Archive for March, 2006
Certifiable Linux Professional
by TBBle on Mar.11, 2006, under CBIT Internet, LCA06, Linux, Programming
My LPI exam results came on Thursday, but I only just read the email...
Score Report for Exam 101 Your Score: 660 Required Passing Score: 500 Status: Pass Test Section Information Percent Correct Section 71% Hardware Architecture 78% Linux Installation & Package Management 95% GNU & Unix Commands 100% Devices, Linux Filesystems, Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 75% The X Window System
Score Report for Exam 102 Your Score: 690 Required Passing Score: 500 Status: Pass Test Section Information Percent Correct Section 100% Kernel 75% Boot, Initialization, Shutdown and Runlevels 100% Printing 100% Documentation 100% Shells, Scripting, Programming and Compiling 66% Administrative Tasks 100% Networking Fundamentals 94% Networking Services 83% Security
Given my intense need to know just how much cleverer I am than those around me, I went to the LPI website to find out just what the LPI scores mean. It turns out that they're scaled to give a mean of 480 and a standard deviation of 100.
If you're not familiar with standard deviation, Wikipedia to the rescue: 
This means that passing should be just under 50%. However, their stats say that the pass-rate was about 64% up to 2003, and the recent stats say they've given 100k exams and have 32k certified LPIC-1's --- you need two exam passes to be an LPIC-1. Well, I guess at least they're consistent over the years...
More importantly, this means that my 101 result puts me at the middle-high end of the 84.1 -- 97.7% block (1σ-2σ) and my 102 result puts me at the low end of the 97.7% -- 99.8% block (2σ-3σ). Which means a score between 780 and 860 is top-0.2%, for those playing along at home.
I'm quite pleased, given they only took me around 20 minutes each. ^_^
So how am I spending my weekend? Installing Visual Studio for a development project I've won. >_<
I also recently discovered a new prime number generation algorithm. Ask a client to submit all their new artwork for their website. Some portion of it will need scaling down. And some portion of that will have a dimension that is prime. O_O
Depressed atomic bombs
by TBBle on Mar.02, 2006, under Australia
Seen on TV news tonight: Scientists have identified the depression-response gene which governs how well people handle stressful situations and how likely they are to lapse into depression. They are reluctant to advocate testing for this gene, as identification as a carrier may lead to the people at most risk of depression becoming... depressed.
I'm not sure if this is scientific responsiblity demonstrating the counter-argument to the people who claim that science should never have split the atom, since it lead to the creation of the atomic bomb... Or if it's simply a news editor's idea of a good story punchline. Either way, it's nice to see that Australian news is catching up to the present day, the BBC article is not quite three years old. As opposed to the recent slashdot article about toxic toads taking over Australia... ^_^
