YouTube Downloader

You may notice, a number of my posts make use of the youtube-dl utility.  Specifically, I used this to download source videos to show FFMpeg video conversion.

I normally install youtube-dl via the Ubuntu package manager:

$ sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

But, this version is typically 'well seasoned', read that as old.

Alternatively, since the utility is authored in Python, you can install it via Python PIP:

$ sudo pip install youtube-dl

The PIP version is often a bit dated as well, so occasionally it doesn't work with YouTube.

An alternative means is to install the latest version, directly from http://yt-dl.org/update

$ sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
$ sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
$ hash -r

Test it with your favorite YouTube video:

$ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xUFQKxdlxE -o input.mp4

Happy Hunting!

Lack of Professionalism in Job Searches

Suppose you’re in the process of filling a position. You sort through volumes of resumes and find a candidate that seems to be a good fit. You establish contact and while you don’t get a prompt response you are understanding when they return your call after a couple days have past. Their skills look like a solid match and you’re eager to fill this new role on your team, working on a cutting edge technology. You schedule an interview and begin preparing for it, you make time out of your incredibly busy schedule, get your ducks in a row and eagerly wait for your 9 o’clock on-site interview.

The candidate arrives 10 minutes late, but ‘hey, it happens’, the candidate seems a bit disorganized and excuses him/herself mid meeting to take an phone call. During the interview, it becomes clear that the candidate knows little to nothing about your company, what you do, or the products you provide. Let’s say that you look past all these hiccups and take a chance on him/her and extend them an offer. A day goes by, no reply. A week, no reply, two weeks, three…. Finally, you abandon this candidate and start the search process all over again.

No doubt such a behavior is unprofessional and you’d be better off not hiring such a undependable, unreliable, unprofessional candidate; right?

So, why is this level of unprofessionalism been such a trend the past decade for how many companies behave toward job seekers? First impressions are lasting impressions, the interviewing process can be considered the honeymooning period and if you’re not putting your best foot forward what kind of impression are you leaving? If you’re relying on desperate candidates, that day is in the past. Today, unemployment is low and most candidates are gainfully employed, looking for ‘better’ opportunities not simply any opportunity.

Many will defend this unprofessional behavior from behind the ‘we are incredibly busy’ fascade, but that’s often simply an excuse. It’s a matter of priority and if extending your talent pool was a priority you’d simply make the time. Responsive communications in this day in age is simple, can be done at all hours of the night, or drafted and scheduled for working hours. There simply isn’t an excuse for ghosting candidates any more than candidates ghosting companies. Being prompt, prepared and on-time is achievable if you make it a priority in you day, regardless of how busy you may be. Besides, if you’re too busy to hire someone, you’re likely too busy to lead them. Delegate the hiring to a reliable team member, perhaps the same team member that will lead their activities. When interviewing, give the candidate your undivided attention, put down your phone, be on time, and don’t jump in/out of the interview to attend to other matters. You’re all adults, you know this and I shouldn’t need to be telling you it; unfortunately a good deal of companies have forgotten these professional courtesies.

In the end, first encounters can be an early warning sign of disorganized companies, and many candidates will simply walk away from such companies. Early impressions can be a means of separating the wheat from the chaff, filtering good companies from the bad. It really is a matter of being representative of your company during the interview process, if it’s a good place to work then you should represent it as such. Many of my colleagues, as well as myself, have looked past poorly conducted interviews only later to find that the company was a dumpster fire. Then, later regret looking past the early warning signs.

As closely as you are paying attention to the candidate to determine if they are a good fit for your team, the candidate is paying attention to your company to see if it is a good for for them.

Google Archive

Did you know that you can export all your Google artifacts?

https://www.google.com/takeout

Check the items you want to export and kick out a Zip file.

Cheers.

System Forensics -- Locating Relevant Log Files

Every once in a while you'll get an assignment to figure out something about a system that no one knows anything about.  Someone will point you toward an executable, like a system daemon and wish you on your way with a hearty 'good luck'.  Now what?

A good start would be to take a peek at any relevant log files, but how do you know where to look?  An intellectual game of hide and seek begins.

Perhaps the process status will provide you with a clue; a log directory or log file may be specified in the command line arguments.  If not, what's next?

You can continue by seeing if they use the typical system log conventions, examining the /var/log/ log files for traces of relevant events.  If that path proved unfruitful....then what?

The 'list open files' utility can be a solid next step.  The 'lsof' utility, when provided a process id, will show all files the process is accessing.  A hard-coded log file which may be difficult to locate in the source code (if available) is easily found with this particular utility.  Sorting through the plethora of open file list can take some doing, it's pretty exhaustive and a wealth of information, showing shared libraries the process is using, open sockets, open files,..... If the executable is writing to a log file, it'll be in the lsof file listing.  This comes in extremely handy in finding otherwise elusive log files.

Let's do one quick example; say you know nothing about the apache service but want to know what log files it's using.

root@river:~# ps -aef | grep apache
root      1467     1  0 May25 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data  9948  1467  0 20:59 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data  9949  1467  0 20:59 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

We'll focus on the process 1467.

root@river:~# lsof -p 1467
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfsd-fuse file system /run/user/1000/gvfs
      Output information may be incomplete.
COMMAND  PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF      NODE NAME
apache2 1467 root  cwd    DIR    8,1     4096         2 /
apache2 1467 root  rtd    DIR    8,1     4096         2 /
apache2 1467 root  txt    REG    8,1   662560 114558879 /usr/sbin/apache2
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    47600 120590386 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.23.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    47648 120590377 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_nis-2.23.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    93128 120590384 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnsl-2.23.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    35688 120590392 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_compat-2.23.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    22536 114821038 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_status.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    14344 114833078 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_setenvif.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    34832 114833033 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_negotiation.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    63504 114833026 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_mpm_event.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    18440 114833076 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_mime.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    18440 114821057 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_filter.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    10248 114833082 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_env.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    14344 114821225 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_dir.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1   104864 120586429 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1.2.8
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    34824 114833080 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_deflate.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    38928 114833054 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_autoindex.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    10256 114832998 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_authz_user.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    10256 114821227 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_authz_host.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    22544 114833022 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_authz_core.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    10256 114833069 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_authn_file.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    10256 114833074 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_authn_core.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    14352 114833010 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_auth_basic.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    14344 114833059 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_alias.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    10256 114833015 /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_access_compat.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    14608 120590365 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.23.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    18976 120586259 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libuuid.so.1.3.0
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1   166032 120586445 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexpat.so.1.6.0
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1    39224 120590381 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypt-2.23.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1  1868984 120590390 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.23.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1   138696 120590374 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread-2.23.so
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1   204936 114559448 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libapr-1.so.0.5.2
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1   159488 114559436 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libaprutil-1.so.0.5.4
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1   456632 120586274 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3.13.2
apache2 1467 root  mem    REG    8,1   162632 120590373 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.23.so
apache2 1467 root  DEL    REG    0,5              22729 /dev/zero
apache2 1467 root    0r   CHR    1,3      0t0         6 /dev/null
apache2 1467 root    1w   CHR    1,3      0t0         6 /dev/null
apache2 1467 root    2w   REG    8,1      279  93324825 /var/log/apache2/error.log
apache2 1467 root    3u  sock    0,8      0t0     20189 protocol: TCP
apache2 1467 root    4u  IPv6  20190      0t0       TCP *:http (LISTEN)
apache2 1467 root    5r  FIFO   0,10      0t0    159430 pipe
apache2 1467 root    6w  FIFO   0,10      0t0    159430 pipe
apache2 1467 root    7w   REG    8,1        0  93336006 /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log
apache2 1467 root    8w   REG    8,1        0  93323356 /var/log/apache2/access.log

 BAM!  The last two 7 lines show 3 log files worth investigating.  It also shows shared libraries, open sockets,..... The utility essentially examines the /proc virtual file system, which you could do instead if you wished, but lsof is significantly more convenient.

Happy seeking, hope this helps.  It's particularly been useful to me these past few days on a business-logic seeking mission of my own.