Process and thread are two basic concepts of operating system, but they are a bit abstract which cannot be  mastered easily.There is an analogy which explains these concepts very well.1. The kernel of the computer is CPU, it handles all the computing tasks, it's like a factory and will run all the time.2. Assume there is power limitation for the factory, it can only supply to one unit once,i.e, when one unit is working, other units must stop and wait. The meaning behind this is that each CPU can handle only one task at once.3. Process likes the unit in the factory, it represents the singl...

Some people ask a file is being written by one process and they want to check this process, but they cannot find the process even with sof.This question is very common and there are many solutions, here we introduce a straightforward method. In Linux, each file will be stored on one device and of course there will be a relative inode, then we can use vfs.write to know who is writing the inode on one specified device continuously. Luckily there is inodewatch.stp in the installation package of systemtap, it locates at /usr/local/share/doc/systemtap/examples/io. It is used foe above.Let take a lo...

The core Perl community—if you care to draw lines around a group ofpeople who use Perl seriously and call that a community—is like manyother core F/OSS communities. Real work happens on mailing lists and IRC. Iunsubscribed from several mailing lists and deliberately spent as little timeon IRC as possible this year, for various uninteresting reasons. (I haven'teven made it to the Portland Perl Mongersmeetings for several months.)While that's been good for my productivity, it's also produced aninteresting s...

First who we are: account managers and business developers at web design agencies. This process is geared towards bigger agencies, however it can be applied to freelance and smaller shops in theory.The important piecesWeb design projects tend to be unique in nature, however it is important to have a basic process that can be applied in most cases. This process is executed in a linear fashion starting with information and ending in code, but requires iteration loops at each step.Information â€“ The organization of content and data.Design â€“ The face that communicates inform...

Wow, I remember how idealistic I was when I was about to bring on my first employee! After dealing with bad bosses over my career, after doing a whole lot of thinking about how I was going to be a great boss, and after doing a whole lot of reading about how to hire effective people, I was really looking forward to it. I was going to:-- Hire people smarter than myself, who get things done!-- Trust them to do their job, let them do their job and give them enough resources to do it!-- Pay them WELL and offer great benefits! Work at home! Sure, why not?-- Give people second chances! Don't throw ou...

Some years ago, one of my managers used to repeat this "Accenture truism" (or so he designated it): to fix or improve something, first you need the right people, then you need the right processes to help those people work together, then finally you need the right tools to support those processes. People, processes, and tools - in that order.This is even more true for tech startups than for corporations. As geeks, whenever we face a problem, we often start by looking for a tool to fix it. "Our team isn't communicating properly - let's set up Campfire." "But I don't like Campfire, why don't we u...

“So, what do you do?”Ugh. I hated that question.The truth was that we were trying to start a new venture but we hadn’t really made any progress.But, instead of just muttering something, I would force myself to enthusiastically pitch our current struggling idea. They would nod along but the skepticism on their face was hard to ignore.And, when I was done, they would sometimes hit me with: “So, is that your full-time thing?” Ugh. What that really meant was: you’re trying to tell me that you spend all your time working on that ridiculous idea?The GrindWe left...

Since my last post on technical interviews, I’ve been fairly involved in hiring at Pulse as we grew our team from 6 people when I joined last November to 14 full-timers. In my previous post, I suggested that technical interviews, in the conventional sense, are not especially effective (by technical interviews, I mean the traditional 45 minute coding-at-a-whiteboard and algorithm puzzlers interviews). Those do a great job of telling you how well a candidate is at acing those types of interviews, specifically coding on a whiteboard while someone watches over your shoulder, and how well th...