 STAFF
CV'S
DAVE J ALDRIDGE
Principle Business and Technical Management
Consultant. Lecturer, Mentor and Guru, Business and System Architecture, Process
Re-engineering, Problem Management, Program (Multiple Projects) Manager and
Systems Engineer. System Designer of cost effective, large, fast, real-time,
secure and resilient "MIL SPEC (MIL-STD)" (24x7x365) distributed
systems, including VLDBs and Data-warehouses, Performance, Capacity Planning,
DBs, UNIX kernel, Security, Open Systems, and Communications.
Dave has 40 years experience as a Business
and Technical Management Consultant. He is a member of the ACM as well as a
member of the IEEE and a number of its associated learned societies. He has
delivered basic and advanced level courses in UNIX (Solaris, HPUX), and RDBMSs
(Sybase, Oracle, and Ingress) with emphasis on performance and tuning, as well
as undergraduate courses in computer science.
His work has been divided between
management level troubleshooting, (the management of the solution of problems)
and strategic level studies, developing the architecture of new systems,
package selection and, evaluating evolving technologies.
He has formed and led teams of 2 to 300+
persons and managed many projects including 12 very large programs. He has been the Technical Integration
Management and Design Authority on other projects. Before 1989 he was mainly involved in defense projects. Since then he has shifted to large
commercial projects for Banking, Finance Institutions, and Telcos. He has dealt with architecture, capacity
planning and performance and re-engineering issues for Telco and other systems.
He has the ability to go into any
organization, and rapidly understand their business, what functions the IT
systems are supposed to be performing as the first part of the process of
evaluating, the clients requirements. Be they new systems, changes proposed,
security enhancements, or problems perceived. He can provide cost effective,
perform ant architectural solutions that he is then able to manage to
completion.
He has had extensive exposure to the Source
Code of UNIX up to UNIX V release 4 while involved on such activities as writing
and debugging system software such as device drivers. He first became involved in UNIX when it ran on a PDP‑7. He was tasked with evaluating UNIX for the
USN and later with adding security enhancements to UNIX. He has provided
consultancy and support at the kernel internal level and the associated UNIX
communications methods and for Internet networking. Some of his work has been
tuning and configuring systems including most of the UNIX flavors up to SVR4.2
ES/MP (Destiny P15/S19) and Solaris 2.6.
He has also performed data recovery from crashed and badly mangled file
systems. His main interests now are in
the Electronic Security, Systems Engineering and Performance of large
distributed systems and the associated problems of security, high reliability,
and survivability. That is the
planning, modeling, building, prototyping, tuning, and certification of total
systems.
He has used various formal design methods
such as Rational-Rose, De Marco (Teamwork), MIL‑STD‑390A, Yourdon
VDM, and Z. Pert/CPA, PMW, Microsoft Project, Project Manager, and Gantt Charts
as project management tools and has worked to MIL-STD-2167A for Software
Quality and both JSP188 and MIL‑STD‑390A for design documentation.
Dave has much non-data communications
experience ranging from 80+80 telegraphy to satellite communications, gained
over a period of more than 30 years. He
has maintained a strong interest in Signal Security, Counter Measures, and
Signal Analysis including the recovery of VDU images from their emissions. He
also has experience of Radio from LF to microwave, as well as Satellite
Communications, Radar, Sonar and Underwater Signaling. He is currently a member
of the IEEE Oceanography Society.
05/01 Management Consultant
Evaluation of a major B2T system project
for an International Telecommunications Infrastructure provider. Oversight of project plans, progress to date
and determination of probable chance of problems. This is a large Oracle
8.1.6/8i installation on E10k and EMC hardware including Oracle Financials 11i,
Siebel Enterprise 2000, Tuxedo, Iplanet 4.0SP6, Vignette V/5.
03/01-04/01
Lecturer in Solaris 8 and Sybase to admin level.
A short intensive course for administrators
and senior DB2 programmers, covering Solaris 8, T-SQL and Sybase on Solaris.
01/01 Course
Risk management and decision making under
uncertainty.
10/00-12/00
Principle Consultant IP Billing Strategic Study (Product Selection Process)
Wholesale Portal Provider
Design of an IP Billing architecture and, conduct
an IP Billing product selection process on behalf of the client, a major Portal
Wholesale Provider. This included a feasibility and requirements study for
billing current and emergent technologies on a pre and post pay basis. For
mobile and fixed, any-time/any-where use of streaming video, GPRS, SMS, WAP and
telephony. Evaluation of current and
new billing products. Preliminary
architecture development and in association the chosen product vendor selected
a system integrator.
07/00-09/00 UNIX
and CISCO SME/Guru
Computer Based
Training Company
Acting as the resident Technical Guru
providing technical input for a series of system administration, and tuning
courses across all the main flavors of UNIX (AT&T/NCR, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX,
Digital, and SCO), CISCO to CCNE level and LANs plus WAN design, operation and
management. Final QA/verification of the technical content of the finished
products. Used Skillbuilder.
03/99 – 05/00
System, and Performance Technical Management Consultant
European Telecommunications
Provider
As a managing engineer involved in the
re-engineering and architectural shifts of a young European Telco. Fixing the
performance problems experienced with the Customer Care and Billing system
caused by the system integrator mis-configured the system, by better than
forecast traffic and new connections. The billing operation was based on
Kenan Arbor Wireline package, with a Sybase 11.0.3 database, running on HP
hardware.
Part of this re-engineering process was to
move “Billing” to new kit including, 150TB EMC raid system Oracle 8I (8.17)
Parallel Server for data warehouse and Financials 10.7/11I (11.5) in the MRC
mode for accounting/bookkeeping, (including feeds from Kenan/Arbor/BP). A
Storagetech, robotic tape library for backups. The EMC produced more than a few
teething problems including Sybase error 605, the loss of the main database
page chain integrity at one point.
The principle tools apart from the special
monitors developed for the billing analysis was HP Advisors with WAN and LAN
interfaces. The network switches were
Cisco 7000 series, with 100Mb/s drops; the WAN was T1 there was interconnection
to the ISP provisioning through two firewalls (running Firewall/1 on a couple
of E1000s), proxy server and various Cisco routers.
Additional consultancy interleaved with
managing the billing production was provided to a team developing a data
warehouse system (DSS), this involved training new users of Oracle as well as
DBAs and users previously experienced with Sybase, both formally and acting as
a mentor on an ongoing basis. Apart
from system performance aspects there was support for data migration
performance, configuration and deployment of BMC Patrol-Best/1, and for the
evaluation, Rational Rose and Clearcase across the whole organization.
11/98–03/99
Performance Technical Management Consultant and Mentor,
Y2K and Internal
Infrastructure Major International Telecommunication Equipment Manufacturer.
Provided advice and assistance during the
investigation of the impacts of the Y2K design fault on the Clients
systems. Investigation of the effects
of the projected future growth of users and newer faster versions of
application software across all machines, and the growth in http related
traffic, high-availability clusters and worldwide networks. The internal networks provide connectivity
on a worldwide for a very large user community. An additional requirement was the creation of an integrated, high
performing and cost effective solution to existing and projected performance
problems. The current setup includes:
Sun SPARC and Ultra Workstations U1, 2, 5, 10, 20 with many IPXs used as
print-servers, running Solaris 2.4, 2.5.2/3 and 2.6; AUSPEX servers HP9000s
running HP-UX 10.10, 10.20 and 11. There are around 200 major databases with an
average size of 75 Gbytes. There are in
excess of 3000 printers (mainly HP Laser Printers but some large A0 plotters,
and high-speed band printers. There was an element of ongoing knowledge
transfer to the local DBAs and users.
08/98-11/98
Technical Management Consultant
Telecommunication
Service Provider.
Investigation of performance problems
experienced with the Customer Care and Billing system by a new and fast growing
Telco. They were running a combination
of Kenan and Vantive using a pair of Sun UE6000s in high availability
configuration for billing. In addition,
a pair of HA configured UE4000s for customer care. Both configurations were
running Sybase 11 with a main table of approximately 140 Gbytes, Solaris 2.5.1
and a variety of other supporting Sun products such as Netbackup. Due to the speed of installation (12 weeks)
and better than forecasted rate of new connections the whole setup was found to
lack adequate resources in terms of CPU power, disk i/o or capacity. A total redesign from the top down was
recommended. In addition there were
major divergences from the design methodologies recommended by Kenan, Vantive,
and Sybase. Extensive support and
advice to local users and DBA/SA in the form of a short course and knowledge
transfer to help the redesign process was given. Part of the upgrade plan was to move to UE10000s. Oracle
Financials 10 fed from Kenan/Arbor/BP.
03/98-05/98
Technical Integration Manager
Telecommunication
Service Provider.
To manage the managers of a multi-project
revamp of a major GMS system in the area of back office Customer Care
systems. Covering the assurance of the
technical integration aspects across the whole program (approx. $300 Million). Work included various OFTEL and BATA
requirements with respect to Number of Digits per mobile phone number (mobile
number portability), format of the call records, and portability of numbers
between service providers as well as Year 2000 compliance. This involved liaison with the development
teams. Systems were a very large IBM MVS/ESA system, ABS 21.0 with mods.,
VAX-VMS, DEC VAX DEC Alpha, Kilostream, Frame Relay, Sun Ultra 3000s, Solaris
2.6, CISCO routers. There were a number
of Oracle DBs around 200 Gb each, IBM Mainframe, SNA, DECnet, TCP, IP, Telnet,
DFT, DEC Mail, Network security including Firewalls, Scanners and Document
Image storage. The GMS system has a
rated volume of 2.6 Million calls per day based on Ericsson AXE10 transit
switches and Nokia kit. Used a mix of Microsoft Project, PMW, PRINCE and
ISO9001 methods.
12/97-02/98 Initial Phase of a project to build a Language
Translator Module
This involved canvassing financial support
from European Government and the Minor Languages section of the EU. A preliminary market review, feasibility study,
business plan and project plan was created.
05/97-12/97.
Project Manager, System Architect, and Performance Specialist.
This system was a true mission-critical
super scalable system, designed to withstand loss of machines, without loss of
service, on a 24h 7-day basis. We delivered a distributed transaction
management system for real time document translation based on earlier
distributed process management systems designed and built (i.e. 1991-92,
1988-89 q.v.). The system was designed to handle up to 40000 pages/hour as
speech input or 4000 documents an hour received as e-mail from a web-browser.
Translation was between any of the common European languages as well as other
major world languages (Japanese). The prototype system was benchmarked for performance
on UE4000, UE6000, and 16CPU E10000s in tripe configurations with Oracle 8 and
Sybase 11 as alternative DBMSs. Sybase 11 was eventually selected for the first
production systems. Best/1,
Metrica/Kingfisher, NetManager, and Hostview were employed as part of the
performance analysis package. Apart from Design and PM functions my major
contribution was in performance and tuning the final deliverable.
03/97 - 04/97 System
manager
System Administration and DBA support
during startup of a new European based call center for an International
Geophysical Software Vendor Sun Ultra 3000, Sun Ultra 1, Solaris 2.5.1, Oracle
7.2.3. General problem solution and
building demonstration machines with LANDMARK OpenWorks Release 97 (Beta)
software.
07/96 - 12/96 Performance Management
Consultant
Wall Street
Investment Bank
The job here was to rectify problems with
computer and network performance of the organization’s development and
production environments in New York, London, and Hong Kong. Conduct a fact-finding
study, make recommendations, but most important fix the problems. The client
had a development environment being used to develop a major new Derivatives
Trading System. It had large Sybase 11 databases on the same machines as
Clearcase. A major contribution to the poor performance of the system was found
to be due to the use of Clearcase. Other problems related to system design such
as server and network overloading, as well as an unwillingness of the
management to take the advice of existing staff. Compounded by the rapid exodus of knowledgeable technical
personnel, following an “out sourcing” exercise. I was required to provide presentations at board level, but
investigation. took place at a variety of levels from corporate management
down. The systems were SUN SPARC Center
1000/2000s, SPARC 20s, SPARC 10s, SPARC 5s, SPARC 2s, lots of PCs, Cabletron
Hubs, CISCO Collapsed Backbone Ether Switch plus Sun firewalls and lots of
other kit. Tools used included BEST/1,
Spectrum, Openview, Proctool and various Solaris system tools, as well as RMON
and the Data General Sniffer.
10/ 95 - 07/ 96
System and Capacity Planning and Management Consultant
This project for one of the major
International News and Financial Data Providers was to create Capacity Planning
and System Management for a Data Warehouse running on the LARGEST MPP machines in
Europe. The machines are intended to
provide market analysis facilities and on-line historical as well as real-time
data for a number of years on a worldwide basis. The prototype machines (NCR3600s) have 120 Application Message
Processors (AMPS), 24 Parse Engines (PEs) and 10 Application Processors (APs)
with six 75 MHz Pentium in each) and will handle around 5000 users at the end
of the first year. The design was to create
an integrated environment for System and Capacity Planning and Management of
the AT&T/NCR 3600 World Mark system running Teradata 5.2.1 under UNIX
MPX-SVRV.4 rev3 (NCR MP-RAS 3.0 and TOS (the Teradata Operating System) with
the transaction monitor TOPEND Tools
used included the BEST/1 performance analysis and modeling package from BGS
running under Solaris 2.4 (SUN O/S 5.4 on a Sun SPARC/20 (hw 09/95) with Open
Windows 3.4 Winrunner and local VB scripts. The BEZ modeling package from BEZ
Inc., under Windows WG3.11. The METRICA/Kingfisher statistical package was used
for the “backend” that is for number crunching and report generation of
strategic resource usage. METRICA runs under OSF/1 on a DEC Alpha based
MP500/2100Server. The Teradata PM/API
permitted provision of near real-time tactical information that was to be
integrated with the output of SAR and the output from the monitoring facilities
of BEST/1. This project represented the
implementation for UNIX of the organizations Automatic Capacity Management
Environment (Project ACME) part of ARMSTRONG.
06/95-08/95 A
European PTT
To investigate system problems involving
IBM Type 1 cabling, 4 Mbit/sec Token-Ring, Novel NetWare 2.2/3.11, and a
proprietary combined speech and data with 200+ workstations, and gateways to a
Tandem T653x, SNA and TCP/IP over V24/CCITT M1022 lines via Sun Firewalls, to
the national primary AXE/10 based site.
The process of re-certifying the hardware and cables, debugging the
Token-Ring/Novel levels. Data acquisition was with Metrica/Kingfisher. Best/1
was used for performance modeling, together with capacity planning, this was
for a Military Messaging System.
03/95-06/95
Research into VLF emissions
The development of a VLF Electromagnetic
Field detector required for investigating VLF fields around (the rear of) VDUs.
01/95-02/95
Space (Satellite) Communications Specialist
A study for NASA and ESA relating to the
requirements for fast (250 Mbit/sec) processing at the start of the ground
station preprocessing of a CCSDS data stream and the proposal to perform the
framing and CRC type integrity checking in software. General conclusions were
that SUN machines have not the back-plane speed, SGI Indigo machines might but
the Cray CR6400 would handle it with room to spare and was scaleable as
throughput was raised after the year 2000. Prototype ATM implementation, built
in the lab.
11/94-12/94
Project Trouble Shooter
An investigation on behalf of a major
American Automaker. How to move 20 MB
of binary image on a very frequent basis to 3200 sites in Europe in a
cost-effective way. The investigation
revealed that the cost of doing this over PSDN/X.25 links was prohibitively
expensive in part due to network security constrains. The solution was in two parts: first in the short term distribute
the images on CD-ROM which while its is rather inflexible and secondly within 2
years go to VSAT with appropriate security precautions.
08/94‑11/94
Technical Management Consultant
For a (Secure) European Government Project Problem
solving and product evaluation for a UNIX and DOS/Windows client/server
environment. Based on S19 SV4.2ES (B2/C2) country wide distributed system. Work included; PC chip-set identification
software, investigations of LMU/X UNIX interactions, space problems, and
performance on large (150+ user) servers. Evaluation of CD-ROM drives,
evaluation of LAN site configurations, Configuration of UNIX Communications,
ISO, TCP/IP and TCP/IP over X.25, building of server configurations with Access
Manager 200, LAN Manager for UNIX (LM/X ULM/X), Microsoft Office and Disk lock
The Team series of products.
Investigation of net security and configuration of Firewalls. Hardware
was ICL DRS6000s, 3000s ValuePlus and Technical PCs.
02/94‑06/94
UNIX and Communications Specialist for European Bank
Configuration of UNIX Communications, mail
and strategic planning for Internet connection. Network security including Firewall. First intranet in EU, http, Mosaic demonstration of Client/Server
system. Document Imaging, storage and retrieval – Optical disk storage.
09/93 ‑
01/94
Information withheld
05/93 ‑
09/93 Principle Investigator and Problem solver/Guru.
General purpose "in house" Guru,
at the Principle Investigator level, in a large research lab environment. Dealing with some 330 workstations evenly
mixed between SUNs, IBM/RS6000s, Silicon Graphics with some DEC Stations and
VAX stations (for Ultrix), two HP9000s, as well as a CRAY and a Convex for
number crunching and various net security devices. With all the UNIX flavors;
X‑Windows; Oracle, and Sybase. The complete GNU software and
compilers for C, C++, Lisp, and FORTRAN. Both vendors supplied and third party
(Lucid). Single platform and cross
platform, with lots of performance related problems involving load
distribution. As well as usual machine tuning and sizing. Document imaging, Optical Jute-box
performance and its interconnection to the super computers (CRAY/Convex/
STRATUS) were covered. There was also
support for vendor-supplied software and hardware integrated "packages
" such as that provided by LANDMARK Inc. which is a Geophysics Trace
Interpretation System (GTIS) built on a Sun 4/75 server pair with 60 Gigabytes
of disks a specialized directory tree, layout and heavily protected (encrypted)
software. Advice and support was also been given on C, C++, Lisp and FORTRAN
usage and the problems involved in cross porting of packages from their
development platform. The software was
in a single or mixed set of the languages (FORTRAN 77, C, C++, and LISP) and
heavy use was made of distributed cooperative (parallel) processing on more
than one machine. The user applications
are very diverse, examples are: finite element analysis, neural networks and
fluid dynamics, as well as Digital Signal Processing and Geophysical
Interpretation with a strong emphasis in all cases on 3D Graphical Interfaces
under X‑Windows.
10/92 to 02/93
Information withheld
05/92 ‑
09/92 Principle Investigator UNIX SVR4.2 and Destiny Kernel Consultant.
An investigation for one of the major
European UNIX platform makers. The
investigation was in two parts. First looking at the driver kernel interfaces
visible and hidden in this manufacturers port of UNIX, compare the actual
interface with that of the AT&T sources (including SVR4.2ES/MP) made
recommendations for migration back to the standard. The second part was a comparative investigation of the contents
of the packages that made up the manufacturers deliverables and compare this to
USL/USO Destiny loads up to S19/P15 (Orange/Red Book B2) with recommendations
for and against migration to the AT&T composition.
03/91 ‑
02/92 Project Manager and System Designer,
Engineering Consultant, System Builder and
Resident UNIX Specialist, for an Integrated Management System to permit the application
of "Just in Time" to a retail department store chain. The Project was to design and systems
engineer a Distributed Process Management System running an Integrated Command
Control Computation and Information System (IC3IS) for Cash, Stock, and Personnel
Management. The whole Distributed
Process Management System, written in C, is running under SCO UNIX on Compaq
machines with TCP/IP and SLIP (RFC1050) communication over leased PTT lines. The Distributed Process Control System was
implemented as Trusted Software and the Integrated Command Control and
Information System runs within the DPMS's controlled space and is seen by the
Distributed Process Management System as a series of its controlled
applications. The Distributed Process
Management System / Integrated Command Control Computation and Information
System generally referred to as the PMS, provides the client with integrated
control over all aspects of its business from cash receipt using EPOS to
inventory control of the central warehouse and in‑store stocks. In
addition it handled ordering as well as re‑ordering at both the retail
and wholesale levels, accounting, payroll, personnel records, and the staff
pension fund. Applications that are controlled by and run within the system
space of the PMS include Oracle, Oracle Financials and Uniface with various
External Schemers for Uniface. The
pilot and proof of concept phase which is now complete was valued at
approximately $US 1,000,000. The
complete system which will be phased in over the next number of years
represents a "First in Europe", a major Data Processing System,
designed from the ground up to meet the highest levels of reliability and
security, and will eventually have more than 100 nodes. NOTE:
The 475th node was rolled out September 1997 proving the
super-scalability of the original Architecture.
10/90 ‑
03/91 Principle Investigator and UNIX System Manager.
For a major UK Computer maker and
Quasi-Autonomous Government Organization (QUANGO) soon to be PLC - Resident
Wizard and System Manager. The organisation was a
novice UNIX user. The system consisted
of 20 nodes, running UNIX System V Release 4, TCP/IP, XBYTE Tape system, on an
ICL DRS6000s. Cisco Firewalls, 64kb
broadband links via Microwave The main
application is a series of 4.0 Gigabytes Oracle 6.0.31 based commercial
databases, with Forms 3.0, VT340 terminals, and PC emulation of VT340
terminals. Total data per node 9
Gigabytes with planned growth to 27 Gigabytes per node.
05/90 ‑
10/90 System Designer and Prototype Developer:
Digital Signal Processing and Graphics
development for a Raster-scan display for retrofit to Marine Radar;
high-precision/high-resolution-approach (marine) radar, running on MC68030 CPU
VMEbus RevC. Retrofit Sonar display for "in the mud" system; same
basic hardware 20 MHz and 80 MHz clock systems. The sonar used Parametric and aperture synthesis as well as DSP
techniques. The associated software was
in C running under ROSY/68; the development was Microsoft C 5.1, Quick C, and
Codeview on a 386 PC. The intermediate
environment was Motorola WS32000 lab system running UNIX V.4/68, and the
graphics display was a RS170 terminal. TEAMWORK was used for system design.
01/90 to 05/90
High speed Communications Consultant European Software House
A fully integrated Medical Electronics
Intensive Therapy Unit Command Control and Information System with specific
application to heart condition monitoring.
Additional work on graphics interface and printing of ECG traces with
the special requirements for a running cache of data to permit ECG printing
after an event as well as design of the communications links which had
reliability and real time requirements.
03/89 ‑ 09/89
Principle Investigator Design and Development of a major Airport system
For Air Defense and ATC applications,
Internet Communications and UNIX SVR4 Kernel involving TCP/IP V.3.2 and V.4.0
Motorola SYS/68 multi LAN constancy for a major European Defense manufacturer
to advise on performance of a distributed system having multi parallel
IEEE802.3 LANs distributed databases X25 STRATUS high availability machines,
SUN 3/50's INTERNET routers and gateways.
Also to supervise the benchmarking and tuning of a test‑bed system
for optimum performance. This system
had imbedded real-time and Oracle databases.
01/89 ‑
02/89 Strategy Consultant, UNIX Porting: Canadian PC Maker
Planning for a port of UNIX onto an Intel
80386 machine for a Canadian PC maker.
It included a full literature search of all known information. Evaluation of the trade-offs and
recommendation of the optimum solution based on the client's exact
criteria. Benchmarking strategy was
developed and an estimate of expected performance given together with figures
for some competitors.
11/88 ‑
12/88 Secure UNIX System Constancy
TCP/IP Secure Communications for a B2/A1
(Orange Book secure UNIX systems constancy.
Negotiation with US communications board maker. In addition, some
security work, using formal methods GYPSY and the Z language.
07/88 ‑
11/88 Technical Consultant,
High Reliability Communications, UNIX and
VMS Management: Defense Software House. Redesign
of part of a public service C3I system (CRIS.
To redesign the performance critical secure message switch and router to
handle multi protocol communications under; BSD 4.2 TCP/IP, UNIX V.3 Streams
& TLI, TCP/IP PSI, and DECnet.
Written to JSP188 standard the documentation also had to be produced for
level 1, 2 and 3 design together with test and integration plans. Various machines with operating systems
ranging from VMS through ULTRIX, AIX and other UNIX like o/s to AT&T UNIX
were supported for tuning and performance improvement as well as a multi node
INGRESS database.
06/88 ‑
07/88 Californian Software House
Porting of a 6000 line compiler and an
associated financial package onto all the ICL CLAN (DRS400 and DRS500) series
i.e. 4, 5, 6 and 7 CCI UNIX from AT&T UNIX v.3.2. Working at the ICL Software Development Center Slough England for
a Californian Software House.
10/87 ‑
05/88 Technical Management Consultant: Major US Computer Maker
The project consisted of the performance of
a quality review of existing software together with the evaluation of the
changes to bring it to a general worldwide marketable product from a special
one off package. The product was a high
availability twin processor system incorporating mirroring and shadowing. The feasibility study included cost/benefit
analysis and assessment of proposals for changes to be incorporated within the
design. The supervision of the
preparation of a vast array of documents from overall design documents to
technical risk report, product impact statement, detailed module design
document and the project time‑scale/plan with materials budget
projections. Much of the technical
documents were generated by reverse engineering the source code. Adding the approved changes produced the
system design documents. The QA plan
together with the Test plan was then derived.
The time plan from ARTEMIS helped to produce the budgets and the project
management report. Finally, the Quality
and Reliability report was produced.
07/87 ‑
11/87 Technical Consultant and System Designer.
High Reliability Communications,
Ethernet/IEEE802.3 Data Communications Constancy: Defense Software House. This
work was undertaken for the prime contractor (Hughes Electronics) on behalf of
the US DOD in the UK and at the Visual Imaging Research Center Vandanburg Air
Force Base Lompoc Calf. USA. The basic
project was to implement the prototype of a three node 10BASE10 Ethernet with
the provision of a priority access for one node termed the master. To achieve this a form of token passing was
implemented. The hardware was standard
MIL grade VMEbus cards with MC69010 processor and LANCE chip for 802.3
communications. To this was added a
Baseband to Fiber Optic and Fiber Optic to Baseband converter pair. The fiber network being considered better
for this application that of connecting between an Evens and Sutherland Flight
Simulator running on a GOULD machine under UTX and a Visual Display Unit
employing CW lasers to generate a wrap‑round cockpit display.
09/86 ‑
05/87 Principle Investigator: Project Manager and System Designer,
This project involved High Reliability
Communications, X25 Data Communications Constancy for a Major UK Defense
Company. The project was the
completion of a subsection of the British Department of Transport National
Motorway Communications System Mark 2 for the prime contractor. The facilities employed were the seized
assets of a failed sub-contractor. A
good deal of diplomatic man management was required to obtain co-operation from
the original project personnel. About
50% of the activity was to perform damage limitation with the client (MOT), as
well as to motivate the reformed team, obtain the required technical input from
the original designers/developers and then to crack a number of design faults
by leading from the front. All in a
zero time frame and with a non-existent budget. The system was based on a British Post Office modified X25
protocol with bits of Levels 1 to 3 together with BS5397, ISO4335, ISO6159 and
ISO6256 compressed together and known as BPO/X25.
01/86 ‑ 08/86
Technical Consultant and System Designer;
This constancy; which lasted over 8 months
in parallel with the European Multinational project above; was a real mixed bag
of mission critical sensitive information storage systems involving Message
Switching, Information Systems, Databases, Security, VMS, Ultrix: for a
European Government. It was for a the
Departments of Home Affairs, External Affairs, Health and Defense and involved
supporting the upgrading of their: car taxation system, national criminal
intelligence system and ship registration systems as well as other high
security systems making a total of 8 systems in all. The switch in the main was from PDP11s to clustered VAX7xx series
machines running Oracle 6. Major design
constrains were that the existing remote devices used for lookups were dumb
KSR33 teletypes. Moreover, an
evaluation of the data communications problems was made. Provision was for upgrades over seven years
to eventually incorporate packet radio links for lookups in real time. Help was also given with database design and
revamp, as well as Ultrix VMS and combined database total system tuning.
10/85 ‑
01/86 US Technical Computer Maker (Conglomerate)
System Structure Design for fourth
generation language generator (compiler) to interface to RELIANCE database
system. Also to advise on the language
interface for FORTRAN, C, COBOL, BASIC and PASCAL. The object being a common
interface from user code in any language, together with security while running
under either UNIX or Concurrent (Perkin-Elmer) OS/32.
08/85 ‑09/85
US Wall Street Banking House
The client, a major name in banking and
commodities futures trading commissioned Dave to evaluate an existing proposal
for a new (real‑time) trading system to be used for the Eurodollar LIFFE
and London commodities futures markets.
01/85 ‑
07/85 Secure Operating System Design Specialist US Communications Maker
The project was to develop a MIL-STD-spec
secure communications management system based around a VAX 7xx series
machine. Prototype experiments were
performed to modify the internals of VMS and Ultrix to provide a secure
communications environment built around military grade terrestrial microwave
and satellite links.
07/84 ‑12/84
Secure Operating System Design Specialist
Developed a detector system for use on a
North Sea Oil Platform on behalf of a Major British Defense Manufacturer. It provided for the continuous monitoring
and automatic shutdown if hazardous conditions were detected. The system, which had other security
monitoring potential, was built in a modular way to permit reuse of the
software and a high degree of redundancy in the hardware. It was based on Z8000, and Z80 CPUs. The
software was derived in part from code written in CORAL66/MASCOT and PASCAL;
all of which was converted to C. The
main processor to which this system interfaced was a Feranti Argus M700. An
intense 3 months was spent tuning this machine. The Command and control was via tropospheric scatter links.
1982/1983
Falkland Islands
During part of 1982 and 1983 in the
Falklands with NP808.
1977 ‑
1983 TPIC/CETEA
The following major projects where handled
during this period in the capacity of Principal Investigator (Project Manager
and Defense Consultant) some of this work is still CLASSIFIED. Protection system for large economic targets
(Marine). Underwater Navel system (DOD
project), Navel Hardware. Parametric and Aperture synthesis sonar techniques
distributed UNIX real‑time O/S, a lot of array and signal processing.
Marine Automaton, Unmanned Engine Room and Bridge Equipment. Underwater Operations (DP) Ship Full C3I
Design. This ship used satellite
navigation as a primary positioning system to locate (fix) ultrasonic and
microwave local reference sources either on marine structures or on the
seabed. They then permitted fine incremental
positioning over a spot on the seabed for recovery, oceanography or other work.
Study of ESM, ECM and ECCM against Satellites (Elint/Ferret/Oceanic
Surveillance).
1974 ‑
1977 National Electronics Institute
While studying for an HND in Computer Science
Dave lectured in Math’s, General and Communications Electronics including Air
and Marine Communications, Navigation, Navigation Aids (Decca, Loran A, B, SS,
and C, Omega, and NNSS), as well as Radar and USW techniques. He then taught Computer Science for 2 years.
1963 ‑
1974 USN
In the US Navy working on Electronic
Warfare. Most of this period in South East Asia.
1959 ‑1963
MoD
Technical apprenticeship with British
Ministry of Defense, trained as an Electromagnetic (Radio) Propagation
Physicist / Engineer and Applied Mathematician. Worked with a variety of projects including Radar, Communication
(RF and Line), Sonar and ECM and on RPVs for UK MoD and NATO. Also used Finite Element Analysis to solve
antenna design problems for Radio/Radar (Radio Frequency) and Sonar (Ultra
Sonic Frequency) systems.
Academic
and technical:
East Cowes County Technical Grammar School
GCE 'A' levels Math’s, Physics, Chemistry.
C & G Tels. 49.
O.N.C and H.N.C Electrical and Electronic
Engineering
R.R.E Diploma.
Ph.D. Electrical and Electronic
Engineering.
Montrose Postgraduate Naval College.
Extra 1st Class Master Mariners License.
(US DOT)
(Equivalent to a Ph.D. in Nautical Science)
H.N.D Computer Science
Member IEEE.
Member ACM.
Project Management Course in New Techniques
Amsterdam .
Sybase DBA course
Solaris Migration Seminar.
HP/SUN NetView and OpenView Network
Management Course
BEZ and Teradata Modeling and Capacity
management Package Course
Virus and Security Course Summer
PRINCE
II Methodology
Risk Management with application to
Multi-Projects
Advanced Problem Solving and Decision Making
Workshop
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