John L. Sokol

San Jose, California (669)200-8207

E-mail:
Home Page: http://www.dnull.com/~sokol

Hands on Sr. Software Engineer and Architect

Researcher and Manager

OBJECTIVE

To find a stable and challenging long-term position that will allow me to increase my standing within the engineering and standards communities.

EXPERIENCE and STRENGTHS

· Advanced Unix (BSD, Linux) Kernel and Applications development: 18 Years

· Audio and Video Compression and Streaming, Image processing: 16 Years

· TCP/IP network protocols, routing and streaming: 10 Years

· Embedded systems software development: 10 Years

· Distributed Systems and clusters. High-end servers, queuing theory and caching: 13 Years

· Experience in overall system design, architecture, theory and development.

· Proven track record for doing cutting-edge research and development.

· Solving problems from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Software, hardware, physics, management, business, financial, sales and marketing.

Patents

20050168941 and 20040218362 System and apparatus for heat removal

WORK HISTORY

Video Technology Inc. Montclair, Ca 2003 - Present
Business Owner / Software Developer / Editor / Manager

• Publisher, Writer and Editor of the online magazine VTM - "Video Technology Magazine"
• Operate a consulting company, "Video Technology Services". We have had many large companies as clients, Polycom, E-buckmail, Avion, Idetic, Irell & Manella Law Firm, Cisco, Pioneer, Nokia, Quad Research.
• I have completed projects and lead teams developing software for HDTV Advertising displays, Set Top Boxes and embedded Video DSP's, Linux V4L2 and BSD Unix Device drivers, Streaming Video solutions, JPEG Cameras, RTP/RTSP streaming, streaming server benchmarking, iSCSI and Fibre Channel file system internals related to real-time (SAN) video editing, playback and recording.
• Worked on H.263 and H.264 video codecs. And offer consulting and support for developers struggling with these codecs. have h263l.com proving info on these codecs. Did some of the First 3GPP streaming of H.264 video over cell phones
• Developed FEC based Multicast streaming system.
• Developed "VIVI" a Virtual Video Driver for V4L2 Video for Linux. It's the only working example code fo r how to write an example video driver for a current linux kernel.
• Did development with UC Linux, on Blackfin and TI 642 DSP's. And PSOS on Philips Trimedia DSP.

Nisvara Inc. Mountain View, Ca 2001 - Present
Engineering Manager

• Founder and CEO, Shareholder and board member, I was the main inventor behind the technology and held the CTO position for several years.
• There a two patents files on the technology, for Silent computers, Silent hard drivers, Water cooled servers, Thermally Conductive composite materials.
• Nisvara Inc. had a partnership with NASA Ames for the development of composite materials for computer heat management and almost closed a $500K grant with the California Energy Commission (CEC) for it.s server that consumes ½ the power of a regular server.

VCTVision Inc. San Dimas, Ca 2003 - 2004
Engineering Manager

• Managing Development of PVR video recording and streaming application on MS Windows VC++.
• Responsible for overall software design and architecture as well as coding key components.

GlobalStreams Inc., Rancho Cordova, Ca. 2002
Embedded Systems & Video Compression Developer

• Developing Client/Server video streaming application between Trimedia and MS Windows VC++ application.
• Improved TCP/IP stack in Embedded Philips Trimedia CPU used for Professional Quality Video Streaming.
• Implemented a Non-I frame based delta coding video compression algorithm. 10x Improvement over MJPEG.
• Wrote Window 2K COM DLL for display, playback, ”Clip Scrub” and record of the new video format.
• Researched viability of MPEG-4, H.26L JVT for several projects, this resulted in a comprehensive report.
• Worked on IGMP and Multicast, Firewall Tunneling and other Internet related protocol tricks.

Bravara Communication Inc., Palo Alto, Ca. 2001 (Company Closed)

Protocol Engineer, Kernel Developer

• Unix Kernel TCP/IP Stack development on embedded BSDI 4.2 OS.
• Extended BSD Kernel Debugger to work over raw Ethernet.
• Added Router Alert Router IP Option to catch RSVP Packets for MPLS Tunnel setups.
• Modify Kernel to allow GATED ISIS to see additional virtual interfaces in Kernel.
• Added many new functions to kernel IP Stack to enhance scalability and routing control.
• Added system calls to BSD Kernel, added syscontrols, and added new socket options.
• Re-engineered TUN (Tunnel) and TAP (Ethernet Tunnel) loopback network interface drivers
• Developed LKM (Linkable Kernel Module) device drivers.
• Designed in Kernel, dynamic virtual network interfaces,
• Implemented dynamic IFNET Structures (add, delete, modify) allowing a user space daemon to control virtual interfaces.

Enumera 2000 to 2001, Sr. Software Engineer and CTO

• Designed Distributed Parallel computer platform and Simulation environment.
• Created a prototype 100 Pentium Computing cluster and operations software platform.
• Worked with Chuck Moore author of the FORTH on a new CPU Architecture, 50 Parallel Cores on a Single Chip.
• Developed wearable computer based on Forth F21 Stack CPU for Charmed Inc.
• Research for Charmed Inc. on 802.11 based wireless routing protocols for Wearable computers
• Implemented Software simulator for 50 CPU core, experimented with new parallel processor compiler with extensions to C language.

Digital Video Broadcast Systems, 1998 to 2000, Sr. Software Engineer and CTO (acquired IBS)

• Cofounder – Senior Technical Architect. Chief Architect of the Livecam video server and Afterburner web server.
• Redesign of the video server and web server products. This Improved reliability, user interface, image quality, video frame rates and simplified manufacturability while reducing costs.
• Developed H.263 / MPEG4 real-time live compression codec that operated across 100 Pentium cluster.
• Developed UNIX ELF Binary copy protection in the kernel that keys the executable to the hard disks serial number.
• Independent third party benchmarked of our web server product tested at 5,300 operations per second (Ops) at ACME.COM and a Specweb of 3,400 Ops at MindCraft.
• Did extensive research and experiments into Coding theory and compression leading to improvements in products.
• Developed and Implemented (GA) genetic algorithms that created a family of proprietary Error Correction Codes.
• Wrote and fixed Unix Device drivers for BT878 video capture, AW37 sound cards and Trident video display.
• Did some of the first Wireless IP base video transmissions. Experimented with video on Wireless PDA’s

Internet Broadcast Systems, IBS, Los Angeles Ca. 1996 to 1998, Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and Cofounder

• Chief Architect of Afterburner a high power web server, in one day it received 90 million hits (not simulated but real users).
• Implemented and tested video compression engines (codecs) based on H.263, Wavelets, Fractals, DCT, JPEG and hybrids.
• Designed, developed and deployed 20 Unix servers internationally for a streaming video distribution network handled 17,000 viewers.
• Developed reliable UDP based protocols to stream video data over the Internet with low latency and reliability.
• Filed patent high performance web server design. International WO00/41455
• Did many web/cybercasts including Timothy Leary and three with Arthur C. Clarke transmitted live from Sri Lanka.
• Designed “Burn” video server, capable of supporting over 1000 simultaneous video streams at a time. Tested in real world at these rates.
• Responsible for all technical issues. Managed an engineering team of 10 people.
• Developed streaming H.263 (MPEG4 before it was called MPEG4) compression system
• Developed streaming MPEG2 server in collaboration with Xing Technology Inc. Became Streamworks.
• Interacted directly with large customers and perform demonstration and talks for investors.

Sun Soft, Los Angeles Ca. 1995, Short term Contract, Developer Support for Solaris 2.5 Pre-Beta

• Assisted developers with technical problems writing and porting code to Solaris 2.5 Beta (Unix operating system).
• Debugging of code, analyzing Core files and troubleshooting the causes of crashes, panics and core dumps.
• Repair and troubleshooting of PCI device drivers, CDE-motif code, X11 Apps, MPMT threaded code, TCP-IP socket code, and C and C++ compiler problems. 
• Interfaced directly with major customers such as AT&T Bell Labs and Unisys to determine if a problem lies in Sun’s code or the customer’s code.

Wells Fargo Bank., San Francisco Ca. 1994 Contract Programmer

• Assisted in creation to new Internet / Online Banking. Helped get the wellsfargo.com web site up.
• Developing Data Management Tools for the Test Bank project. Many application and utilities. (UNIX, MS-Windows, PowerBuilder, SYBASE, TRINZIC- Infohub, SQL, CICS, MVS, TSO, C++, COBOL, JCL)
• Development of UNIX based scripts and script generators for automated FTP of files from MVS to UNIX.
• Wrote report generators and cross-reference generators to parse Cobol, JCL, and CA7. (Unix C).
• Wrote MS-Windows Application to view inter-application dependence of COBOL code from the Mainframes.
• Providing UNIX, X windows, MS-Windows and MS-DOS programming services to assist the TESTBANK project.
• Development of Dec ACCUS, CORBA environment for the first pilot project to evaluate the use of ORB technologies.

Sun Microsystems., Mountain View Ca. 1993 to 1994 Short term Contract Programmer

• Software development for Scott McNealy's Christmas video, NFS session control and wrappers. Involves writing client/server application for limiting concurrent "video on demand" sessions over the network. Met a dead line of having the software written and debugged in 4 days. There were over 10,000 users in one week with over 350 servers worldwide. Software also included polling for servers not running daemon. (Solaris 1 & 2)
• Upgrade of Helios, on-line document viewer, from Sun OS 4.1.3 to Solaris 2.3. The only distributed application at Sun, required operating in both BSD and SVR4 environments, altering of Postscript printer files to add time and date stamp and sending them over TCP/IP sockets.

Micro Metric Inc., San Jose, CA. 1993 Programmer / Systems Engineer

• Software development for image processing and precision measurement system. (MS-DOS, Pharlap, MetaWare)
• Converted all 3D coordinate math from complex sin & cos operations to matrix math that allowed multiple coordinate systems. The simplified and the reduced code size by 60,000 Lines!
• Developed software for automatic uploading of measurement results over network to UNIX database.
• Customized software on site for IBM, Nikon, 3M, Rocky Mountain Magnetics, Datatape-Kodak and NIST.
• Organized backup procedures for all software development and customers' off-site machines.
• Programmed Delta-Tau Servo Controller card. Implemented servo algorithms. (56001 DSP Assemble)

Dept. of Radiation Oncology, Stanford University, 1988 to 1993 Scientific Programmer I

• Responsible for all Hardware and software development for a real-time computer controlled system for heating cancer tumors in living patients. Used 100W 500KHz RF.
• This system had to be zero-defect. A bug could have resulted in serious injuries to a patient.
• Responsible for operation of equipment in over 100 patients’ cancer treatments including Senator Cranston.
• Designed and machined a robotic temperature scanning system. Software, Hardware and Mechanical.
• Developed a phantom (substitute for a tumor) for use with a thermal imaging cameras and image processing software to analyze temperature data.
• Wrote assemble language drivers for the Imaging Technologies (ITEK) FG100 frame grabber card, image filters and an image-contouring algorithm.
• Wrote simulation software under UNIX to compute 3-D electric field patters in tissue. (VAX11/750, Cray YMP)
• Designed and built a time-lapse photography microscope with 3-axis motion control, image processing and high capacity storage on to optical disk for additional post processing and analysis. (Borland C++ & Pascal)
• Developed scientific plotting libraries for the PC, output for HPGL plotter and VGA display.
• Completed a stand-alone windowing OS and GUI library used for patient data analysis and scientific visualization.
• Fabricated a 3-axis, robotic positioner for ultrasound (1-2 MHz) measurements, this system produced high-resolution images of acoustic power distribution.
• Developed application to display 3-D CAT scans on SGI workstation. (GL, IRIX, C, C++)

Consulting and Misc. Projects.

• Did first release of 386BSD to the Internet. 386BSD was the first open source Unix, I assisted its primary author Bill Jolitz, in fixing bugs, adding device drivers and managing the new release of 386BSD available on the Internet. 1991
• Assisted in getting Xing Streamworks prototype streaming video working, first commercial steaming video application ever.1996
• Setup all early video-streaming solutions in Los Angeles in 1995 and 1996.
• Provided Very High End consulting services to 25 ISP’s a full 1/3 of all Los Angeles ISP's at that time in 1995 and 96.
• Worked with large Hollywood clients like Paramount, MGM and Fox, AFI, Timothy Leary, Leonardo Dicaprio, the Uruguay and Tahiti governments. 1995-2000
• Hosted Movie sites, Showgirls (first site to break 3 Million hits per day), Neuromancer, Lost in Space, and The Arrival.
• UNIX kernel tuning for a many high demand movie sites to increasing server capacities and reliability.
• Installed Dozens of T1 lines and configuration of Cisco Routers, assisted in getting T3 and Fiber pulled into many office building. Worked on FDDI, ATM, Sonet fiber Optic networks and Gigabit Ethernet
• Setup Parallel computing clusters, MPI, Beowulf, and mosix for video compression, Neural Nets and GA.
• Developed, Million Digit math library functions, encryption codes and extensive research into Prime numbers and random number. 1999
• Developed Early LIVECAM™ JPEG Push video streaming. Livecam captured Yosemite’s Glacier Peak collapse on Internet. 1995
• Developed first version of Afterburner web server, Based on a single threaded state machine and caching the site in RAM. Afterburner served the record breaking Showgirls.com movie site a 3 Million Hits per Day. 1995
• Designed and Implemented, ECIP™ an error correction code (ECC – FEC) based protocol used to prevent the retransmission of packets over the Internet 1995
• CyberJava Café First in SoCal, Setup high speed (T1) Internet access, E-mail server, Protected MS-Windows user environment for Café customers. 1995 .

COMPUTER LANGUAGES and SKILLS

High Level: C, GNU C++, MS Visual C++, Pascal, FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, and FORTH

OS: FreeBSD, Linux, Vx Works, PSOS, UNIX, DOS, MS-Windows 2K, Mac OS X, Solaris

Compression: MPEG1, MEPG2, MPEG4(all profiles), H.263, H.264, 3GPP, 3GPP2, Wavelet, Fractal, JPEG, GSM, AMR

Kernel Development & Drivers: FreeBSD, Linux, V4L2, BSD/OS (BSDI), NetBSD, DOS, Windows

Assembly/Machine: MMX, SSP2, 80386 protected, TriMedia tm1300, 6809, 68K, Z180/Z80, 6502, 8051, DSP 56001

MISC: HTML, Java, JavaScript, CGI’s and E-commerce, Postscript, X Windows, CVS, GDB, KDB, PERL, Routing, TCP/IP

CLUBS AND ASSOCIATIONS

Founder of SVBUG (Silicon Valley BSD Unix Users Group), Tech Startup Connection, Amateur Radio license KE6BYN

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND

· Stanford University, Foothill College, Santa Clara University – Attended many courses as non-matriculated student.

· Self-Educated - I have studied countless of books on computers, engineering, science, medicine, advanced mathematics, business, and management.