James W. Thompson
111 Hekili Street
Suite A
PMB 168
Kailua, HI 96734
(808) 351 19199 (cell)
12610 E. Mirabeau Parkway, #900
Spokane, WA 99216
VP Software and Systems / Chief Architect
July 2002 - Jan 2004
Vivato designed a series of "WiFi Switches" that use
phased-array (beam forming) techniques to improve the range and capacity of
WiFi networks. Vivato's Wi-Fi
switches have the same properties as Ethernet switches - parallel network
operation, extended range and support of standard client adapters, as well as a
high-power, dual radio 802.11b 'bridge/router'.
During my tenure at Vivato, I led the research, design and
engineering efforts on all but the first generation (802.11b) WiFi switch
product. These efforts included
managing groups developing custom 802.11 ASICs (MAC and Baseband, including
algorithmic simulations), all system software, as well as having primary
responsibility for the PRDs and functional specifications of these product
lines.
I was also the lead on Vivato's interactions with the FCC and
WECA, and was pivotal in the second and third rounds of financing.
4417 Ridge Oak Drive
Austin, TX 78731
Founder
April 2001 - June 2002
Musenki designed a suite of fully-featured, low-cost 802.11 and
security products based on the PowerPC (Motorola 824x) architecture. During my tenure at Musenki, I served
as the primary architect for all of Musenki's products, and managed and
performed the complete software effort, from cross-compilers, then the
bootloader (ppcboot) and linux 2.4.18, including device drivers for 802.3 Ethernet,
802.11b, 802.11a, and i2c, SNMP (v1, v2, and v3) daemon, 'bridge mib' support,
Perl, SSHv2, SSL, HTTP/HTTPS, and a captive portal. All systems software was released under GPL or similar
licenses.
I also led Musenki's 'guerilla' marketing efforts, including being
invited to speak at 802.11 Planet and EyeForWireless, serving on several
panels, and speaking to several "community wireless" groups including
BAWUG, SeattleWireless, NYCwireless, and AustinWirelessNetwork. I was Musenki's "public
face".
8303 North Mopac Expy
Austin, TX 78731
CTO and VP of Engineering
October 1998 - April 2001
Wayport is the leading provider of high-speed Internet access in
more than 700 hotels, 100 McDonalds resturants, and 9 airports nationwide. At
Wayport, my duties ranged from development of unique hardware and software used
in provisioning Wayport's services, to managing the provisioning and operation
of the network that connects all of Wayport's locations to the Internet, to at
various times, running the technical support group ("Call Center").
Also provided support for responses to RFPs from various hotel
chains, closer for sales calls, and active participation in two road-shows with
both CEOs to obtain and close over $85M in venture capital. The second round
took 10 months to close with a new CEO at the end of 2000.
Detail on various internal development efforts follows:
Managed entire process from initial/idea phase through development
and test, and manufacturing, including test fixtures, etc. of a 16-to-100 port
managed Ethernet switch ("EveryWire") system including switch fabric, embedded
PowerPC (MPC860T) controller, physical layer cards for 10BT, 100BT, VDSL & HPNA,
backplane, power supplies, development of first-generation 5-port 10/100/HPNA
switch box, and second-generation single-port 10/100/VDSL in-room electronics. The system was deployed inside
custom-designed hardened, environmentally sealed enclosures. I managed and participated in the
development of the control software (Kadak-based) for system bring-up,
diagnostics, remote monitoring, diagnostics (SNMP) and remote firmware update.
PowerPC-based (MPC855T-based) embedded linux system for xDSL
and 802.11 networking
(DSLAP). Never brought to
production due to change in strategic direction and change of CEO.
Various Linux (2.0.36 - 2.2.18) efforts related to the deployment
of Linux/PC-based Network Management Devices (NMDs) used in-place of an IP
router and control/management plane.
The NMD is critical to Wayport's services in any given Wayport location.
Chief architect and guided development of use-detection and billing
system for users of high-speed Internet service provided at Hotel and Airport
properties via direct 10/100-base-T Ethernet and 802.11 wireless access. User access and system configuration
are detected via SNMP. Backend data base initially used Perl DBI to MySQL, then
converted to Oracle. This system
also tied into custom call center support.
Managed the design, provisioning and operation of the production
data network used to support Wayport's services. Negotiated with and selected providers for T1, T3, Fiber and
co-location services. Designed
first IP addressing plan.
Designed or developed various internal tools used to manage and
plan the deployment and installation of Wayport's services in over 400
locations, totaling over 120,000 hotel rooms, over an 18-month period. Systems are still in-production.
Austin, TX
Founder (Founded in April of 1992)
August 1996 - September 1998
SmallWorks was a small, 5-person Internet software development company in Austin, TX. SmallWorks had two 'main' products. The first was a dynamic, fully controllable stateful packet-filter than ran on SunOS, Solaris and Windows NT, with a configuration and monitoring GUI written in Java. It was OEMed by several large "firewall" companies including Sterling Commerce (since acquired by Computer Associates.)
The second was "CiscoSecure", a TACACS+/RADIUS AAA
server, since acquired by Cisco.
The Cisco Secure Access Control Server (ACS) is a high-performance,
highly scalable, centralized user access control framework. Cisco Secure ACS offers
centralized command and control for all user authentication, authorization, and
accounting from a Web-based, graphical interface. SmallWorks proposed, developed and supported the product
until the product was acquired by Cisco, who still sells this product.
In addition, SmallWorks performed various performance work
(typically multi-threading and 'hotspot' elimination) on three of the four
"commercial" DHCP servers of the day: Competitive Automation
(acquired by @Home), Quadritek Acquired by Lucent) and American Internet.
We also conceived of, developed and sold (to Quadritek) a
LDAP-based backend that was the core of Quadritek's QIP 3.0 platform to enable
enterprise-wide management of IP address spaces.
SmallWorks also developed a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)
'listener' (in Java) that could tie the eBGP4 feeds from the MAPS RBL service
into NetGate firewall rules. This
software would allow customer sites to completely block providers of UCE from
contacting their constituent networks.
The code to the listener was open sourced, and used in several
university-level Java programming classes.
(Acquired by RDI, Inc.)
Austin, TX (reported to Cambridge, UK)
Director of Engineering Services
February 1992 - August 1996
Tadpole created and marketed specialized UNIX platforms
specifically designed and configured for compute intensive environments like
electronic design automation (EDA), genomics, oil and gas, finance, application
service providers, military, health care and telecommunications.
In particular, Tadpole engineered notebook computers that
performed as workstation replacements.
These notebooks were based on industry-leading RISC architectures,
including SPARC (Sun) with both SunOS and Solaris support, PA-RISC (HP) with
HP/UX support, Alpha (Digital) with both Ultrix and VMS support, PowerPC (IBM)
with AIX support and Intel support (Windows 95, WinNT, NeXTstep, OS/2
Solaris/x86, and Linux.)
As the only US-based member of the Cambridge, England-based
engineering staff, my responsibilities ranged from mainline OS porting and
development to porting and support of low-level drivers for OpenGL for
Tadpole's now largest customer, to taking those layer-3 support calls that the
support group could not handle, with bi-weekly trips into the field to assist
in various sales efforts.
I was also responsible for the concept and development of
Tadpole's "Nomadic Computing Environment" (NCE), a suite of tools and
technologies that helped road-warriors use Unix-based systems in a mobile
environment.
Dallas, TX (reported to Mt. View, CA)
NOC Manager (aka Net.God, according to some)
November 1988 - November 1992
At Sun, my primary responsibility was the design, provisioning and
operation of SWAN (Sun Wide Area Network), a network supporting world-wide
access across all Sun offices and sites including13, 000+ Sun employees working
on 40,000 network nodes (1992 stats).
During my tenure, SWAN grew from a set of 4 56Kbps leased lines
connecting four area sales offices to Sun's California headquarters to include
multiple cross-country T1 backbones, undersea bandwidth to Europe and Asia, and
T1/E1 lines for both voice and data to Sun's world-wide offices.
I also maintained Sun's top-level e-mail machines, Sun's USENET machines
(world-wide), Sun's Arpanet (the Internet) gateway. I authored Iftp and Itelnet, some of the first
"firewall proxy" programs ever to appear on the Internet. (Sun's consulting group sold these for
a while.)
I was the representative from HQ during the final six-weeks of the
startup of Sun's manufacturing plant in Linlithgow, Scotland.
While at Sun, I also was very involved in the early-stage
development of INN, a complete Usenet system by Rich Salz.
(Since acquired by HP)
Dallas, TX
July 1986 - November 1988
Formed in 1982, Convex designed and manufactured computers aiming
to satisfy scientific and technical users with an increasing demand for fast,
affordable supercomputer performance.
Convex saw themselves as Cray substitutes and aimed to provide
compatibility with Cray and IBM systems.
Convex computers were widely used for visualization in computational
fluid dynamics, medicine, computer-aided engineering, petroleum and seismic
exploration, and finance.
While at Convex, my primary duty was System Administration for
software engineering group. I also
ported several GNU programs, including GNU Emacs, GNU CC (gcc), GDB, GAS, and
other utilities to Convex architecture.
During my last year at Convex, I managed a group of eight people
responsible for all engineering system administration (including test/lab
machines), and continued development and support of various internal tools.
Austin, TX
Partner
May 1993 - Summer 2000
Part edge-culture bookstore, part self-published magazine (peek
circulation, 12,000), part website, and part purveyor of odd bits from the
bleeding edges, Fringeware was a self-styled "media collective"
started with a goal of supporting a marketplace for artifacts from diverse
cultures. Fringeware was one of
the very early (1992) businesses on the (pre-browser) Internet.
http://www.auschron.com/issues/annual/bestof/97/critics/tech.html
One of the first virtual corporations, FringeWare, Inc., has
always been, as Bob Rossney once said, "at the cutting edge of the cutting
edge." FringeWare has cultivated affinities along the technocultural
borders of consensus reality, creating a true "temporary autonomous
zone" and a great party online and off. The FringeWare bookstore
supplanted the late great Europa Books as coolest source of human code, and the
FringeWare website is chock full o' fringe goodies. 2716 Guadalupe, 494-9273,
http:// www.fringeware.com
See
also: http://www.salon.com/tech/log/1999/06/22/fringeware/
and http://www.booklist.com/stores/fringeware.html
US/Canada Tour 1994
Internet Roadie
June 1994 - September 1994
Interval Research Corporation was founded by Paul Allen as an
elite R&D firm, replete with PhDs intent on inventing the Next Big Thing in
high tech. Despite its lack of spin-off success stories, Interval was, during
its heyday, a hub of the best and brightest in Silicon Valley, focused on
innovative futurological approaches to design, video-intensive market research,
home to a thousand and one always intriguing but never really lucrative
inventions and ideas.
In 1994, Interval Research decided to sponsor The Electric
Carnival multimedia tent that toured with Lollapalooza concerts during the
summer of 1994 ranks high up in the list of intriguing, and probably at the top
of the list of expensive experiments from Interval Research.
My job was to ensure that there was a T1-speed satellite shot with
Internet and video conferencing connectivity at 43 venues during the ten-week
tour. This included being
responsible for everything from provisioning the satellite channel, to taking a
rack of gear (satellite modem, router, Ethernet hubs, SPARCstation-based web
server, etc) 'on tour' to supporting the 100+ Macs and PCs that hosted a variety
of research experiments.
Since this even was concurrent with my employment at Tadpole, it
bears explanation that I took twelve weeks of accrued vacation in order to
complete the task.
http://web.interval.com/projects/ecweb/ec.html
Los Angeles, CA
August 1993
SIGKIDS was started by Coco Conn in 1992 as a way to get exposure
for educational technologies for children; to connect educators with technologies,
and children with technologies.
I assisted with SIGKIDS at SIGGRAPH in 1993, including
multicasting the 1993 Electronic Theatre show on the 'mbone'.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.04/sigg.kids.html
94 hours completed
toward a B.S.M.E. at BYU 1980-1983
Additional
C.S. coursework 1987-1988 University of Texas at Dallas
802.11, Ethernet, TCP/IP, embedded devices, firewalls, computer
security, VPN, network architectures, SNMP.
Languages/Environments: C, C++, LISP/Scheme, Java, TCL, awk.
Architectures: Xscale (IXP42x), MIPS (Broadcom 47xx, IDT32438,
RealTek RTL8181, Atheros 5312), PowerPC (MPC824x), SPARC (v7-v9)
Snowboarding, Surfing, Genetic algorithms (esp as applied to
financial modeling), LISP, community-networking, artisan baking (pastry)
Inventor or co-inventor on six US Patents: 6,970,927 6,732,176 6,571,221
6,483,902 6,414,635 6,259,405 and D429,483