Two men running

Adam and Bob have exact speeds for walking and running - neither Adam outwalks Bob, nor Bob outruns Adam.

But for a given distance, Adam runs half the time, then walks another half. Bob runs half the distance, then walks another half.

If they were to compete, which distance would Adam win at, and which distances would Bob be the winner at?

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54 screening questions for Windows admin

  1. What is Active Directory?
  2. What is LDAP?
  3. Can you connect Active Directory to other 3rd-party Directory Services? Name a few options.
  4. Where is the AD database held? What other folders are related to AD?
  5. What is the SYSVOL folder?
  6. Name the AD NCs and replication issues for each NC
  7. What are application partitions? When do I use them
  8. How do you create a new application partition
  9. How do you view replication properties for AD partitions and DCs?
  10. What is the Global Catalog?

    11. More interview questions »

    Posted in: Windows | Comments(29)

10 questions on MySQL speed-up and optimizations

Jay Pipes, author of Pro MySQL, on his blog posts 10 questions and answers dealing with MySQL speed optimizations.

  1. Which will be faster out of these two queries - one with OR or one with IN?
  2. Where does MyISAM cache table records?
  3. Which will be faster out of queries with explicit INNER JOIN and implicit one?
  4. Is InnoDB faster/better than MyISAM?
  5. Is CHAR faster than VARCHAR?
  6. Is VARCHAR(80) faster than VARCHAR(255)?
  7. Are there performance issues when joining tables from different storage engines?
  8. If I change a derived table to a view, will performance increase?
  9. If I see Using temporary; Using filesort” in the Extra column of EXPLAIN output, does that mean a temporary table is created on disk?
  10. Is it possible to do a FULL OUTER JOIN in MySQL?

Posted in: Database, Web dev | Comments(1)

Search engine marketer questions

Some would say that a position of a search engine marketer or optimizer is not a very technical one. True, compared to Linux kernel hacker, the technical knowledge required for entering SEO field seems simpler, but when the site is built and serving pages, you’re very likely to have SEO go over the site structure and reprogram essential parts of it. Anyway, check out 55 search engine optimization questions, and either test yourself, or use them whenever you’re interested in hiring a search engine marketer.

Posted in: General, Web dev | Comments(0)

Topics for networking interview

These questions were sent in from IBM. They discuss various telecom and networking topics.

  1. OSPF
    1. Describe OSPF in your own words.
    2. OSPF areas, the purpose of having each of them
    3. Types of OSPF LSA, the purpose of each LSA type
    4. What exact LSA type you can see in different areas
    5. How OSPF establishes neighboor relation, what the stages are
    6. If OSPF router is stucked in each stage what the problem is and how to troubleshoot it
    7. OSPF hierarchy in the single or multi areas. Cool OSPF behavior in broadcast and nonbroadcast
    8. Draw the diagram of typical OSPF network and explain generally how it works, DR, BDR, election, ASBR, ABR, route redistribution and summarization

    More interview questions »

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Simple C++ interview questions

  1. What is the most efficient way to reverse a linklist?
  2. How to sort & search a single linklist?
  3. Which is more convenient - single or double-linked linklist? Discuss the trade-offs? What about XOR-linked linklist?
  4. How does indexing work?
  5. char s[10];
    s="Hello";
    printf(s);
    What will be the output? Is there any error with this code?
  6. What is the difference between
    char s[]="Hello";
    char *s="Hello";
    Please give a clear idea on this?
  7. Why do we pass a reference for copy constructors? If it does shallow copy for pass by value (user defined object), how will it do the deep copy?
  8. What is the difference between shallow copy & deep copy?
  9. What is the difference between strcpy and memcpy? What rule should we follow when choosing between these two?
  10. If we declare two variable and two applications are using the same variable, then what will its value be, will it be the same?

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12 general questions from an international company

A TechInterviews reader sent in the questions he faced at a major global company. The questions are fairly generic:

  1. Tell me about your analytical skills, cite some examples of how you have used your skills in the past.
  2. What are some of your long term goals?
  3. What are your short term goals?
  4. Where do you see yourself five years from now?
  5. Tell me why I should hire you?
  6. What does customer service mean to you?
  7. Why did you leave your last job?
  8. Describe your definition of a team player?
  9. Sight examples of when in the past you have proven to be a team player?
  10. How would you handle a conflict with another employee?
  11. What do you believe you can gain by working at this company?
  12. Give me some examples of times in the past, when you were able to avoid a conflict, by thinking on your feet. Tell what you know about this company.

Posted in: General | Comments(0)

Windows admin interview questions (includes Vista)

  1. What is Active Directory?
  2. What is LDAP?
  3. Can you connect Active Directory to other 3rd-party Directory Services? Name a few options.
  4. Where is the AD database held? What other folders are related to AD?
  5. What is the SYSVOL folder?
  6. Name the AD NCs and replication issues for each NC
  7. What are application partitions? When do I use them
  8. How do you create a new application partition
  9. How do you view replication properties for AD partitions and DCs?
  10. What is the Global Catalog?

    11. More interview questions »

    Posted in: Windows | Comments(2)

Linux application programming questions

  1. Explain the difference between a static library and a dynamic library? - Static library is linked into the executable, while a dynamic library (or shared object) is loaded while the executable has started.
  2. How do you create a static library? - If you have a collection of object (.o) files, you can do it by running ar command. Generally a static library has a .a extension, and you can link it into an executable by providing -l libraryname to gcc.
  3. Where should the developed libraries be installed on the system? - GNU recommends /usr/local/bin for binaries and /usr/local/lib for libraries.
  4. What’s LD_LIBRARY_PATH? - It’s an environment variable that lists all the directories which should be searches for libraries before the standard directories are searched.
  5. How do you create a shared library? - Create the object file with -fPIC for position-independent code, then run gcc with -shared option.
  6. How do you install a shared library? - Run ldconfig in the standard directory that it’s installed in.
  7. What does ldd do? - It shows a list of installed shared libraries.
  8. How do you dynamically load a library in your app? - Use dlopen()
  9. What does nm command do? - It reports the list of symbols in a given library.

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Python interview questions

comp.lang.python group recently had a discussion on which interview questions to ask a candidate, with Tim Chase suggesting the following list (redacted from original to include just Python-related material). As you can see, some generic programming questions and some process questions made the list:

  1. Do they know a tuple/list/dict when they see it?
  2. When to use list vs. tuple vs. dictionary vs. set?
  3. Can they use list comprehensions (and know when not to abuse them?)
  4. Can they use tuple unpacking for assignment?
  5. String building. Do they use “+=” or do they build a list and use .join() to recombine them efficiently?
  6. Truth-value testing questions and observations (do they write “if x == True” or do they just write “if x”)?
  7. Basic file-processing (iterating over a file’s lines)
  8. Basic understanding of exception handling

    9. More interview questions »

    Posted in: Web dev | Comments(0)

Some C++ interview questions

  1. What is a void return type?
  2. How is it possible for two String objects with identical values not to be equal under the == operator?
  3. What is the difference between a while statement and a do statement?
  4. Can a for statement loop indefinitely?
  5. How do you link a C++ program to C functions?
  6. How can you tell what shell you are running on UNIX system?

    7. More interview questions »

    Posted in: C++ | Comments(21)

Perl self-test questions

Dr. Dobb’s Journal in its Linux and open source section is running an article by Emmett Dulaney with 50 Perl questions and answers. The focus is mainly on the knowledge of the language itself with questions like:
- What is the simplest type of data that Perl can work with?
- Which operator can be used to take the bottom item from an array?
- You want to close the directory handle EVAN. Which of the following should you use to accomplish this?
- You want your script to read in a value from the keyboard for a variable named $duo. What do you set $duo equal to in the program to have it read a keyboard value? __________ (Fill in the blank.)
- Your script has just read in a variable from the keyboard and you want to strip that variable of the newline character that came in. What operator should you use to perform this operation?

Answers are available on Dr. Dobb’s Journal site.

Posted in: Unix/Linux, Web dev | Comments(1)

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