These pictures are from Rothschild Park in Zihron Yaakov.

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1. Photos
2. Utopia Park

I shot these pictures in Utopia park. It is a small park in Beit Hefer, quiet close to Tulkarem. It is best known for its orchids, although the peacock definitely tried to steal the show .

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1. Photos
2. Rothschild Park

These are from Alexander river. This is one of the rare places where you can see wild (almost) nature from only few meters away. In the river there are soft shell turtles, otter and a couple of hangry sheat fishes. All absolutely adoring bread – actually it is a bad thing that people feed these animals because they’re supposed to find food on their own.

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I guess it started because I actually wanted to do web-designs. I started learning Photoshop back in 1997-1998, and by year 2002 became quiet proficient with it. As proficient as an amateur can be of course. Also, HTML is simple language and I used it to create simple web-pages for many years. Actually, there’s a page that I created back in 1997, still hosted somewhere on the internet. Imagine how amazed I was when I found it couple of years ago. By the year 2002 I, again, was proficient enough to do more complex web-sites. I learned PHP and JavaScript and knew how to do some nice things with these tools. Eventually, after using some free hosting solutions, I concluded that paid hosting is a must and purchased a hosting plan. Obviously I had to register a domain name. Back then it was asandler.org. Later, when I managed to come up with something that can be opened to public, I tried to register asandler.com. It appears that it is already taken by Adam Sandler. Anyway, now its just someone trying to sell something – I doubt it has anything to do with Adam anymore.

As I mentioned, after a year or so I managed to come up with a design and content that can actually be shown to someone. Later, I concluded that the content is useless and threw it to garbage. Same happened to design and PHP/Javascript code backing it up.

Later, I figured out that the true reason why I am doing this web-site is because I wanted to create a web-site. Note the difference between having a web-site and building one. Once I created a design and created PHP code to back it up, I became bored and threw everything away. It happened several times in a row. Once I even wrote a complete CMS system. One with built-in WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) and database driven file-system. I think I have this code somewhere on my hard-drive.

Two years ago, after being asandler.org, asandler.net, obosnuy.org, obosnuy.com, etc, I registered alexandersandler.net. I registered it on dyndns. This allowed me to do some advanced configurations with the domain, including redirecting some sub-domains to my home computer and the primary domain to my web-site. Few month later I decided to stop playing around and to do a site that would stay. I went shopping for CMS system that could answer my demands. Back then, all I wanted is to manage few documents online, do a little theme and that is it. I was quiet terrified with number of features some CMS systems has. I really wanted something simple, that would just do those simple tasks I wanted it to do. Eventually, I found Etomite. Etomite is a simple CMS system, that allows you to write your own plug-ins, easily create themes and manage your content. Everything is online, using administrator panel.

It appeared that doing themes for Etomite is very simple task. Basically, this is like having several PHP files included from one PHP file, to create a complete web-page. I.e. one PHP file contains only the header, second contains side-bar, etc. I created several themes, some were quiet nice. Also, I started working on some content, again. This is when I started the g15dods page. Eventually, after playing around with Etomite for about a year I started seeing its problems and disadvantages.

In my opinion, one major problem with Etomite is that its community is very small. You can write plug-ins for it of course. And as with themes, writing plug-ins for it is a very easy. Yet from some reason when I started to look for something useful, I couldn’t find it. I was looking for gallery plug-in – I found whole bunch of them, but no one has touched them since 2005, meaning nobody maintained and fixed them. Also, I wanted Ajax gallery. There is none. Same with comments. I wanted to allow comments on my web-site, yet I couldn’t find working comments plug-in. When I asked about it on a forum it appeared that I actually needed a guest book plug-in, which with some effort could be turned into inconvenient comments plug-in. And forget about Ajax.

So I went down to create another theme. And once few months after it was ready I decided it was time to move to some other CMS. This time I was looking for  something mainstream. Something that would be easy to use, that would have lots of plug-ins and large community of people using it and enhancing it. Finally, after doing some research I ended up with two options – Drupal and WordPress.

It really had to be blog. CMSes in their pure form no longer exist. Instead every CMS tries to be either portal or blog. I didn’t want to install portal software on my web-site so it really had to be a blog. Among many blogs, I picked two biggest.

It took me 30 minutes to figure out that it can’t be Drupal. It was really simple to understand that Drupal is way too not intuitive for me. On the other hand, frankly my demands have changed too. I wanted something that works out of the box, preferably with tons of themes and plug-ins – as time passes I have less and less time to work on themes and plug-ins myself, hence the new demands. Drupal has tons of features, tons of themes and tons of plug-ins, yet it lacks simplicity. On the other hand, WordPress has them all.

At the moment, my web-site is WordPress based. It didn’t take much time to get used to it and I found a way to make things work my way. At first I started working on a new theme, but over time I figured that I better use one of those ready themes, especially considering that there are so many of them – creating theme for WordPress is far from simple. Yet, since I am so impatient with getting things perfect I often change the theme. Of course since this is WordPress, I don’t really have to worry about the content – it’s there, no matter what theme I use.

Few things were difficult with WordPress. For instance I wanted some more advanced features in the WYSIWYG editor that is built into WordPress. These features are available in plug-in that, on the other hand, breaks look and fill of the formatted text. Luckily, the plug-in allows you to use your own style for the edited text, so eventually I have it all the way I want it.

I’ll continue adding new paragraphs to this article as this web-site evolves. In the meantime wish me good luck with WordPress and I hope this setup will last longer than it’s predecessors.

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1. WordPress plugins
2. Crisis
3. Announcement

I took these pictures in Kibbutz Dalia – one of the most beautiful and peaceful places I’ve seen.

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1. Photos

I took these pictures in Mini Israel – a great site with miniature copy of all major Israeli buildings and landmarks. This is perhaps the only place in Israel where you can see what our small country look like as a whole.

I used my n95 cell phone to take the pictures. Hence, the quality is so so. Please accept my apologies.

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1. Photos
2. What kept me from sticking to Ubuntu as a desktop solution
3. Where the hell am I?

Name: Alexander (Sasha) Sandler

Birth date: 03/11/1979

Email: alex@alexonlinux.com

Summary

• Linux and Linux kernel expert.
• Ten years of professional software engineering.
• Exceptionally experienced with C/C++, Python, Assembler and other programming languages/environments.
• Exceptionally strong background in Linux system administration and Linux internals.
• Exceptionally strong background in multi-threaded applications.
• Exceptionally strong background in x86 and other computer architectures.
• Object Oriented Design and implementation background.

Education

03/1992 – 07/1997: Graduated high school.

10/1998 – 04/2000: Student for BS.c in Education in Technology and Science in Technion.

09/2000 – Present: Student for BS.c in Computer Science in Open University of Israel.

Courses

IBM LX20 – Linux kernel internals.

Experience

11/2009 – 12/2009: Senior Software Engineer at Exanet LTD.

08/2007 – 11/2009: Software engineer at PeerApp R&D LTD.
Developed Linux kernel application for inspecting and fast forwarding network traffic.

06/2006 – 08/2007: Software engineer at ScaleMP LTD.
Developed logging over InfiniBand facility. Maintained company’s vSMP product series.

09/2005 – 06/2006: Software engineer at Metalink Broadband LTD.
Developed Linux device driver for company’s wireless 802.11n chipset, for x86 and ARM processor architectures. As part of the position developed software for reference board based on embedded Linux platform.

11/2000 – 09/2005: Senior software engineer at LSI.
Developed stack of block device drivers, for Linux, that implement volume manager with snapshot and mirroring capabilities. Ported the drivers from kernel 2.2 to kernel 2.4 and then to kernel 2.6. Adapted the drivers to work on Itanium and PPC64 processor architectures. Ported the drivers to Novell Netware.

04/2000 – 11/2000: Software engineer at Verysafe LTD.
Developed SNMP based management system for company’s server farm. Developed module for Apache web server.

01/2000 – 04/2000: Software engineer at SentryCom LTD.
Developed screen saver for MS. Windows. Developed voice powered logon systems for MS. Windows 2000/XP.

Off duty Experience

12/2007 – Present: www.alexonlinux.com

06/2009 – Present: pytcp project – TCP/IP stack in Python.

Personal Skills

• Self directed. Able to work both independently and as part of a team.
• Excellent communicational, interpersonal and organizational skills.
• High self education ability.

Languages

Excellent Hebrew and English. Russian is mother tongue.

Recommendations

Recommendations are available upon request.

Related posts:

1. About
2. I got a new job, take 3
3. I am looking for a new job

Multithreaded simple data type access and atomic variables
In this article I am trying to answer a question. What is the most efficient, yet safe way of accessing simple data type variables from two or more threads. I.e. how to change a variable from two threads at the same time, without tainting its value?

How inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism work in C++?
In this article, I am explaining how the three whales of OOP implemented in C++. How encapsulation works. How overloading of methods works. What is the structure of C++ object compared to C structure. How polymorphism works. What’s the structure of virtual methods table and how inheritance affects it. And many other things. Hope you will find it interesting.

32-bits vs. 64-bits computers, the QA
This article describes the difference between the two. Does getting 64-bit support really worth the time and the effort and perhaps the money?

Swap vs. no swap
This article describes how lack of swap partition affects behavior of your Linux system.

Few problems that you may encounter when booting Linux
This article gives solutions to common problems that one may encounter when booting Linux. From faulty service scripts to corrupted initrd, it’s all there.

sed, the missing manual
This article describes sed, an excellent tool that I often use in shell scripts that I write. In the article I explain it’s most common features and also show some often overlooked features.

Aligned vs. unaligned memory access
In this article I review implications of unaligned memory access in programs. Is it really that bad? Read on.

Opening and modifying the initrd
This article explains how to crack up and modify initrd – the initial ram-disk.

tcpdump for Dummies
In this article I how to use tcpdump – another exceptionally powerful tool in my toolbox.

Reverse SSH tunnel or connecting to computer behind NAT router
In this article I explain how to connect to a computer behind NAT router using reverse SSH tunnel. I explain problems involved and how to solve them.

SMP affinity and proper interrupt handling
This article deals with one of the aspects of system administration and engineering and that is correct interrupt handling.

How debugger works
This  article reveals the secrets behind debuggers and even demonstrates a program that places a breakpoint.

Useful Linux Networking Commands
An article that describes several of the most useful Linux networking commands.

Irex Technologies Iliad – More than a year together
This article reviews Irex Technologies Iliad, an eBook reader based on revolutionary e-Ink technology. I am reviewing the device, after using it for over a year.

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1. Hall of fame

I took these pictures when PeerApp, myself included, were in trip in Bet Oren, near Haifa.

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1. Photos

IDA – Interactive Disassembler Macros Page
This page present IDA macros I’ve written.

SlickEdit Macros Page
Here, I collected few macros for SlickEdit that I find most useful. I hope you’ll find them useful as well.

g15dods Page
g15dods is a G15 keyboard applet that counts frags in Day Of Defeat Source.

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3. g15dods