beer planet

Peteris Krumins is nothing short of a technical genius. Every single one of his blog posts is so detailed, one can write a book about it. He blogs about Linux, programming, and other tech stuff on his blog http://www.catonmat.net/.

A short while ago, Peteris posted his very thorough experience interviewing at Google. Needless to say, the level of detail is astounding. Unfortunately, he didn’t get the job but the post is very positive and informative. Here is the gist and a short excerpt:

• There were 3 phone interviews and 5 on-site interviews.
• Peteris flew in all the way from Latvia, fully sponsored by Google. They paid for his flight, hotel, transportation, and food – brilliant!
• The interviews were very technical, with an emphasis on algorithms.
• Google’s preferred language seems to be C/C++, though I know they use Python extensively as well.
• If you’re interviewing, you better be very solid in computer science theory and data structures. At the same time, they treat every error in code very seriously, so even memory leaks are not acceptable. In fact, it looks like a few such mistakes cost Peteris his potential job.
• The questions included data structures, networking, OS/filesystem, algorithms, and past work experience.
• Google, of course, treated Peteris to a great lunch.

In order to prepare for his interviews, Peteris reviewed lots of both theoretical and practical problems. He posted a great list of books:

• TCP/IP Illustrated
• MIT’s Introduction to Algorithms + his notes on algorithms
• Building Scalable Web Sites
• C++ Cookbook
• Python Cookbook
• Perl Cookbook

to which I can myself add

• The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference

and articles

• Google C++ Style Guide <—excellent style guide, every C++ programmer needs to read it
• Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture
• Algorithm Tutorials on TopCoder
• Corey Trager’s Google Interview
• Rod Hilton’s Google Interview
• Ben Watson’s Google Interview
• Shaun Boyd’s Google Interview
• How I Blew My Google Interview by Henry Blodget
• Get That Job at Google by Steve Yegge
• Tales from the Google’s interview room
• Google Interview Questions
• Google Interview Questions — Fun Brain Teasers!
• The Google File System
• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
• MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
• Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

Read the full experience at http://www.catonmat.net/blog/my-job-interview-at-google.

Thanks, Peteris and good luck on your next interview.

I’d like to share this relatively new video that shows Google Android’s mutli-tasking capabilities and the seamless integration of these capabilities. Hey, it’s got a copy/paste too (eat that, iPhone!). Android is an OS that’s got a clue. I applaud Google developers for thinking ahead.

You can view more videos from the Android/Google developers here.

Updated: September 5th, 2008

So Google Chrome - Google's attempt at an open source browser, came out yesterday and I took it out for a spin. At its heart is the Webkit engine (also open source) and Google Gears, powered by SQLite (can MySQL rival SQLite in applications like this?). Here are my thoughts.

• Fast - Chrome loads extremely fast, blazing even. Granted, my Firefox would probably load fast if I didn't have any addons as well. Sites like Amazon or Digg load very fast. New tabs open instantly.
• Slow - http://www.blinkx.com/videos/channel:itn, seems like the combination of flash and html (or JS) on one page makes scrolling and redrawing quite slow.
• Very fluid design - I love how the tabs flow around when you drag them or make them pop in or out, I love how fluid animation and resizing is.
• Internal task manager - an absolutely brilliant idea. Since each tab and plugin get their own process, they don't affect each other. Any freezes are isolated to the process itself, so the days of hung browsers because of some buggy javascript should be gone gone (I'll actually have to see how well it works first).

• Great Google search integration and overall Firefox3-like url bar behavior.
• The word search functionality is amazing - best out of all browsers. It's incredibly fast, even on large pages, highlights all the matches, with the current one in orange, and more importantly, gives count (finally!). The search popup complements the fluidity perfectly.

• History - looks great and has a timeline style. It's like reading a journal.

• View Source - again, best in class. Highlighting and line numbers by default. Url access style: view-source:http://digg.com. Search spread highlighting on the right. It's close to perfect, without using any plugins.

• My bookmarks, where art though? Where's the bookmarks menu? I know the homepage has them, and there's a pretty hidden way to make the bookmarks bar appear all the time (right click on it while on the home page and check 'Always show bookmarks bar' but that's not what I want. I like placing many-many bookmarks named with 1 or 2 letters onto the bookmarks bar (I found a way to emulate the behavior in the screenshot below). How can I create duplicates of the same bookmark in different places? It seems you can only bookmark in one. The interface to get around managing the bookmarks isn't well thought out, you can get to certain places only the certain way. How do you export/import bookmarks after the initial installation (I chose to skip mine)? Edit: Apparently, you can't yet.

• The homepage button is missing (though it can be enabled by Options->Show Home button on the toolbar). Why is it not on by default?

• I also enabled the following option right away (the main reason I use TabMix Plus for Firefox):

• Scrolling is very choppy and goes in huge jumps on my laptop (not the case in Firefox).
• Status bar - why do you disappear automatically when I get close to you? You can be so useful and display so much useful info? Stop disappearing!
• What with the Vista-style buttons? I have Win2k menus, which I find a lot simpler and easier on the eye. Why not inherit the window style?

• No Linux support. Hopefully coming soon.

• No addons supported or announced yet.

In conclusion, I understand the browser is very new and will probably go through many facelifts, UI changes, bug fixes, and enhancements but it has a lot to cover and if it's going to try to rival the giants, it better fix some things fast. I personally won't start using it until some addons start showing up, like the AI Roboform (AI Roboform has actually responded to this guy about such addon possibility) and Adblock Plus ones. However, for occasional browsing, it's great. Give it a spin.

As Matt Cutts (Google's SEO and search quality expert) wrote in his blog entry a few days ago, Google PageRank updates are underway. Google updates PR (Page Rank) quite rarely – every three months or so, and it's the most important thing a website operator should be concerned with when it comes to site promotion and popularity.

I'm happy to report that Beer Planet's PR went up yet again on this update, from 3 to 4 and my buddy Thaya's PR went up from 2 to 3. He's been blogging a lot more about WordPress, and I think he'll surpass me very soon, thanks to his ingenious plugins.

Is it time to check your site's PR? You can use the Google Toolbar, Firefox plugins, like Search Status, or a range of websites that provide this number, like this one.

Updated: June 1st, 2008

I think this is going to be really neat: you walk around the streets of San Francisco, for example, with your Android powered phone, en route to your destination 20 blocks away.

You whip out your phone, go to Google Maps, pull up the StreetView (remember this?), which zeroes in on your location using a built-in GPS, and then changes as you move the phone around using the built-in compass.

You then virtually walk the city, looking around, without actually moving an inch (looking for the closest ATM, restaurant, etc, hint-hint?).

Without further ado, let's have a look at this video from Google's I/O Conference for a demonstration?

Visual voicemail and slide zoom touch interface from Apple, compass from Google, … from Sun? What's next? My Sprint contract is up and I am definitely looking forward to Q3 and Q4 of this year!

Edit: I found a nice related video by G4TV. Here it is: