As an applications programmer in the C/UNIX/Oracle environment I have proved to be capable, reliable and constantly exceed customer requirements. This is based on 20 years of C and UNIX knowledge and a deep understanding of the operating system, client business requirements and expectations.

I have been involved in large scale C development and during the eighties I was responsible for designing, building, demonstrating, upgrading and maintaining a single program comprising 1 million lines of code (Excluding documentation). This program was a fourth generation language and the company became publicly listed on the main board of the Perth Stock Exchange at A$8M and I was required to both maintain and advance production of that language and demonstrate its uses in accounting applications across Australia, S.E.Asia and the USA. I have written simple applications programs for general accounting systems as well as more complex applications such as device drivers, comunications systems, terminal emulators, performed kernel modifications for tuning purposes, database access routines, CGI programs, compilers, de-compilers, language converters, X11 applications at a user level using XView, Xt Intrinsics and early versions of Motif as well as protocol debugging programs. Although I have not used IDEs I am extremely quick at producing easily understood, generic code that is well documented and maintainable simply using vi and compilers such as gcc. My style has been described as 'instantly recognisable.'

I have used many other languages and was considered by my colleagues to be an expert in AWK (With a technical manual produced for WMC for it's application in the mining environment), csh/sh (Having written backup scripts in 1992 which were still in use in 1996 and created a Standard Operating Environment for all WorkStations in WMC which allowed any person from any office to use any other workstation and retrieve their chosen work environment regardless of the machine or number of screens), PERL (In 1995 I created a database web server using CGI PERL scripts which retrieved AAP/Reuters news details and Stock prices and provided web pages on the fly. The total number of accessible 'pages' of information exceeded 25,000) , Tcl/Tk (I was part of the original beta testing team with Professor John Ousterhout and provided some of the code for the language while it was in it's early stages). I have good, but secondary skills in C++ (I have attached a copy of a memory management class I created in 1994. This was the first class I had ever created), Java (I wrote the original versions of a Quote Management access system which created Quotes for a multinational construction company and interfaced to Oracle Financials) and JavaScript (I have used this in environments such as retrieving database information for such applications as Unit Fund Pricing) having used these languages as and when required rather than a primary language.

My Oracle experience has been gained in hands-on situations. I have been required at various times to design backup and recovery strategies as well as suggest alterations to relations to increase access speed. I have also been required to install, configure and tune Oracle V7 a number of times for various companies in both production and development environments. I have primarily used sqlplus and sqldba access to make any changes, but have also provided PERL scripts to access the database directly to provide information not easily accessible. An example of this was during an implementation of Oracle Financials. Due to the large segment size required by the company (13!) the Oracle implementation staff were unable to generate a simple chart of accounts listing. I wrote a PERL script that produced this report in three hours. When the first versions of Oracle WebServer were provided to me, I identified several errors in the installation scripts and provided fixes to the Oracle branch office. I have extensive knowledge of versions 1 and 2 of that WebServer having implemented web solutions on several sites. Unfortunately I have no Oracle Forms experience, but I have retained several internal manual sets provided to me by the local Oracle branch for my own use and these do cover that subject.

I currently own copies of; Oracle 7 WorkGroup Server and Oracle Workgroup/2000 for HP/HP-UX, Solaris, SCO, Solaris x86 and UnixWare, Support notes - Version 1.2.2.0.0, Product documentaion library release 1.0.15.1 and 1.0.16.1, Oracle Mobile Agents V2.0, Oracle Power Objects V2.0 for Windows, Personal Oracle Lite and Personal Oracle7 for Windows, Oracle7 for NT V1.1, Oracle Workgroup/2000 for Netware, OS/2 and NT, Oracle Workgroup Server for NT, Oracle WebSystem V1.0 (2 copies), pre-release 2.0, Release 3.0 Beta 2 and V2.1.0.0 all for Solaris.

I also have extensive experience with mSQL V1 and V2. I have created a management system for creating web sites quickly and efficiently in the UNIX environment using PERL and w3-msql connections to the databases. These databases included such applications as retail stores and fund management systems. All of these have web interfaces that provide configurable user styles, access control to the site, internal email facilities, configurable security based menu systems and all on the fly pages.

My recent experience has been gained working for ninemsn Pty Ltd (A joint venture between Microsoft and Packer Broadcasting Limited in Sydney). During my time with this company I have been instrumental in making some major changes to the publishing systems used to create many of the web sites. In particular a publishing system created by myself and my partner Benjamin Evans allowed the automated production of websites in a fraction of the time require previously. The major sites Ben and I built using this system are news (http://news.ninemsn.com.au), sports (http://sports.ninemsn.com.au) and the small business show (http://sbs.ninemsn.com.au). The news site comprises some 2,500 pages generated each hour based on automated feeds from AAP. The site takes approximately 2-5 minutes to generate.

The publishing system we created has been adopted by many other groups within ninemsn and is currently in use by 10 sites.

I have also been involved in many aspects of administration at ninemsn and I am now considered a de-facto administrator with full privileges across all servers. This has involved the setting up and maintaining Site Server 3.0 (90% CDS) as well as IIS/Proxy in a variety of configurations. This required me to gain a deep understanding of how IIS, Site Server and Windows NT works, and required me to create many functional components both in VBScript(Wscript), ASP, Perl and C and VB COM objects.

As a direct result of this Ben and I have built our own network at home comprising some ten servers running everything from Solaris, RedHat and NT.

I have written many technical documents for various companies that have become standard references on both the internals of Solaris and SunOS as well as user and management aspects. I have attached the first chapter of a Systems Administration book I wrote for Western Mining Corporation in 1993/4 as proof of this. This book detailed all aspects of SunOS systems administration covering such issues as Hardware, File Systems, System Directories, System Files, Kernel Configuration, Startup and Shutdown, NFS, NIS, Network Commands, Backups, Printing, Email, PC-NFS, Users, Crontabs, Automounting, System Modules, Modems, Ongoing Maintenance, Tuning, Security, AWK, Perl and others in such detail that it was purchased by several large organisations and used as the primary reference for SunOS administration for two years. Tim O'Reilly requested that when the manuscript was finished to send it to him for publication. Unfortunately the pressure of work and the gradual acceptance of Solaris stopped this. A draft copy of this is available for perusal. Unfortunately the originals were created using FrameMaker V4.0 and V5.0 and as I do not have access to this DTP I am unable to provide more up to date copies.

My UNIX experience covers most major versions of that operating system although primarily concentrated on SunOS and Solaris. I have administered both large and small sites. The largest was when I was contracting to Western Mining Corporation and involved the complete rebuilding of their UNIX environment across Australia. This involved traveling to all the mine sites and offices of WMC and proposing solutions, arranging purchase of equipment, installing, configuring to integrate many different mining applications and managing all of the 115 servers. This also required an in-depth understanding of PC access to the network and required me to liaise with all levels of management and staff. I have trained two systems administrators to take over after I left, one of whom became the systems administrator for WMC Olympic Dam operations and the other became the branch manager of Maptek Australia in Perth.

I have installed two ISP systems including sale, configuration and post sales support. This involved DNS, Firewalling, Email, Anonymous FTP as well as web serving.

The Kwinana Nickel Refinery division of WMC requested that I create a disaster recovery plan for their UNIX systems which control the movement and monitoring of toxic chemicals around the plant. This required a detailed understanding of the current network, proposing a failover system with all points covered, producing a detailed report on implementation, advice on purchase of equipment and creation of the first disaster failover system between the servers that controlled these systems.

I created and maintained a mining and resource company information web server (25,000 pages) dedicated to providing quality and timely information to the resource industry. This involved Oracle, Ingres, SQL, C, C++, Perl, Java and Javascript code as well as direct connection to such wire services such as AAP/Reuters.

I participated in the sale of 50 Ascend P50s, 2 Ascend 1800s and 2 Ascend Max 4000s for a government department. I was then required to install and configure these devices including failover options, configure OSPF/RIP as and when required and handle general issues such as creating automated scripts to create and download configuration profiles for these devices. I was directly involved in identifying a wiring problem created by Telstra at a remote location by systematic testing of devices surrounding the suspect device remotely.

During the installation of these devices, a statewide communications issue became apparent for that government department which involved performing hand decoding of protocol traces. The network has several mainframes, high end Sun servers, dozens of routers and some 2,000 PCs. In two days I identified the problem as being the incorrect fragmentation and re-sending of packets between DataCraft routers and the subsequent timeout storm by hand decoding protocol traces. The fix was to increase the timeout on the remote PCs.

While engaged by WordRight Technologies I was involved in the sale of a large number of Sun Microsystems machines to a large construction company and created the first version of a complete virtual network spanning Australia and S.E. Asia. I also created the first version of a full extranet to allow remote users to tunnel to the main server and create quotes, modify accounting information and handle email, news, spreadsheets and word processing within a Microsoft Internet Explorer browser window. This involved handling remote PC and server connections and the creation of an extensive Oracle based Web service to provide all this functionality. (The email and news services were not the IE extensions) It also required detailed liaison with the then ISP (Access/1).

At WMC I designed and implemented security solutions at the site and machine level. This involved identifying potential problems and creating standards for the reduction in security alerts. During this time WMC hired a third party contractor to test the network for security holes unbeknownst to myself and the resident IS manager. In 5 minutes we had identified an attack was occurring, contacted the ISP, arranged for Federal Police to raid the suspected attacker and this was only averted by WMC senior management informing us that the attack was authorised.

As the above descriptions show, I have a broad and deep understanding of UNIX, Windows NT 4.0, Programming, Administration, Database and Web Applications. I believe that I can provide a excellent addition to any team whether it be in the Applications Programming, Systems Administration and Web Development environments.