what I was going to try. (keeping people informed is an essential skill)

So the server in question was getting power but nothing was happening during boot. The motherboard had died. What I needed to do was connect the raid card to another server so I could copy the data from it to our Nas drive (luckily I had an upgrade plan and this failure had just accelerated it)

A few hours later the data was copying and I could breathe again. I told my director that I had fixed things but there would be minor issues on Monday.

Describe your strengths and weaknesses?

It wouldn’t be an interview without a strengths and weaknesses question. As an interviewer I want at least one weakness and I want it to actually be a weakness.

My strengths are my problem solving skills, I can look at a problem and investigate what is going on and find a solution. If its a technology I haven’t used before I can read up about it and find out how it works and then use it to solve the issue.

My weakness is my interpersonal skills, I am much better at analysing a computer issue than figuring out why one member of my staff is not performing. This is an area that is improving over the last few years I have taken on more responsibility over people and I am learning more about getting the best out of them.

Technical Questions

I have never included technical questions in one of my interviews until recently and I think it is a good way to gauge ability. I often come out of an interview unsure how well that person would perform under the stresses of my job. If I have something down on paper it is a good start.

But the personality that comes through during the interview must also be considered as most knowledge can be taught.

A good technical question I have used in the past is write a paragraph explaining DHCP. This question illustrates what their knowledge is like for an essential technology, but it also indicates what their writing style is like. Could the passage they have written be given to a Director or Client?

Good IT people need both technical knowledge and the ability to communicate at all levels, I still struggle to know if someone is good or not and even sometimes if I am any good.

Boldly go where no SQL has gone, 2

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 20:00:45 +0000

Let’s continue looking at a database schema for storing details of every Star Trek Episode. If you are new to databases, a schema is just the design of the structure of the database.

We have three tables, Episode, EpisodeWriter and Writer. See my last post for more details of these. It has been suggested that a slight change to this structure would enable storage of more of the creative staff.

Lets rename Writer and call it Credit, and rename EpisodeWriter and call it EpisodeCredit. Now any creative staff member involved in an episode can be stored in the Credit table. Lets alter EpisodeCredit and add an extra column called CreditType. CreditType is just a text field that stores the role that creative person had on that episode, it can be anything from Director, Writer, Actor, Science Consultant etc.

We now have the ability to store information relating to the episode in the episode table and any creative people in the credit table. What else can we add to the database? How about a table that can be used to record when an episode was last watched. I am probably weird but sometimes I want to watch a Star Trek episode that I like but I haven’t watched in ages.

The last watched table is really simple and just have a datetime field and episodeId. This can be further expanded to have a userId field if you wanted to keep track of what episodes your friends had been watching.

Another idea could be to tag episodes with certain themes or topics like Klingon episodes or meaning of life episodes or Kirk talks a computer to death episodes. Again this is fairly simple table containing TagName and EpisodeId.

Beyond SQL: to boldly go further

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Sun, 12 Oct 2014 20:00:45 +0000

My last post proved quite popular so I am wondering if I can combine a post about IT and Star Trek.

Years ago I used to have lists of Star Trek episodes, which included such information like original air date, production number, episode title and brief description.

One thing that was hard to keep track of was how many episodes were written by a specific person. This is because episodes are written by multiple people. A column called writer would then need to contain multiple people, another option would be to have columns called writer1, writer2 etc. This wouldn’t help either as you wouldn’t know which column a specific writer had been saved in.

The relationship between writer and episode is known as a many to many relationship. An episode can have many writers and a writer can have written many episodes. To achieve this structure in a SQL database you will need three database tables as it is not possible to create a many to many join between two tables. The first table will contain all the episodes, the second table will contain all the writers, the third table known as a junction table, will contain the relationship between the two.

Let’s do an example so we can see how this would work. Gene Roddenberry creator of Star Trek wrote the pilot episode ‘The Cage’. So Gene would be added to the writers table with an id of 1 and The Cage would be added to the episode table with an id of 1. In the junction table, it has two columns episode and writer, so we would enter 1 and 1 into these columns.

Select * from Episode e
Join EpisodeWriter ew on e.id = ew.EpisodeId
Join Writer w on w.id = ew.WriterId

But if Gene Coon and Gene Roddenberry had writing credits on The Cage we would need to add Gene Coon to the writing table and add an extra entry to the episodewriter table.

I am going to do more posts based on this as I expand the database structure to include other information, I may go on to create stored procedures for bringing back certain information or I may use this as an example to talk about coding a user interface.

Destination Star Trek

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Sun, 05 Oct 2014 20:00:45 +0000

As a break from my usual topics I am going to talk about what I did over the weekend.

I am a huge star trek fan, so me and my wife Laura went to Destination Star Trek, a convention held in London. This is a picture of us in costume, my wife created a tribble costume (A tribble is an alien race that just consists of a ball of fur) and I am wearing an original series captains uniform. We had a great time.

There are several things that made this trip special.

Friends: After the last convention I remember thinking how much better the convention would be with a group of friends. Shortly afterwards I started listening to the trekmate podcast, eventually this lead to me helping out with their website and making friends via twitter with many of the hosts. This weekend was the first time I met up with them and it was great to put faces to names (or twitter names)
Writers and Directors: Star Trek has a great philosophy. In the future human beings will put their differences aside and work together to explore the galaxy, this is one reason why Star Trek is so popular even after almost 50 years. This philosophy has been created by the writers and other creative staff over the years. My favourite Star Trek film is Wrath of Khan which was directed by Nicholas Meyer, this weekend I got my DVD signed by him and was able to tell him how I still enjoyed that film over 30 years after it was made. He said that he really appreciated me saying that. Listening to his talk later on, it was fascinating to hear his insights into making my favourite film. It is the writers and directors that make our favourite characters who they are, the actors themselves aren’t allowed to ad lib, all they do is flesh them out with a bit of emotion or a mannerism, it is the writer that create our favourite lines or situations that we remember.
Seven of Nine: During my teenage years I had lots of posters of Seven on my walls. Seven of Nine was the ex-borg that walked around the ship in a skin tight catsuit, but she was also highly intelligent and continued to explore what it was to be human. It was great to have my photo taken with her, even if it was rushed due to the large number of people that wanted their picture taken.
Trivia: On the Friday of the convention, Laura took part in the beginners trivia challenge, she won. On Saturday I took part in the intermediate trivia challenge, I did really badly only got 3 correct, On Sunday I took part in the captain level challenge and I won. I really wasn’t expecting that, after I did so badly the day before. Thanks Marc Stamper and Destination Star Trek for organising that it was great fun, and also fun to meet the other trekkies who I had been competing against via twitter.
Party!: On Saturday night we went to a party, we had Romulan Ale to drink, we had some of the actors performing songs (James Darren was particularly good), and some of the actors mingled with fans, it was great to see the actors relaxing and if you were lucky you could chat to them, I asked Vaughn Armstrong how he was enjoying the music, he loved it.

This is just a taste of what I got up to, there was lots more, like seeing alien costumes, listening to talks, sitting on a mockup of the bridge. Only one way to end this post, Live Long and Prosper!

Windows 9 or do I mean 10

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 20:00:45 +0000

Like many systems administrators I watched as the news came out yesterday about the latest version of windows. What would it be like? What would it be called? Would it be better or worse than previous versions?

I was shocked when the name of the new operating system was revealed to be Windows 10. What really!? At first I though someone had tweeted a photoshopped image of the press conference, but no it was really going to be called Windows 10.

Windows 10 is the next operating system to be released after windows 8, many had been calling it windows 9 or windows Threshold.

Microsoft has never had a fixed naming convention for its OSes, so should we really be that surprised at its new name.

Windows 1.0 (1985)
Windows 2.0 (1987)
Windows 3.0 (1990)
Windows 95 (1995)
Windows 98 (1998)
Windows ME (2000)
Windows XP (2001)
Windows Vista (2007)
Windows 7 (2009)
Windows 8 (2012)
Windows 10 (2015)
Windows 11 (2021)

One reason Microsoft may have gone with with Windows 10 is because they wanted to signify that the coming Windows release would be the last “major” Windows update. What does it mean to be the last major update?

If you look at the list of OSes above you will see that between XP and Vista was a huge 6 years, this gap is/has caused a huge headache for IT professionals (me included). Software was written for XP because that is all that was available, when XP moved out of support earlier this year it caused loads as problems as people tried to get this software to work on more modern OSes.

If windows 10 is around for a long time we may end up with a similar situation to XP, in that loads of software will run only on it and cause problems if you try and port it to whatever comes next. I am only a trainee developer so I don’t know what is involved with building an OS, but I would imagine there must be things that are very difficult or almost impossible to fix without ripping them out and starting again which is what happens when a new version of an OS is written.

Only time will tell if Windows 10 really is the last version of windows and what will happen to the OS in the future. What ever the case I am downloading a preview so I can have a look (I want my start menu back!)