kugelfish

During the summer month, our offices are buzzing with young, enthusiastic people from all over the world - a sign that it's intern season. Internships are the closest that academic professions have to the apprenticeship model still common in Germanic countries. Students get to experience professional life for a few months during semester breaks and learn some practical skills that might improve their perspectives of employment, while employers get to build relationships with some of the most promising students before they officially enter the job market. Some employers complain that students don't leave university with the exact skillset that they are currently looking for in their entry level applicants. However the most important skills a good university should teach are the ability to reason, to learn and to understand the underlying scientific foundations of a given field. Many of the practical skills needed to excel in a certain profession are best acquired on the jo...

Since the term has been coined a few years ago, unicorns have become the mythical creature of the venture capital industry: privately held (tech) startups with a valuation of more than a billion dollars. What is a Startup? While indeed extremely rare (about 200 globally), the concept of unicorns helps to clarify what people instinctively mean when they say "Startup" - specially when used as an anglicism in other languages. The most literal definition is a new company. But for that matter, most new companies are restaurants, gas stations and other small business. Or maybe being high-risk? By that definition restaurants qualify as well as many fail within a year. What about being innovative? Most successful innovation is created by large established organizations which have large R&D budgets and who can often attract the top talent in a given field. My favorite definition of a "Startup" is the one by Steve Blank : A startup is an organization formed to se...

Linux is a multi-user, multi-tasking based system, which means that even a computer as small as the Raspberry Pi, can be used by multiple users simultaneously and there can be multiple processes executing (seemingly) all at once. For example, here are all the processes currently running for the user pi: pi@raspberrypi ~ $ ps -fu pi UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD pi        4792  4785  0 Mar11 ?        00:00:04 sshd: pi@pts/0    pi        4793  4792  0 Mar11 pts/0    00:00:04 -bash pi        6137  6130  0 00:30 ?        00:00:00 sshd: pi@pts/1    pi        6138  6137  1 00:30 pts/1    00:00:01 -bash pi        6185  4793  0 00:32 pts/0    00:00:00 tail -f /var/log/mess...

In the previous two episodes about IP networking, we have seen a lot about raw addresses and port-numbers, because that is how the networking stack operates internally. But this is not how we interact with the Internet in real life. Except for trouble-shooting, we don’t typically use raw addresses and IDs but rather names. For example, instead of http://173.194.113.115:80 , we would enter http://www.google.com . In the earliest days of the Internet, people kept a list of name to IP address mappings on each computer connected to the network, similar to having each a copy of a phone book. The remnants of this file still exists today on Linux in /etc/hosts for some special local default addresses. pi@raspberrypi ~ $ cat /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost ::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback 127.0.1.1 raspberrypi Beyond that, it is hardly used for name management except for the smallest networks with only up to a few hosts with static IP addresses. Domain Name System (D...

Today, we are taking a look at the TCP/IP Internet protocols by using a few commands which allow us to see what is going on in the Linux kernel, all the way down to the Ethernet wire. For example, the basic ping command we have seen in a previous post might result in the following sequence of packets sent on the Ethernet port of the Raspberry Pi: ARP, Request who-has 192.168.1.143 tell 192.168.1.148, length 28 ARP, Reply 192.168.1.143 is-at c4:2c:03:1c:f2:2e, length 46 IP 192.168.1.148 > 192.168.1.143: ICMP echo request, id 17785, seq 1, length 64 IP 192.168.1.143 > 192.168.1.148: ICMP echo reply, id 17785, seq 1, length 64 IP 192.168.1.148 > 192.168.1.143: ICMP echo request, id 17785, seq 2, length 64 IP 192.168.1.143 > 192.168.1.148: ICMP echo reply, id 17785, seq 2, length 64 But before we are trying to understand what is going on here, a brief excursion into the history and theory of packet networking. In the 1960ies, researchers were starting to think of ...