Thus Spaketh Idd Salim

Kenyans will believe ANYTHING!

So, yesterday after coding from 9am to 10PM, I was just chilling and billing while waiting for the killing as I continue my money-machining.

I decided to watch a comedy as a warm-down. I slotted Michael McIntyre Wembley DVD and as i laughed my glutes off,  I logged to on 2go as went to the Nairobi chat room.

Normally, there are over 40+ chatters heres. Only 13 guys were there in this night. Strange. “Ohh well, they must be on the Kenya room”, I thought. I adjusted my crouch and switched to the Kenya room. 10 people in Kenya room!

Hmmmn… Why are people offline today? I wondered. Could they all have finally got hook-ups and were on “Masaa ya Kubambwa na kushikwashikwa’? All at once?

I was feeling social and all chatty. Living in a big house all by myself can be a very lonely ordeal sometimes. So I decided to call someone, whisper sweet nothings to her, then sleep. I checked my airtime on my Zain Line, and it took 2 SMSes for my credit balance to be sent to me. Too many zeros. #LotsaMoney!

My friend picked up the call. Real FEAR in her voice. ‘Salim, is that you?’, She asked. ‘No, it is the gay oogambooga boogie man from Timbuktu!’, I answered in my indian-patel-robot voice. (am very good in voices. Indian, Somali, Kamba, Alien and Robot). Clang!! She hang up! This hot mamsilla never hangs up on Salim. She knows my number and my swagger. So, I called again. She did not pick up. I sent her a sweet SMS and called. She asked me to check out Facebook.

I checked Facebook and was confused. Then I called her and I was enlightened.

“There are these guys who are calling people and if you pick up the calls, you DIE IMMEDIATELY!”, She said. “10 people have died in Ukambani already. They are also using SMS texts to kill people. The phonecalls come from a number ending with 999 or 98 and the number shows as RED on your phone. Even the MulikaMwizi black-and-greed phones phones show the numbers in red. The SMS text is yellow/purple/green on all phones.”

I scrolled through some Facebook posts and was dumbfounded by what I saw.

“Someone on Campo just received such a call!”, one stated, “It is all over Easy FM news. The INSTANT death is caused by radiation.”.

Well, I can send an SMS to your phone that will restart the phone, send an SMS that will self-destruct on a set amount of time, etc.. but COME ON!!

I decided to call random numbers. Just for the kicks. It amazed me how many people had their phones off out of the utter fear of Kifo Pap! My Guys friends (especially the gay ones) and chics either never answered the phone, or answered with real, tangible FEAR reeking out of their breath.

My Gawd! What next? The midnight nipple-nibbler phenomenon? Where a strange man appears in your bedroom in the middle of the night and starts nibbling (well I know people who will relish this), and the only way to top him is to SMS ‘noNibble’ to 6090?

Grow up people! Read a book.

Back to code.

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Bend Over, daggering

Raila once quoted me and said, “Wameona Simba amenyeshewa na ametulia, wakadhani ni paka mkubwa”.

The sad Google swahili translator processes this as: “The see lion in rain. He has relax. They think big pussy”

Well, thanks to Mblayo, I got this disturbing video of the Zain truck:

BendOver jibe at Safaricom HQ

The Zain Marketers (who safcom’s has ruthlessly out-performed, out-thought, out-conned us and out-sold  for over 8 years now), came up with what they thought is a daggering blow at SafCom.

They hired PA System and went to blast the ‘Bend Over’ song at Safcom HQ.

Dunno if the traffic police, Nema, the ZainWanaringasasa crew and the ThisWeekSijaona conglomerate will take this lightly. I, for one, know Mwai is devastated by this.

But wait! For the life in me, I would assume for a moment Zain would show some class and focus on the areas where SafCon makes them bend-over, daggering style, e.g:

• Social Networking
• 3G or 4G Data
• Zap vs Mpesa
• International Call rates
• Data Rates

Just a thought.

Now, lemmi make some windows servers bend over.

Have a bendy night, wont you?

Wazi.

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Cry baby? Again?

Please let me put in 7 laughs Kwanza for Safcom. – Ha… Ha… Ha… Ha… Ha… Ha… Ha…!

Michael Joseph was ranting on KTN as 2 PM today about this deal.

Thanks to the new Zain Tarrif. You can now call for3 bob per minute to ANY network in Kenya.

Safaricom has BLOCKED all calls to Zain as at 1PM Kenya time. Most of the Safcom calls were calls from jamaaz telling jamaaz tu SHIFT to Zain. Talk of viral migration.

This morning, Safcom had 15M+ Subscribers. I predict they will have only Mwai and 4M others by close of day.

The only reason I had kept my Safaricom line was because of Mpesa. Now I have Zap. Now, Zain just needs to stream-line Zap and work with local developers and Zain will rule this Market.

More later.

Back to code!

Wazi.

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Hello, we are Google! Who are you?

Well, blame my exclusive ownage of the words ‘idd salim‘ on google, my rich CV and list of systems done and out there, or just plainly the references I have, but a week after my 28th Birthday, google came calling…

Their main point of reference was my Xing Profile.

Alot of my facebook, gmail, symbiotic, redtape, Qz and PLG buddies have requested me to blog about the google Interview process. What they require. How to prepare.. yaddayadda.

I could not refuse. Who am I to refuse?

Their initial point of contact was an email below:

Hi Idd,

SRE are an elite group of circa 350 engineers in Google. This is obviously a very small group of the overall organization.
Technically this team consists of both Systems Admins and Software Developers.

Sys Admins are expert Linux admins with kernel level hacking experience. They also tend to have exceptional scripting experience and some networking knowledge. Developer tend to come from a C++, Python, C or Java background with exceptional Design and algorithms and data structures experience.

The team has a large number of industry leaders and industry technical pioneers especially in the area of Linux and Python.

SRE work on all of the major internal and external Google systems. Gmail, Search, Maps, Earth etc etc
They are responsible for the Scalability, Reliability and Efficiency of all of the systems from both a software and hardware perspective.
This is not an operations team (we have one of them!) but rather an internal consultancy type group.

The job specs are below:

http://www.google.ie/intl/en/jobs/dublin/swe/software-engineer-google-com-eu-headquarters/index.html

http://www.google.ie/intl/en/jobs/dublin/engops/opsit/unix-system-applications-administrator-google-com-eu-headquarters/index.html

We have these roles available in Dublin, London, Zurich, US and Sydney.

If you are interested, send me back your updated CV and we can arrange a time to discuss

Kind Regards,

I sent them my CV and then Google sent me a self-evaluation test:

Hi Idd,

Thanks for your reply and the updated Resume.

Can you complete the skills assessment below as accurately as possible and return it to me.

Self Evaluation Guide:

10          = you literally have written a book
7,8,9      = expert, go-to person on this technology
5,6         = solid daily working knowledge. Highly proficient.
3,4         = comfortable working with this, have to check manual on
some things.
1, 2        = have worked with it previously but either not much, or rusty
—————————————————————————

TCP/IP  Networking (OSI stack, DNS, etc.)(  )
Unix/Linux System Administration tasks(  )
Unix/Linux internals(  )
Algorithms & Data Structures(  )
SQL and / or Database administration(  )
C(  )
C++(  )
Java(  )
Perl(  )
Shell Scripting (sh, bash, ksk, csh)(  )
Python(  )

Whats days and times this week would be suitable for us to discuss.
I would like to call you and discuss your Resume, give you more information regarding the roles that we have available and also ask you a number of technical questions.

Kind Regards,

I responded as honestly as I could. We set a date to a week later via email for a phone interview. So I spent a week brushing up on my skills on things like as Trees, Calculus I and II, Algebra V, Discreet maths, Big-O, Data Structures, Algorithms and the full unoma shebang.

And so, the big day came. Google was to call at 5pm. I was the young Salim again. I now could speak-out the code to do a heap-sort, merge-sort, Dijkstra’s Algorithm, TSP, Graphs etc, in C and Java.

At 5:07pm. Google Calls. The callers accent was somewhat faster than I could decipher, but after a verbal interview on what languages I know, about systems and databases, started.  The following some of the few questions I can remember:

1. How many bytes are there in a MAC Address?
2. Explain the 3 way HTTP TCP handshake.
3. Explain, in detail, the sticky bit flag on Unix directories.

Not surprisingly, this is all I can remember as I blog this. As I give them space to get back to me (not holding my breath of-course), the hassle continues.

Benefits from this exercise

After the Google contact forced be to revisit things that I had completely ignored or postponed like the books of Knuth, the Dijkstra’s algorithm, B+Trees… It made me a better optimizer. I now look at my YU and Orange projects with optimism as the systems will perform better. Ramadhan period locks me indoors and I can only improve.

Google job or no Google job, I am now a better coder, thanks to the contact.

Wazi, back to Dijkstra!

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In my study of Calculus, I delved a bit into the pre-calculus era and I came across a very interesting concept by Zeno of Elea.

The most famous of Zeno’s paradoxes is a race between a tortoise and the legendary Achilles called, appropriately, the Achilles. Zeno contends that if the tortoise has a head start, no matter how small, Achilles will never be able to close the distance. To do so, he’d have to travel half of the distance separating them, then half of that, ad nauseum, presenting the same dilemma illustrated by the Dichotomy.

No matter what!

A (above) fractal used to explain the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea — a movement can become impossible if its distance is recurrently divided into smaller pieces. The girl is assumed to walk three times as fast as the turtle, but whenever she turns a corner the turtle will, too. Even though she is faster, she will not see the turtle within a finite number of turns.

The Kenyan Coder’s Paradox

As we strive to make it to MkwanjaVille via code, we face a path that is finite, buy has infinite snooker points. As with any journey one takes, Before one can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a fourth, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on.

In essence, the journey can never ‘really’, get started!

Every step has a snooker

A client will not give you a job until you propose in their desired format, even if you have the right solution. The proposal will not be accepted until the price is right (favoring the client), the price is right and the proposal is OK, but you must ona mtu kando or kiss the deal goodbye. You have betrayed your anti-corruption mantra and done that evil thing but you now must wait for 1 month for a response. After one month, your well-research proposal is given to a competing company whose MD is a friend of a friend of the project managers.

If you get the deal, you must wait for 60 days to be paid, if you are lucky. The clients never have any qualms authorizing the job but GOD help you if you dare suggest you might need to be paid. And then what? Downpayment? Are you nuttz?

And the best goes on.

More Info on Zeno here.

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