Eric Binnion – Page 81 – Eric's blog on family, WordPress, software, and other interests.

I’ve got my kid on those learning games.

Apr 3, 2013

@drpeppergaming for the win!

Mar 17, 2013

I’ve been looking at the possibility of getting an internship this summer, and in the process I have built up a large list of possibilities. I decided I would try to compile some of these so other Computer Science majors may find it easier to land an internship this summer.

*Note – Many of these are big companies and/or well-known startups. Get your resume and/or website in shape before you consider applying. I also recommend building up several of the following.

Recommend Social Websites

Twitter – Forget Facebook. If you’re looking to build social connections, Twitter is the way to go since most tech people use it to conversate. Twitter is also the way I got my job.
Github – Github is quickly becoming�the�way to get noticed online for programmers. Sure, maybe you don’t have any good ideas that you want to publish. Well, in that case, find something you love, fork it, and contribute. No excuses. Looking for something to fork? Check out my latest project.
LinkedIn – I love LinkedIn because it acts as a central place to put all of my work history and certifications for others to see.
Stack Overflow – As most of you probably know, Stack Overflow is a great place to get your coding questions answered. As a matter of fact, I got my implementation of the Haversine formula from there! But, if you decide to start answering questions, you can build ‘reputation’ that looks good to potential employers. This is one thing that Jorin mentioned.
Coderbits – Coderbits is a great way to show potential employers a snapshot of your programming skills. It creates graphs and gives you badges for certain achievements, essentially gamifying the process of learning to develop.

The List of Internships

Made In New York – List of ~500 Internet companies based in NYC. Many are hiring.
Google
Amazon
Yahoo
Microsoft
Southwest Airlines
CGI

Want to Add to this List?

If you know of an internship for Computer Science students, feel free to leave a comment below and I will add it to the list. If you’re an employer and have some advice programmers, please contact me or leave a comment with your input.

Feb 21, 2013

Rsync Backup on Ubuntu Server

I work on some servers at my University. Recently our RAID server went out, which means that we could potentially lose all student and professor data across several of our servers. I was tasked with getting some sort of backup going from our main servers to a local backup server.

After thinking about how to approach the problem, Dr. Awesome (Terry Griffin) and I decided that Rsync would be a good way to go, at least until we could get another RAID server.

The Command

Here is the command that I used:

sudo rsync -arv -e "ssh" --rsync-path="sudo rsync" user@host:/home /backup

The Command Explained

Note that I am using sudo on both the local server and remote server. You will need to be in the sudoers file on both machines to use this command. Sudo let’s you run a command as the super user, which essentially means you are awesome and can do anything.

Next, we have rsync with some options. The rysync command is what is used when you want to do a remote sync. Then the options are explained as follows:

a = Archive – This creates a tar of the directory that you want to backup, which allows you to keep permissions, times, etc. in sync.
r = Recursive – This option will allow the rsync to copy throughout the target directory.
v = Verbose – This option will print give you updates on the screen as the rsync command runs.

Other Notes

You can be more specific about what is copied by deciding to put a “/” at the end of a directory or not.

For example, if you a “/” at the end of the source directory, then rsync will copy the content of that folder. If you don’t put a “/” at the end of the source directory, rsync will copy the source directory and its contents.

If you put a “/” at the end of the destination directory, rsync will paste the contents into that directory. When you don’t use “/”, rsync will create a directory and paste the contents within that directory.

Feb 8, 2013