Just how geeky are you anyway?

Ever wondered exactly how [tag]geeky[/tag] are you? When I say geeky, I mean it in the most positive, favorable way. How much more knowledgeable, and technologically competent are you compared to the unwashed masses?

Below are some more or less cryptic statements that probably won’t make sense to mere mortals. See if you understand all of them without looking them up. In other words, if you look at one of those and you think “WTF in hell???” you don’t get your points. For each one that you actually get, give yourself 1 [tag]geek[/tag] point. If you are stumped, I have the explanations posted below for your convinience.

If asked, could you explain the following statements?

1. ~
2. #!
3. (x?1:2)
4. 127.0.0.1
5. 10 = 2
6. Oct 31 = Dec 25
7. FF = 255
8. A is 41
9. 2147483647*2 = -2
10. s/.\(.\)/&\1/g will make Bob into a Boob
11. #ifdef
12. When I say 12345678, you say 36145278
13. [tag]1337[/tag]
14. [tag]1D10T[/tag]
15. [tag]PEBKAC[/tag]
16. s/\//\\/g
17. [tag]grep [/tag]the | [tag]cat [/tag]today
18. (car (cdr ‘(car cdr cadr)))
19. <lt;>
20. [tag]nmap [/tag]-O --osscan-guess --fuzzy target

You can get total of 20 points from the questions above. Here is another batch of questions – you can answer each yes or no. For each yes you get 1 geek point.

1. you know your [tag]IP[/tag] current address without looking
2. and the addresses of 3 other workstations on your network
3. all of your machines have [tag]port 22[/tag] open
4. you read your email by telneting to [tag]port 110[/tag] on your mailserver at least once in your life
5. you sent email by telneting to [tag]port 25[/tag] on your mailserver least once
6. you have a strong oppinion in the vi vs. emacs debate
7. and in the interpreted vs. compiled debate
8. you know for sure that your OS is better than some other OS
9. you have a [tag]headless server[/tag] standing in your house
10. the uptime of one of the machines in your house is one year or more
11. you have a very strong opinion on [tag]object oriented[/tag] paradigm
12. and about [tag]functional programming[/tag]
13. and about Open Source
14. you have a live linux CD and a screwdriver in your backpack (just in case)
15. you have 4 or more electronic gadgets on you at any given time

Finally, give yourself 1 geek point for every programming language you know. Stop counting after you reach 10. If you know more than 10 languages, that’s awesome, but we have to stop this somewhere.

Add it all up and you will get a score ranging between 0 and 45. The higher you get, the geekier you are. Enjoy!

Explanations for the 1^st part of the quiz:

1. ~ expands to your home directory
2. first line of a shell script eg: #!/bin/bash
3. java operator, evaluates to 1 if a is true and 2 otherwise
4. in TCP/IP 127.0.0.1 is the reserved loopback IP address and it points to the local machine
5. binary 10 = decimal 2
6. octal 31 = decimal 25 (it’s an old joke)
7. hexadecimal FF = decimal 255
8. A is 41 in ASCII
9. 2147483647 – the largest 32 bit integer will overflow when multiplied.
10. it’s a regexp: echo Bob | sed s/.\(.\)/&\1/')
11. C++ preprocessor conditional directive
12. The numbers represent the order of pins on each end of a crossover cable
13. if you don’t know, I’m not gonna tell you
14. 1D10T (pronouced one d ten t) == idiot
15. Problem Exist Between Keyboard And Chair
16. regexp which to switch unix style path delimiters ‘/’ into a windows style ‘\’
17. cat dumps the contents of the file today into STDOUT, which is then piped (|) into grep, which finds all the occurences of the word ‘the’
18. common lisp expression which evaluates to ‘cdr’
19. HTML encodings for <lt;>
20. port scan with OS detection on target