Flutterby™! : Wanted to hire 2003-06-23 19:26:33.405041+00

Wanted to hire

2003-06-23 19:26:33.405041+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Wanted to hire: Technical person in Hong Kong. Must be able to talk mechanical engineering in Cantonese and communicate with me in English. Should know how to handle a soldering iron, know what configuring a second ethernet card in a Windows XP machine means, and have basic mechanical and computer problem solving skills. Needn't be a programmer. And there'll probably be customer support involved, I expect that this position will evolve into something between a field engineer and a customer support/technical sales sort of job, but for starters I need a set of eyes, ears and hands on the ground in that area.

And, bonus position: if anyone wants to do office manager type of work in San Francisco, I can pass on a resumé to the appropriate folks there.

Not really, or, in an organization as small as the ones I like to work in, the chain of command is "whatever needs to get done". But yeah, this could be a way to take what had been a slight feeling of stagnation and redirect it, if only because a different set of responsibility gives me some novelty and gets me excited again.

Going off on a tangent -- can an XP box handle redundant network connections easily? Having one be the external connection and one on an intranet is easy enough; there's only one default gateway. But how would you handle two network cards, both connected to the net, and your wanting to load-balance and/or have redundancy?

I don't know. I'm using the second card on a 192.168.x.x network to talk to my motor controllers, and using the hosts file (yes, Windows has one) to create a local name so that the proxy settings don't muck with it (because none of the example .NET code about how to work around proxies seems to work...).

I've never actually considered that an XP box would have throughput such that you'd care about multiple ethernet cards talking to the same networks. Yes, there were those benchmarks that took advantage of multiple net cards before the Linux kernel had multithreaded I/O, but realistically, if you're not going to be doing processing and disk I/O then use thttpd, and if you are, then one on the network that talks to your file server, one on the network that serves, and distribute as much out to local disk caches as you can.