Alan Walendowski
 
walendo@bitsmith.com

About me
I'm a general-purpose programmer, working in the software industry since 1987. For the last several years I've been working in the networking and web areas, writing server and networking code, though my roots are in device drivers and low level graphics.

Experience
11/2006 - present PARC, Palo Alto, CA
Programmer
  I'm currently a programmer in the Computing Science Laboratory at PARC. More specifically, I am in the Ubiquitous Computing Group where I'm having fun with mobile devices and multimedia delivery techniques.
[Java/C#, Windows Mobile]
2002 - 2006 Bitsmith Consulting, Bay Area, CA
Software Engineer, Founder
  Worked on a variety of projects, including:
10/99 - 03/02 AT&T Labs, Menlo Park, CA
Software Engineer
  At AT&T, I was part of a small team that developed Hubbub, a sound-enhanced, mobile instant messenger that provided background awareness cues and supported lightweight, informal communication among distributed groups. I designed and implemented the server (Java with PostgreSQL for the database), the proxy servers, the Palm wireless client (Palm III/V series with the Omnisky wireless service), and worked on the Win32 client. I still administer the Hubbub servers and website.

Also while at AT&T, I co-authored the book " Designing From Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology" with Ellen Isaacs. In this book, we describe our strategy for user-centered design and use Hubbub's development as the primary example.
[C/PalmOS, Java/Solaris/Linux, C/Win32/MFC, Perl, PostgreSQL]
05/99 - 08/99 Communities.com / The Palace, Cupertino, CA
Software Engineer, Contractor
  One of Electric Communities' products was The Palace, a graphical chat application. The Palace server handles message fanout and permission enforcement, among other things. I worked on extending the server so that it could better handle large scale moderated events. This involved enabling servers to act as clients on other "master" servers, allowing chains of servers to be created. My task was to add the client emulation and message handling code that allows the servers to talk to each other. This code eventually became the Palace Arena.
[C/Linux]
07/98 - 05/99 3Dfx Interactive, San Jose, CA
Software Engineer, Contractor
  I designed and implemented a conformance test suite for 3Dfx's Glide graphics library. The test suite was intended to help verify that new revisions of either hardware or software behaved within tolerance of previous versions, and that the Glide API performed according to its documentation. It consisted of a series of image-based and self-checking tests, image comparison tools, and run-comparison tools, and was used successfully during the development of Glide 3.x to find bugs and deviations in the new software.
[C/Win32/Glide3]
01/97 - 06/98 Electric Communities, Cupertino, CA
Software Engineer
  EC was developing a Java-based secure, distributed virtual world application/platform. I wrote the text subsystem (first completely in Java, then in Java-wrapped native code for better performance), integrated our application with web browsers and the Win95/NT Explorer, and examined and fixed various performance problems (memory usage, speed, and networking) throughout the code base.
[Java/JNI/C/Win32]
10/96 - 01/97 Dimension X, San Francisco, CA
Software Engineer
  I was a developer on the Liquid Reality team. Liquid Reality was Dimension X's Java-based implementation of a VRML2.0 browser, plus a set of API extensions. I implemented 3D text, added DirectSound support, and handled the integration of Liquid Reality with web browsers (as an ActiveX control and as an applet).
[Java/C/Win32]
01/90 - 09/96 Anyware Fast, San Jose, CA
Founder / Partner
  I co-founded Anyware Fast as a consulting firm in 1989. We specialized in graphics-related projects, from device drivers to high level APIs. Most of our work was done for Sun Microsystems, although other customers included SCO, Ameritech, Any Channel, and Rendition. Anyware Fast was acquired by Dimension X in October of 1996.

The last few projects I worked on at Anyware Fast were:

  • Ported SunVideo (Sun's video conferencing application and support library) from Solaris 2.4 to Solaris 2.5.1. SunVideo lives on top of XIL (Sun's 2D imaging library), which was a moving target at the time.
    [C++/Solaris]

  • Wrote device and XIL drivers for the Hauppauge Win/TV family of video-in-a-window boards for Solaris x86. The XIL driver knew how to talk to the device driver, and provided a standard API that external developers could use to write applications around the Hauppauge boards.
    [C/C++/Solaris]

  • Wrote device drivers for The MediaVision ProGraphics 1024 and the ATI Graphics Ultra Pro video cards, in support of the X Windows port that we were also working on.
    [C/Solaris x86]

Prior to those, I was involved in various projects onsite at Sun. One highlight was being on the SunPHIGS (Sun's implementation of the PHIGS 3D ISO standard, a display list based graphics library) development team.
1989 - 1990 IBM, Kingston, NY
Software Engineer, Contractor
  Consulted for IBM (through Pencom) as a member of the GraPHIGS (IBM's PHIGS implementation) development team.
[C/Unix]
1987 - 1989 Computervision, Bedford, MA
Software Engineer
  I was a member of the graphics group for CADDS, a very large CAD/CAM application. I was also one of a three-person team responsible for bringing SunView to the Raster Technologies GX4000, a graphics accelerator with a firmware PHIGS implementation.
[C/SunOS]
Education
1987, B.A. Computer Science, Boston University, Boston, MA.
Patents
US Patent #6760754 (2004)
System, Method, and Apparatus for Communicating Via Sound Messages and Personal Sound Identifiers

US Patent #7043530 (2006)
System, Method and Apparatus for Communicating Via Instant Messaging
Publications
Isaacs, E., Walendowski, A., and Ranganathan, D., (2002)
Hubbub: A sound-enhanced mobile instant messenger that supports awareness and opportunistic interactions, Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) '02, Minneapolis, MN: ACM Press, pp. 179-186.

Isaacs, E. & Walendowski, A. (2001)
Designing From Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology. New Riders.
References
Available upon request.

-walendo, 2006