Current Projects

Management consulting

I am the chief technical management-consultant on a few projects this year. I really see the need for project management expertise, am making steady progress with it and am grateful for the opportunities to do this work. Historically, as a technical consultant, I have always tried to close the gap for clients who do not have project managers, but am much better at identifying the gap and offering better solutions.

Multi-lingual blog

I will be creating a multi-lingual blog in the coming weeks. Blogs are easy to create and manage, but they are not so easy for most users to customize or repair.

CMS: Custom/Integration with open source

Converting multiple static web sites into a dynamic, managed-content website using PHP 5.x, JSON, mySQL and open source (PHP) applications with rich text editing capability.

Production Photo Gallery

When a client asked for a self-serve photo gallery, I installed Gallery 2.0, an excellent open source application with loads of features and integrated it with the design. It didn’t completely satisfy the client because they also wanted functional customization and that creates a problem. Once one starts extending open source applications, one is committing to migrating the extension along with the application. In less time than it would take to do a full cost benefit analysis, I created a production gallery creation system that various scripting tools (Perl/PHP/Photoshop) to automate the production of a photo gallery faster than can be done manually (especially as the galleries get larger).

Database Application Migration

Moving a critical legacy application from an Alpha server to the Itanium (OpenVMS) has required extraordinary level of planning and refactoring, but I can see why OpenVMS has such a faithful following. All the planning and refactoring is about to pay off and (on this fortress) is expected to keep paying off for decades to come.

Past Projects

Online multimedia investor presentation

Create online multimedia investor presentation. Powerpoint has limitations that make it less desirable for fast, rich online presentations. We wanted to integrate various media types, Flash, voice-overs and background music and by mixing Flash, frames and DHTML, I created a presentation that was modular, easy to modify and upgrade incrementally.

Productivity Application

Web-based in-house sales ticket tracker that integrated three business units, increased transparency and enforced policies that cut costs and increased revenue. The solution was a Perl/CGI + DBM web application because the customer has a very heterogeneous server environment. This Perl program cost far less than customizing the accounting system.

Scientific Instrumentation

This desktop application performs a significant amount of data conditioning, file I/O, and printing – all of which went in a headless multi-threaded DLL. The data reporting model allows the client to make asynchronous queries and redirect the results individually. The raw data cache provides a data abstraction layer so the data conditioning code does not know whether the data came from the port or a file. The post-conditioning data cache allows the GUI to query without re-processing (which would be perceptible to the User). Finally, the GUI exe has a representational data cache because the User chooses a particular view of the data. This made the GUI client a little fatter, but it is GUI logic. The container class allows the client application to easily describe new representations, not just the ones in the specification.

Keystroke Redirection Service

"KeyJack" is a keyboard utility that redirects function keys to the console. It was developed for a terminal emulation project that needed to send keyboard commands over a telnet session.