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In 1990, I co-founded Aesir Computing, Inc. as a means to pursue software technologies I enjoy. This page and that line is all that is left from an inside joke from 1993 when my wife put up her first web page and I copied that page word for word and put my name on it to get my first page up. The html in this page is as old as well and I update this using a ssh connection using vi as my editor to a server in Dallas.
I first got involved with computers to satisfy my "foreign language" requirement for a Chemistry degree that I received in 1983 from Virginia Commonwealth University.
After graduating, I went to Houston in 1983 to pursue my PhD in Chemistry but a week before classes were to begin, I had dropped all my chemistry classes and enrolled in both graduate and undergradute computer classes. I found a job with a company needing chemists that could program and supported myself as a programmer in Fortran while I began my own accelerated course of study in Computers. I was living in the graduate dorms at Houston and later in VCU as I worked various computer jobs with the universities and private companies (Chemshare, Phillip Morris, and Academic Computing for the Universities). Over the next 4 years I took every computer science graduate course while working full time at University of Houston and Virginia Commonwealth University. I left graduate school when my wife graduated in 1987 and we both found employement with Planning Research Corporation that was just beginning the automation of the Patent and Trademark Office paper system to digital form. That was an exciting time and my first large scale network (2000 nodes) at the time) with high end graphic workstations and minicomputers. It was a fantastic opportunity of one Gigabyte disk drives that took an entire computer rack and WORM jukeboxes holding over 100GB of patent data when most home computers were still striving to have 10MB hard drives which was a huge leap from floppys. I was hired as a senior systems programmer and wrote UNIX drivers for smart io boards running tcp/ip and XNS. A driver for the 100 platter sony worm juke box and various kernel hacks that fixed kernel panics and race conditions. Later I did a port of 4.3BSD-Reno's network stack to sunos 3.2 for the AWIPS project with custom communication routers and satellite drivers that I wrote for a run off between PRC and CSC. PRC won the contract given they were able to showcase taking generic communication box's and re-program them for function (using PSOS and wind real-time kernels) such as an x.25 to tcp/ip router, satellite GOES-NEXT processing, tcp-ip routing, etc. With it's developement cycle over, I moved on to consulting for my own company and other than the short 1-2 year terms as a Chief Security Officer of a security internet data center, I have done commercial software developement before semi-retiring in 2006.
My career falls into the following progressive stages. I love technology and would work in this field even if I wasn't being paid. I have been very fortunate to have made some big bets that paid off. The first was choosing UNIX and TCP/IP in 1982 when the mainframe was the more secure and higher paying route to puruse. The second was to become a computer consultant and work in commercial software development when government projects were the less risky choice. In commercial software developement (client/server back then), I was pushed to work both user interface and kernel work. That background allowed me to make better choices with my code when efficiency's were still important to maximize performance. These days, I spend a lot of time answering Zimbra questions about mail systems as I dabble in security and various internet services like mail, dns, web, firewalls, vpn's, routers, bgp, etc. I still announce my own /24 ip address for example.
We developed our Web Server technology in 1994
(Aesir*Web) which was used for the
Aesir Resorts Internet product. At the time, it was seeing over 18000 unique ip addresses per day in 1995-1997.
It contained some interesting features such as
"just in time web access" to better handle peak load where it would turn up servers on the fly to handle image delivery. Geographical load balancing
of images. NOTE! see akamai to see a nice
description of how we did it. Virtual images which
allow us to return the best possible image for a particular browser.
Fine granularity content negotiation allowing us to return html 2.0 and
html 3.0 attributes depending on browser type. The translation from
2.0 to 3.0 was done automatically by software conversion in the server.
Server side includes that can be cached on a per file basis. This was decommmissed when
mod-perl and Apache became stable and we were able to duplicate many of
these features and began extending those platforms.
We transitioned off of the
Connections: A Southern Golf and Vacation Guide and began actively
building Relocation Central
1998 which later was a Berkshire Hathaway Company when Cort was purchased.
That site was created using spider technology that helps create the pages and keep links
up to date using a combination of human editors and a library classification system such as the early Yahoo before it became too much work for them to manage. Relocation Central had over 64K pages when we left the company in 2001 and was built to generate high quality leads for apartment and furntiture rental.
With the arrival of our first daughter
in 1998 we slowed down and took a much reduced work load. We relocated back to Canada in
2006 to look after my eldery grandfather who was 90 and living alone in his house and raise our children in Canada.
This site and page is completely out of date with content from 1994. I have been experimenting with a new site called The Silent Admin. It will eventually contain more information as I port articles and tech tips from some internal stuff I had running here like jotspot (now google apps), etc.
I am originally from
Medicine Hat, Alberta. and have lived in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal,
Washington, DC, Houston, and now Victoria, BC.
I have a few interests outside of computers:
I am still a Canadian Citizen,
having arrived in the states in 1976.
Interests
Interesting Links
Fun Internet Links - warning (these were from 1995)
Contact Info:
Aesir Computing, Inc
If you want to contact me... Jim.Dunphy is my user name on gmail.
My telephone number can be found on a lookup of my domain aesir.com
My initials as was the custom with UNIX email addresses in the early 80's is my initials with aesir.com.
My middle initial is our first letter in the alphabet.
I am also on facebook and
linkedin with my name.
Questions? Comments? Complaints? Glowing Reviews about Aesir Web
pages? We'd love to hear from you via email at
<[email protected]>
or our easy to use
feedback form.
J. Dunphy, Aesir Computing, Inc. Copyright © 1993-1999 by Aesir Computing, Inc.