Personal Blog

Yesterday, mere hours after I had finished the IBM phone screen, I got an e-mail from the Apple UCSB relations contact, to congratulate me on passing the first round of on-campus interviews. I now need to schedule a phone interview with Apple in the next two weeks. You can be sure I'll be studying for this one hard as well as the IBM interview.

In the first on-campus interview, I was told that this phone interview (of which there might be more later) will be a technical interview. I'll have to be ready to show off my skills. I'll update with another post once I've had another interview.

Yesterday I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. It was IBM, calling for my inital phone screen. I had expected a confirmation of the interview time by e-mail, as that's what they said I would get, so I was surprised by the call and had to quickly set up my interview material in front of me. This call was a quick half-hour interview, and I was told up front that it was just to make sure I qualify for the position.

The interviewer started by telling me about the internship structure, and saying what she could about the projects, though they're still being thought up. The internship comes with all-inclusive housing. At the end of the period, there's a big event in New York involving project presentations, hiring managers, big execs, and the CEO.

Some of the questions were the kind that could have been asked on an application: "Have you worked for IBM in the past?", "Have you seen any presentations with the Extreme Blue teams or talked to members?", "Are you planning on going to grad school?" and that sort of thing. The rest of the questions were typical semi-technical interview questions: "Tell me about the work you've done in Java outside of class", "Talk about a time when you had to give a convincing presentation", "Have you ever had to deal with customers or clients?", and others.

It wasn't so much of a guided interview. I've been reading some articles of effective phone screening, and this one went with the antipatterns listed by Steve Yegge. Still, it was just a quick screen to make sure I wasn't lying on my application or a complete idiot. I just talked about what I could think of, related to what I was asked. Having notes in front of me and not having to worry about my appearance (nervous movements, making eye contact, sitting up straight) helped my responses and my nervousness a bit. When we got to the inevitable question, "Do you have any questions for me?" I was able to scroll down on my notes onscreen and read off a suitable question, which turned out to be, "What sort of projects are in the works; can you tell me more of what you know about the projects for this year?" It came out pretty well.

Like I said, the interview was simple enough that she could decide immediately if I had "passed" the criteria for that round of interviewing. She told me I had passed. The next step is to get online and take the IPATO (Information Processing Aptitude Test Online), which looks to be a one-hour timed test involving logic and math skills. They are currently contacting my references, and once they hear back and I've taken the test, I will be scheduled for a two-hour phone-and-IM technical interview. That should be interesting.

While I was away for the Thanksgiving break, the /home drive on my server (named hull) decided to die. I was able to unmount the drive and create a temporary empty /home so that hull could continue running without errors in the meantime, but I was also unable to access anything on the original /home partition. My plan was to find a good time to take hull down and remove the defective drive for recovery later.

Before I could take hull down, my friend told me he was selling a 250 GB Seagate drive he had, and he'd offer it to me at ten dollars off the eBay price just so he wouldn't have to deal with eBay to get rid of it. It turned out to be a brand new, never-opened SATA drive, and I took it off his hands for a considerable discount over Newegg's price.

I decided I'd add in that new drive at the same time as I removed the defective drive. Then I got to thinking that I shouldn't waste downtime, so I'd give hull its major upgrade for the year. I got onto Newegg and bought another Seagate 250 GB drive of the same type, a gigabit ethernet card, and a gigabit ethernet switch.

I did the upgrade a few days ago, late at night. I was stumped briefly as to why the new drives weren't being detected, even after I'd set up the SATA module correctly. Turns out I had disabled the onboard SATA ports in the BIOS long ago, so it was a quick fix. Now hull is running two RAID arrays: the new /home partition is on a 40 GB RAID 1 array, and the four 250 GB drives are all in a RAID 5 array totaling 750 GB. I was impressed with the speed of the RAID 5 array - since it's software RAID, I was expecting poor write performance, but it turns out to write at about 60 MB/s and read at 80 MB/s.

I was able to get the defective drive into a USB enclosure, and from there I was able to mount it on the server and copy all the data off it. NFS speeds over gigabit ethernet from my MacBook to the server are nearly three times what they were before (but not ten times more because, for one, it's all still on the same PCI bus, which is limited to 133 MB/s total between the drives, network, and other devices, and I haven't done any NFS client/server tweaking for th faster maximum speeds).