About Jim Weller

personal | professional | accomplishments | resumé | software | documents | credits

/jim-weller/images/addrimage.jpgI'm Jim Weller, a happy Alaskan living in Anchorage, Alaska. I work in computers and have a background in information technology. I enjoy reading, computing, biking, and most things outdoors; winter and summer.

This site (jimweller.com, jimweller.net) is my blog. I started it around 1999. Before that I was dinking around with HTML on the VMS and DEC Unix servers at the University. I'd done serial cable gaming and dial-up BBS' for a long time. I've had and been into computers since I was very young. Then when I got my first broadband connection in 1999, I started hosting a small phpWebsite "Web Log."

Despite the fact that blogs are clichéd, passé, nouveau and a couple other French adjectives, it's immensely useful for notes and as a portfolio. This site is really just like my breakfast bar, a transient horizontal surface to put things on.

Personal

I was born in Kansas on March 3rd, 1976. I'm a Pisces by the Greek Zodiak and a Dragon by the Chinese Zodiac. We moved to New Mexico when I was about two years old. I spent most of my youth in the Sandia Mountains in The Land of Enchantment on a large acreage next to a hunreds of thousand acre Spanish Land Grant. My siblings and I had a lot of outdoor freedom. My freshman year of high school my parents moved us, spontaneously, to Alaska which turned out to be a good move. We left for Wyoming for a while, then lived in Kansas for a while. Finally, we ended up back in Alaska where I graduated from Dimond for my senior year of high-school. I've lived here since then and like to say that, "I will until my bones are to old to take the cold." The north is mystic and magic.

I enjoy training and working with animals. I have an african gray parrot (Mr. Bean) and two rabbits (Cardamom and Poppy ) at my house in midtown Anchorage. The parrot talks which is fun. The bunnies learn simple patterns, like wandering out for a blueberry or climbing up the "rabitat" for breakfast veggies. They are all friendly.

I like tinkering with computers and software at home where I keep a linux server and RAID array in the garage. I keep a computer in the office upstairs that has homegrown scanner to email software gateway that I'm pretty proud of. I like to make videos and slideshows. I collect mp3s (63,000). I also like to combine materials with power tools and being handy around the house. I generally just geek out with whatever fancies me in my spare time. I'm not really about spare time. I don't watch much television. I enjoy keeping busy.

I mountain bike, hike, and camp in the midnight summer sun. I bike and cross country ski in the winter. Anchorage is a great outdoors town. And I love my home here.

1979 jim pic 100_0931 DSC03750 IMG_0098 th_portfoliocollage

Professional

Resumé

I have a Bachelor's of Computer Science. I'm a generalist with a deep understanding of computers and the internet. I'm a technical communicator, an above average programmer/mathematician, an average visual designer, a qualified sysadmin, and an enjoyble team member. I like to think of myself as a project and systems integrator. I like working with teams to a successful conclusion. People I work with say I'm quick on my feet, empirically driven and have a broad range of IT and professional skills. I have explored many roles in IT and business. I like to say, "I'm platform independent. Give me two bits. I'll bang them together."

I currently work at the University of Alaska Anchorage as the Lead Software Engineer in the Information Technology department. My department administers core enterprise technology. My group, the Web Applications Team, "enhances the effectiveness and quality of UAA's teaching, research, and service through software integration, software development and data analysis." We develop releases of third party software, do a lot of enterprise integration, are the defacto DBAs and focus on the continuous improvement of web content, information management, and code quality. We are spread very thin and are lucky to have an incredibly talented crew that works all through the OSI modle (Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away) and with a lot of different languages (batch, bash, perl, php, .NET, coldfusion, html, javascript, SQL, java, etc.).

Notable Accomplishments

2008 VMware certified profissional.ITIL v3 foundation certification. Continuous improvement. All software placed under version control and continuous improvment through formal code reviews. Same pattern for web sites. Batch scripts to data warehouse MS DHCP logs complete with a PHP interface that operations uses to identify violations of appropriate network use. Sophisticated 1,000 line MS office macro to build a product catalog from and ODBC data source. Analysis and hacking of Cisco IP Callcenter and Manager DB schemas. Hundreds of queries and data transformations. Data warehouses to union ERP core data with local tracking and directory data.

2007 Promoted to lead software engineer. ITIL Foundations certification. Clusters with SAN storage for Blackboard on Solaris and CommonsSpot on Windows. Snapshot oracle ERP warehouse into MS SQL OLTP stores for webifying and reporting with .NET and PHP. Co-chair of Elearning governance comittee. Standardized BAT and VBS scripts for the provisioning of web hosting accounts. C# desktop app to use MS SQL OLTP ERP stores transformed to XML to feed course evaluation software. Software grant from UAA's Complex Systems Group to feature add work to herbivore biomass software.

2006 Dashboard software recognized as exemplary monitoring example at Bb World conference. Migrated Learning Management System from Solaris & Oracle 8 to Solaris & Oracle 9. MHS, a C# sharp application to field sample herbivore biomass using integrated hardware and the Table PC. Interim lead duties during lead's maternity leave.

2005 The year of automation. Automated backups of Axis long distance DB, fetches of banner extracts to provision LDAP, creation of web hosting accounts via script, various nightly reports. Software maintenance of student surveying VB application, SDIS. Led project to have UAA handle the Juneau campus' long distance records.

2004 Piloted a streaming media server initiative. Combined 4 software suites into a single streaming server. Lead a large group of 40+ beta testers. Invited to join the eLearning governance committee. Wrote the Intel Assembly Visual Studio HOWTO.

2003 Leader of year long project to migrate UAA's learning management sytem (LMS). Led a large group of 30 beta testers. Wrote perl scripts to provision LMS from Banner and LDAP. Deployed Linux based mail server driven by Active Directory authorization, authentication and provisioning. Implemented Oracle business continuity plan for UAA.

2002 Ported Pascal based SDIS student survey program to MS Access. Wrote a Palm conduit in C++ that syncs with project time management software, Titrax. Wrote Linux Palm Developer's HOWTO.

2001 Wrote MS Access application that still manages the UAA telephone switchboard. Wrote DocBook XML Quickstart.

2000 Converted UAA's long distance database from NEC Astra to Paetec AXIS. Wrote 6000 line perl based Wine CMS.

1999- Co- developed UAA IT's web based LDAP tools in perl. Linux firewall on a floppy.

Software Projects

Course Evaluation XML Extract Generator - This project batch migrates the slow Oracle ERP data warehouse to a faster indexed OLTP MS SQL database. A C# desktop application allows the course evaluation operator to input date and class parameters and retrieve an XML extract that can be uploaded to the ASP course evaluation vendor's web site.

Moose Forage Surveyor
C# .NET Software to mmplement the measurement, recording and visualization component of a new methodology for measuring the density of certain plant species in an area. It's part of a larger project to determine the availability of moose forage by calculating biomass.

Titrax Conduit
TitraxConduit is a win32 palm conduit for Titrax. It facilitates transferring project timing data from the palm to the desktop in the form of text files. Titrax is an GPL time tracking program for the Palm OS. It is based off an even earlier x-windows version, TimeTracker.

OS Scheduler Simulation
A nice java application that simulates differnet CPU scheduling algorithms. This application is designed to simulate the short term scheduler in an operating system.

Linux Firewall on a Floppy
This is my firewall-on-one-floppy howto. The need for this document arose when I wanted to connect my home LAN to the internet over my cable modem. My ultimate (and current) goal was to use linux as an embedded system for a 486 with two ethernet cards and a boot rom to start from the local network.

Documents, HowTo's and QuickStarts

VC++, MASM, 32bit ASM QS (htm|pdf|src) Describes howto use nmake and MS Visual Studio to create, compile, and debug programs written in assembly language for masm on x86. Serves as a solid introduction to microsoft makefiles and assembly programming. It is intended to get developers with other programming experience up and running quickly. It is perfect as a first assembly lesson in a college computer architecture or assembly course.

DocBook XML QS (htm|rtf|xml|txt|src) Describes how to install, configure and use the tools and resources for DocBook XML 4.1.2. The purpose of this quick start guide is to get new docbook authors, editors, and contributors up and running fast with the DoocBook tools.

DocBook SGML QS (htm|rtf|sgml|txt|src) Describes how to install, configure and use the tools and resources for docbook sgml and dsssl. The purpose of this quick start guide is to get new docbook authors, editors, and contributors up and running fast with the DoocBook sgml tools. It assumes a fair knowledge of building and installing source packages.

Linux Palm Dev QS (old|draft) This guide is intended to help those new to palm programming get started developing using linux, PRC Tools, GNU tools, and the PalmOS© SDK. It assumes a fair knowledge of linux and GNU tools and a user level understanding of the PalmOS.

Quickstart: SSH Public Key Infrastructure I keep SSH keys on a USB keychain and use that to access the servers I work on. No passwords over the wire and single-sign-on. Some have asked how its done. Here is a comprehensive 7-part video tutorial on using 2 major clients with both server types.

Monitoring oracle with intelligent agent and net or ucd snmpThe purpose of this document is to walk through installation, configuration, and examination of oracles smart agents SNMP capabilities. This document is specific to Unix, but directions exist for windows. Oracle provides its own SNMP master agent. Youll use an oracle wrapper to net/ucd-snmp.

White Paper: Four Core Streaming Technologies at UAA The purpose of this white paper is to give a rich overview of UAA's next-gen streaming environment. UAA has services for all four major streaming suites. This document explains how those services are arranged at UAA. This paper covers the abstract process of publishing streaming media. It explores connecting streaming media to the web. This is not a detailed tutorial or instructional document but rather a survey of the streaming media market and how it relates to the UAA community. This document limits its scope to on-demand unicast streaming; skipping live and multicast streaming.

Site Credits

This site, my career, my education, and many of my philosophies are either because of or inspired by the open source software movement. I believe in open source. I work in business in the real world and understand the need for proprietary software. I'm very pragmatic and will use whatever tool it takes to get the job done. I try to make holistic considerations that include more than just the technology. I'm not an evangelist. But in my heart, I believe in open source.

This site stands on the shoulders of open source giants. Very little of the software is in its original form. That is to say it is severely hacked up for my needs.