USCIS Citizenship Questions without Answers

1. What is the supreme law of the land? 

2. What does the Constitution do?

3. The idea of self-government is in the first three words of the Constitution. What are these words?

4. What is an amendment?

5. What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?

6. What is one right or freedom from the First Amendment?*

7. How many amendments does the Constitution have?

8. What did the Declaration of Independence do?

9. What are two rights in the Declaration of Independence?

10. What is freedom of religion?

11. What is the economic system in the United States?*

12. What is the “rule of law”?

13. Name one branch or part of the government.*

14. What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?

15. Who is in charge of the executive branch?

16. Who makes federal laws?

17. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?*

18. How many U.S. Senators are there?

19. We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?

20. Who is one of your state’s U.S. Senators now?*

21. The House of Representatives has how many voting members?

22. We elect a U.S. Representative for how many years?

23. Name your U.S. Representative.

24. Who does a U.S. Senator represent?

25. Why do some states have more Representatives than other states?

26. We elect a President for how many years?

27. In what month do we vote for President?*

28. What is the name of the President of the United States now?*

29. What is the name of the Vice President of the United States now?

30. If the President can no longer serve, who becomes President?

31. If both the President and the Vice President can no longer serve, who becomes President?

32. Who is the Commander in Chief of the military?

33. Who signs bills to become laws?

34. Who vetoes bills?

35. What does the President’s Cabinet do?

36. What are two Cabinet-level positions?

37. What does the judicial branch do?

38. What is the highest court in the United States?

39. How many justices are on the Supreme Court?

40. Who is the Chief Justice of the United States now?

41. Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the federal government. What is one power of the federal government?

42. Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the states. What is one power of the states?

43. Who is the Governor of your state now?

44. What is the capital of your state?*

45. What are the two major political parties in the United States?*

46. What is the political party of the President now?

47. What is the name of the Speaker of the House of Representatives now?

C: Rights and Responsibilities

48. There are four amendments to the Constitution about who can vote. Describe one of them.

49. What is one responsibility that is only for United States citizens?*

50. Name one right only for United States citizens.

51. What are two rights of everyone living in the United States?

52. What do we show loyalty to when we say the Pledge of Allegiance?

53. What is one promise you make when you become a United States citizen?

54. How old do citizens have to be to vote for President?*

55. What are two ways that Americans can participate in their democracy?

56. When is the last day you can send in federal income tax forms?*

57. When must all men register for the Selective Service?

AMERICAN HISTORY

58. What is one reason colonists came to America?

59. Who lived in America before the Europeans arrived?

60. What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?

61. Why did the colonists fight the British?

62. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?

63. When was the Declaration of Independence adopted?

64. There were 13 original states. Name three.

65. What happened at the Constitutional Convention?

66. When was the Constitution written?

67. The Federalist Papers supported the passage of the U.S. Constitution. Name one of the writers.

68. What is one thing Benjamin Franklin is famous for?

69. Who is the “Father of Our Country”?

70. Who was the first President?*

71. What territory did the United States buy from France in 1803?

72. Name one war fought by the United States in the 1800s.

73. Name the U.S. war between the North and the South.

74. Name one problem that led to the Civil War.

75. What was one important thing that Abraham Lincoln did?*

76. What did the Emancipation Proclamation do?

77. What did Susan B. Anthony do?

78. Name one war fought by the United States in the 1900s.*

79. Who was President during World War I?

80. Who was President during the Great Depression and World War II?

81. Who did the United States fight in World War II?

82. Before he was President, Eisenhower was a general. What war was he in?

83. During the Cold War, what was the main concern of the United States?

84. What movement tried to end racial discrimination?

85. What did Martin Luther King, Jr. do?*

86. What major event happened on September 11, 2001, in the United States?

87. Name one American Indian tribe in the United States.

88. Name one of the two longest rivers in the United States.

89. What ocean is on the West Coast of the United States?

90. What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States? 

91. Name one U.S. territory.

92. Name one state that borders Canada.

93. Name one state that borders Mexico.

94. What is the capital of the United States?*

95. Where is the Statue of Liberty?*

96. Why does the flag have 13 stripes?

97. Why does the flag have 50 stars?*

98. What is the name of the national anthem?

99. When do we celebrate Independence Day?*

100. Name two national U.S. holidays.

Insane SCVMM and Hyper-V - no API for remote access

For any enterprise product one of the fundamental facets is its public [programmatic] interface using which other products can interact with it or users can write scripting etc. 100% marks in this regard to VMWare vCenter which has a very well thought through web interface based on SOAP. Top that with client specific bindings in Java, .NET, Python etc and you are covered. There is no talk/bothering about what OS you are using on the client in order to connect and program the enterprise service.

Enter the world of 'insane scvmm' - things are not like how they should be and even worse, they are no where close to being sane. SCVMM is Microsoft's flagship product in v12n management and squarely positioned to compete with VMWare's vCenter. But guess what, there is no public API to SCVMM that's programmable from across different OSes. This is because the primary and only API available to program SCVMM is a powershell based. This has few major problems

1. Powershell is not available on non-Windows boxes. I know folks out there think powershell is universal et. al. But there is no credible and corporate-backed implementation of powershell on linux, solaris etc. Without this, no entperise wants to rely on the stack
2. The powershell documentation for scvmm is a nightmare to comprehend. Take 'New-VM' as an example - this cmdlet is used to create a new vm. It takes literally 100+ parameters across different variants of it. The parameter list is flat and available valid combinations and permutations are hard to deduce. Plus the documentation is not even available online in an html form so that it can bing-ed or google-d. It's only in MSWORD or PDF form.
3. Even in the documentation there is no place for me to just understand the entire set of properties that make up an object, say vm. There is only set-vm which has a set of properties that can be set- with usual quirks of valid combinations etc. There is a get-vm but that has no info about all the properties. Contrast this with vcenter's web-published documentation of its awesome object model.
4. Even if I accept client-can-only-be-on-windows apathy, the way to get the client SDK setup is clunky. I have to install a full-fledged admin console - which is a heavy-weight UI just to get 1 or more DLLs that have the scvmm powershell modules. Contrast that with vcenter which has a web interface to download the WSDL.

Coming to HyperV, this is even worse. The only interface to HyperV is WMI-based and that too the client MUST be local. To enable a remote client, one has to go through a laborious set of configuration changes, security anti-patterns etc so the client (again only windows based) can be on a different box. The interface is totally different and disjoint from that of SCVMMs. Contrast this with ESXi - the data and programming model for ESXi is exactly identical to that of vcenter. In fact any client that's written against the interface can work equally well when pointed to esxi or vcenter - this is holy grail!

We use .NET reflector and without this, it is simply impossible to write any non-trivial client for programming scvmm. Reflector disassembles a .NET assembly hence giving us insight into the actual model. We deal with SCVMM APIs in and out very deeply - many times I literally get the feeling of sickness looking at the api maturity, crazy constructs etc, especially relative to vmware centers APIs. God bless me and our team dealing with this insane product!

Insane SCVMM: Duplicating all BIOS identifiers on vm clone

Welcome to the second past in my 'insane scvmm' series. This one is about another insane thing that scvmm does in the context of SMBIOS UUIDs. Identity is a key foundation in any software area. Network adapters are identified by MACs. Machines are identified by an IP address within a single network. The whole web is based on URLs which are essentially identities to content on the web.

To identify computers uniquely, there is a standard called http://dmtf.org/standards/smbios. Of course not all vendors embrace and follow this but most do and all the Intel-based computer architectures and hence Windows OS based machines definitely do. The SMBIOS unique identifier is a UUID (aka GUID). Normally computer manufacturers assign this for physical machines. For virtual machines, hypervisors are responsible to assign the same.

In virtualization (v12n), 'clone vm' is a popular operation as it can be used to quickly provision an identical server including the os, apps, config etc. What we learnt to our utter surprise is cloning vms using scvmm results in the same SMBIOS UUID (and many other BIOS identifiers like serial number) assigned to the cloned vm, as that of the source vm. Totally insane. I raised this question at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/virtualmachinemanager/thread/b8cb5945-5b00-4145-b5ae-dc94fb5b68dc but received no credible response. One may wonder why do we care about unique UUID? The bad consequences are boundless - basically any (sane) software that relies on SMBIOS UUID to uniquely identify x86 based computers will be affected in strange ways.

Hyper-V by itself doesn't have a first-class clone operation. So SCVMM must be doing this somehow using available Hyper-V operations, so this is likely an issue in how scvmm and hyperv are working together. Wait a min, they never work together - isn't that the whole problem?

Insanity continues...

Insane SCVMM - MAC address management

Like most software professionals I'm super busy and have no time to write blogs even though I like to. Two things made this blog possible. One is the long weekend and the other more important one is insanity of SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager). In my current project I have to integrate with VMWare vCenter and Microsoft SCVMM closely. Time and again, we find things about SCVMM that just make us so frustrating - we can't believe how can someone release an enterprise product with such a freaking issue or lack of thought. Anyways here I'm - deciding to start a series called 'Insane SCVMM'. This is the first one and it's about how SCVMM and Hyper-V manage MAC addresses.

In case of physical network adapters, manufacturers worry about MAC address assignment but in case of virtual network adapters (vnics) used by virtual machines, the software (typically hypervisor or hypervisor managers like vcenter, scvmm) need to do this. We found interesting things on how SCVMM/Hyper-V combo does this.

Let's start with HyperV. HyperV individually has a limit of 256 unique mac addresses by default. The range is stored in registry when you enable the hyperv role on a windows server –
registry stores the min and max mac address for the range. The first 3 octets are fixed (Microsoft organization identifier) and next 2 octets come from the last 2 components of ip address of the primary NIC on the box. That leaves only one octet which gives the number 256.

If we clone the hyperv box (or use a windows image to build multiple hyperv boxes),
the same range is used! Unfortunately sysprep doesn’t help here, although it
should have - talk about cross-group collaboration! So the recommendation is to install hyperv after os setup (post install script) or explicitly remove the relevant registry keys so they are regenerated when hyperv starts on the new box. http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2008/07/15/hyper-v-mac-address-allocation-and-apparent-network-issues-mac-collisions-can-cause.aspx is a good article about this.

However when scvmm is used to manage hyperv hosts (and create vms) the mac address
management happens at scvmm level where the limit is 3million+. Ideally this is all one should have cared, IF scvmm had a good design and better coordination with Hyper-V. But there is a
catch – a big one in-fact. Even through scvmm, when we select a dynamic mac
address, scvmm leaves the mac address generation to the hyperv host - how great? This
essentially means the mac address is assigned from hyper-v mac address pool
with no scvmm intervention and hence we still need to worry about 256 mac limit. When user selects a static mac address and uses ‘generate’ button (shown below) the mac address is generated from scvmm’s global [static] mac address pool. In fact
when a new vm is created with ‘dynamic’ mac address for a vnic, that vnic’s mac
address will be all zeroes until you start the vm. Another insanity.

Clone dynamic mac case: when you clone a vm, the cloned vm will get same mac as
source until you start the clone (insanity) at which point hyper-v generates a new
address. Funny things can happen when all addresses on hyperv are filled up and
things have to recycled. Vm starts can fail with no more mac addresses or they
can start with a mac address that’s unused by any currently running vm – thus
possibly getting a currently in-use mac of a powered down vm. However Hyper-V
at-least guarantees mac address once assigned to a vnic is immutable.

Clone static mac case: the cloned vm will get the same static mac as the source and
this will not be auto-generated from the scvmm global mac pool even after
powering on the cloned vm.

Create vm is similar. Create vm starts out as all zeroes for all dynamic macs (insanity) until we
start the vm.

Right way to print details of .NET exception

The right answer is also the simplest way to achieve this – just use e.ToString(). This prints everything including the exception type, message, stack trace, walk the inner exceptions until the last one etc.

May sound too simple to warrant a blog – but I have seen numerous times people writing several lines of code and invariably missing some crucial piece of information.

Bad Ex#1:

catch(Exception ex)
{
    Log(string.Format("Encountered exception: {0}", ex.Message));
    Log(ex.StackTrace);
    return false;
}

This lacks exception type, inner exception details etc.

Bad Ex#2:

catch (Exception ex)
{
    Console.Error.WriteLine("Unknown/Unhandled exception got while running the process");
    Console.Error.WriteLine("Message: " + ex.Message);
    Console.Error.WriteLine("Stack  : ");
    Console.Error.WriteLine(ex.StackTrace);

    if (ex.InnerException != null)
    {
        Console.Error.WriteLine("Inner Exception: " + ex.InnerException.Message);
        Console.Error.WriteLine("Stack  : ");
        Console.Error.WriteLine(ex.InnerException.StackTrace);
    }

    exitcode = -1;
}

This is missing exception type, walking of inner exceptions beyond the first one etc.

So the lesson is quite simple – always use e.ToString() to print the complete information about an exception!

Nasal rinse as a natural way to fight common cold

Whenever I get cold, I’m very averse to taking medicine as technically there is no medicine for cold and taking some will unnecessarily reduce my body’s ability to fight virus. At the same time I always wondered if there is something I could do that’s completely natural and gives me relief at that hard time.

Recently I discovered this NeilMed Sinus rinse that apparently is followed since ages in India. This time I used this towards the end of my ‘cold’ episode and loved it!

Next time I’ll try earlier – usually I know about my cold before a day or 2 of its arrival…

Get subject common name from an X509Certificate2 object

Both Subject and SubjectName properties of X509Certificate2 have the full distinguished name (ex: “CN = Rags, OU = UserAccounts, DC = corp, O = microsoft”). But what if we only want the common name part of it (in this case “Rags”). This was unintuitive to find, but I finally figured out. You use

cert.GetNameInfo(X509NameType.SimpleName, false)

This prevents parsing the string etc and is certainly better!