I spent much of this weekend aparment hunting. It was a blast and I’m really excited to be an adult with a real job, an apartment, a puppy, and of course, my fiance. I’ll have more details later but I think it’s safe to say that the real world is awesome!
Archive for February, 2007
Apartment Hunting
Sunday, February 25th, 2007No www Here
Sunday, February 25th, 2007I just flicked the switch to redirect all content from www.benjamingolub.com to benjamingolub.com (try it out yourself!). The idea is that the www. in the front is not required, it’s just fluff. The argument is a little flawed:
Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.
I get their point…but thats why we have MX records for domain.com to point to mail.domain.com. Web hosting doesn’t do this. I’m mainly doing it for cosmetic reasons but I also gain some SEO (search engine optimization) along the way.
How to do it?
I dropped the following in a .htaccess file (it didn’t work directly in my vhosts.conf for some reason, there was an extra / everywhere):
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.benjamingolub\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://benjamingolub.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
And that’s it. Make sure that this bit of code comes before any wordpress redirects or you might have problems. Now all www.benjamingolub.com points to benjamingolub.com. Why would I want to do this?
It’s Prettier
I decided that the title of my site would be benjaminGolub.com and definitely didn’t like it as www.benjaminGolub.com. It’s shorter and, while some people might be confused, they can still type in the www. to reach my site. But what, besides being pretty, other benifits are there?
Only One Link Target
Google (and any other search engine) sees a link from www.benjamingolub.com and benjamingolub.com as going to 2 different sites. So if half of my incoming links go to www.benjamingolub.com and half to benjamingolub.com then I’m effectively halving my potential pagerank; that is not good! By redirecting with the code 301 I am telling Google that it is moved permanently. Google is smart enough to understand that benjamingolub.com is the preferred site and all links to www.benjamingolub.com should count. This will take some time to propogate through the internet. Currently if you come across my site in Google it will link you to www.benjamingolub.com, but the next time they re-index this should be fixed.
No Duplicate Content
Another benefit of telling Google it’s been moved permanently is that this prevents them from seeing duplicate content. Before Google would think that www.benjamingolub.com/some-story and benjamingolub.com/some-story were different pages with the exact same content; this is a big no-no! You’re basically doubling the number of pages while keeping the content exactly the same, which makes my blog look a little bit like a spam site. By issuing a 301 redirect I’m effectively saying “this content has been moved permanently, go here instead” and your browser and Google’s spider are smart enough to follow my redirection.
So, in conclusion, I get a prettier url, consistency, and no duplicate content. Hurray!
lshw – LiSt HardWare
Sunday, February 18th, 2007Nearly everyday I learn a few new tricks with Linux. Yesterday I learned about the lshw (LiSt HardWare) command. It lets you find out everything about your current hardware. To use it just type:
sudo lshw
To export as html:
sudo lshw -html > name-of-html.html
To export as xml:
sudo lshw -xml > name-of-xml.xml
This seems like a very handy tool; especially when you start building frankenstein computers out of random parts. If you don’t run it as the super-user you still get results but not as much and it issues a warning telling you that you should run it as the super-user.
Here’s my Inspiron 700m.
Google: Can I get my $100 back?
Friday, February 16th, 2007Preface: This is not a bitter story about my hate for Google; I actually love Google and use nearly all of their services. I did not receive an offer from them but I did learn a hell of a lot about interviewing, algorithms, and Google from my adventure. I’m just hoping that by writing this story I might get some attention and then maybe get paid pack for my journey.
On November 10th I drove from Cleveland Ohio to Pittsburgh Pennsylvania for an Interview with Google. Here is a link to the approximate Google Maps route I took. The interview went very well; everyone was really energetic, positive, and extremely intelligent. They all asked great questions that I’ve never been asked at any other interview; unlike my Microsoft interview where I actually knew the answers to some algorithms by heart since I’ve been asked them so many times. The office in Pittsburgh is very bright, cheerful, and “Googly”. They’ve got a projector that shows a flyby using Google Earth of Pittsburgh with buildings and everything, pretty neat. But that’s not what this article is about.
Here is an excerpt from the “Google Candidate Remibursement Policy”:
If you use your own car for travel, we’ll reimburse you $0.375 per mile. You’re responsible for fines, tickets, court-dates, bad karma, and all other expenses incurred as a result of traffic violations when traveling for interviews—please drive safely and kindly.
Sweet, so from my link it looks like Google owes me 134 * 2 * $0.375 = $100.50 exactly. Now this money won’t make or break the bank but I am a college student and I could certainly use it for bills/gas/food.
Another excerpt:
Send all your original receipts to your recruiting coordinator, and don’t panic if you don’t receive your check the very next day—it takes about 8-10 weeks for it to arrive.
Ok, 8 – 10 weeks. But you can’t very well give a receipt for gas right? I mean, who’s to say I had a full tank when I left but that tank got filled up weeks ago, does Google pay for that gas? So I sent an email to the recruiter on November 16th and the response was:
I can take care of that for you. But what I’ve done in the past is print out directions from your house to the office from www.googlemaps.com. =)
Fast forward to January 5th, still no check. I sent another email asking about the status and confirming the address used to send the payment. Here’s that response:
I’ll check to see if your expenses were processed as well as the status and will follow up. Thanks for your message!
Have a great weekend!
Fast forward to today, February 16th, 14 weeks after my interview. I never got a follow up from my recruiter so I sent another email checking in on the status. If they respond today I’ll edit this entry with the body of the email.
Please digg this story; maybe I’ll get some attention from Google that way.
UPDATE:
Here’s my latest response from Google:
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to locate your reimbursement through our files. I’m afraid what might have happened was during your interviews, there was a huge shuffle within the reimbursement group; therefore, there could have been a disconnect some where. But we will get you your reimbursement! I’m really sorry for the inconvenience, but would you have copies of your receipts? If not, I can try another route, by contacting the airline and hotel you used. If you can refresh my memory, that would be great. I have records of you telling me you wanted to fly, but then I found an email of you stating you drove to the Google office. I’m sorry I can’t remember exactly what happened.
Again, I’m really sorry Ben. But I will get you your reimbursement.
We’re getting somewhere, thanks Google!
Fast tracking Linux
Sunday, February 11th, 2007This school year I’ve made a complete transition to Linux. It started out with a desire to learn python and an idea for a celebrity gossip rss aggregator that might generate some ad revenue. So I bought an old desktop for $60, installed openSUSE 10.1, and started tinkering. I setup a wedding blog/gallery for my fiance and I. I taught myself some python and basically recreated the Planet Feed Reader since I was not aware of it at the time. But I was still under the impression that I was never going to be able to switch my personal laptop over to Linux.
Fast forward to finals week. I learn about Ubuntu, realize many of my issues with openSUSE (primarily YaST) don’t exist, and try out a live cd on my laptop. I’m hooked. I was holding out for Windows Vista but when I learned that Aero would not run on my Inspiron 700m with it’s Intel integrated graphics yet Beryl had no problem with it I completely forgot about Vista. Soon I had Kubuntu installed on my laptop, discovered some terrible issues it has with laptop screens (it forgets some settings, leaving you with a backlight that defaults back to turning off after 5 hours which can kill your battery life), and promptly switched to Ubuntu.
I thought I would hate Gnome but I actually found myself right at home. I’ve found an app for everything I did in Windows (including syncing my iPod, development, podcasts, photo management, etc) and even some that I never thought was possible (wiki-style note taking with Tomboy for class notes is amazing). I’ll get into these in later articles though. The one thing I can’t access is a windows/mac only service for listening to classical music, but I just use a VMWare instance of Windows XP for that.
I’m still learning and I’m enjoying every step of the way.
