Crowdsourced Joy

My new job at Cambrian House has been unreal with it’s stock of amazing people, it’s bubbly excitement and cool technology that brings back slightly surreal memories of the startup days at GroupTelecom. I’ve deeply enjoyed work lately — work has always been a large component in my life which, if the magical resonance of doing good and making money can be hit, brings huge personal satisfaction. We have very challenging problems to chew away at, crazily smart people to work beside, an endless supply of coffee and a fridge crammed full of food and beer. We’re even making money (shocking for a startup I know, we actually sell things!). All of that has been great and I’m thankful that my life has yet again steered into a cool venture.

The Fairer Sex

As often seems to be the case in our great human struggle, there is a counterpoint to such things. Kathy, my intrepid former girlfriend, and I have muddled through much of this year searching for our relationship and I think we’ve finally arrived at the conclusion that it not only took a vacation but indeed moved to a foreign country, set up a small noodle business and has no intention of coming home. It’s been a very sad week as the we realized this — emotions for me went the whole gambit and I’m left now with just sad and a little disappointed. Our stunningly different lives and personalities which were so fascinating and attractive in our early days had become burdens without the stability that commonality brings.

Realizations of Connectedness

My love woes (how’s that for a loaded set of words!) served to highlight a rather shocking amount of support in my life from friends, acquaintances and colleagues. It was a thankful and uplifting experience to see just how intermingled humanity becomes in times of difficulty; the speed of this has certainly grown faster with newer technology and I’m happy to say I’ll actually be working on making such things better in the future! I’ve often seen myself as a lone cat, a view I now consider a little mistaken, cats are colony creatures after all. Thanks go out to all my friends, new and old, for all your support and kind words.

The Coming Cold

Quite a few of my friends (and a no small chunk of my family) have asked if I’m moving back to Vancouver. The short answer is: no. I dove into Calgary with an open mind and have had my usual luck (whose magic touch never seems to extend it’s sublime ease to relationships *sigh*) in finding the makings to a great life. I’ve made commitments here and most importantly, at least to me, I’m having a good time in general! My father expresses constant surprise over how easily I move around and this is just another chance to grow my flexibility muscles. Now I just need a few things to prepare for this new season (are you listening Universe?!?): some local friends to hang out with occasionally and explore new restaurants, a chance to dust off my snow board sometimes this winter and a dash of personal growth.

Comments

• October 1, 2008, Pam writes: In Alberta, fall is the season of you-blink-and-you-miss-it! Looks like you're sharing Edmonton's little patch of warmth this autumn. Be well.
• October 5, 2008, Brenda May (Audley) writes: Change is often a good thing. New beginnings, new doors to open as others close. Just another stepping stone to a new experience. If you are not looking for happiness, it often jumps out at you.... Take care.

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As is often the case, transitioning from one job to another was rockier than it first looked. It was full of bitter-sweet moments mixed liberally with some sad moments and a huge swelling of excitement and hope for the future. I’ve gained a pile of insight and a good set of lessons to take to my next venture. I try when I leave a job to figure out what the best lesson was and I think that, in retrospect, we didn’t have enough transparency and that should have been a warning sign. We had a very smart group of people who were kept from seeing or helping with problems because they didn’t know about them. That’s my key lesson from this job – transparency is a hallmark of a good company.

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See the sample report for an idea of that this program does.

TSM is a data management solution that is offered by IBM. It’s a huge, sprawling, flexible monstrosity that work perfectly… if you watch it and keep it fed and watered. TSM is also very scriptable and extensible.

This program attempts to give a TSM administrator a daily report that contains all the things that need to be periodically looked at. Wherever possible it will offer advice on how to fix problems found or attempt to resolve them itself. It will generate a nice email with the report and will modify the subject to flag and problems found so that you know when it’s really important to have a peek inside the report.

If you know of anything that you’d like added, you find a bug, or just can’t get it to run for you, please email me at paudley@blackcat.ca and I’ll see what I can do to help. Please Note: I no longer have regular access to a TSM system for testing, if you’d like troubleshooting I can probably work something remotely.

Thanks to the many people that have passed along code or suggestions and to the Wellcome Trust for funding my time at the University of Dundee.

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Please note that I am current employed full-time and am looking primarily for networking in Calgary or future work. This is also reflected in the currency of the CV below which lacks most of my Cambrian House, GalaxyTelecom, and much of my contract work. Think of its current state as the below… only better with more cool technologies, a variety of nutty co-workers, lessons in code, love and life… and crammed with cowboys and sizzling gypsies.
Patrick AudleyCambrian HouseVP Technology51.031166-114.06229#18 125-23rd Ave SW#18 125-23rd Ave SWCalgaryABCA-ABCanadaT2S 0H9MST July 29th, 1977mobile+1 (403) 608-5704mainpaudley@blackcat.caworkpaudley@cambrianhouse.combackuppatrick.audley@gmail.comold-workpaudley@cogneto.comold-personalpaudley@pobox.compatrick.audley@gmail.compatrickaudley@hotmail.compatrickaudley@mac.com22983449patrick.audley@yahoo.comBC4BlackcatcvFacebookTechnoratiPlaxoWinkprogrammerfreelance-hacker

125 23th Ave.  SW #18
Calgary, AB, Canada T2S 0S9
Phone: +1 (403) 608-5704
E-mail: paudley@blackcat.ca
Website: http://blackcat.ca/cv/

PATRICK AUDLEY

---

INTRODUCTION

I seek team working environments and dynamic companies with interesting or evolving jobs.  I am a veteran of several very successful startups and greatly enjoy the challenge of taking risks and forging a new business.  I’m interested in anything that matches my skill set, but I lean towards careers that mesh my business skills with my technical expertise.  I’m very interested in growing my skills and am a continuous learner and teacher.  I consider a casual work environment and smart coworkers to be serious perks.  Above all I cherish difficult problems and new challenges.

Please note that I am current in Calgary and not actively seeking positions though I am actively seeking contacts in the Calgary energy, development, and startup communities for networking or potential future work.

SPECIAL SKILLS

Business:  Horizontal skill set with significant experience in business development and assessment.  Have been part of building many successful startups as well as cross-functional teams in existing ventures.  Strong knowledge of the financial, marketing and sales aspects of business.  Excellent at bridging the business and technology sides of commerce.  Have successfully led many challenging development projects.

Programming:  Fluent in C, C++, Perl, SQL, and PHP; I pick up new programming languages very quickly.  Have written several database and accounting programs for OS/2, Windows, Solaris and Linux platforms.  Deep UNIX experience on Linux and Solaris with a strong general UNIX skill set.  I specialize in the edge cases: high security, high throughput, high reliability.

Networking:  Have developed several network applications using a wide variety of network transports, cryptographic protocols, and OS platforms.  Extensive Cisco experience in large-scale heterogeneous networks.  I have been on the net for over 13 years.  Extensive network design and maintenance experience in both large scale commercial and cutting edge academic research networks.  Deep ICAP and HTTP caching experience.

Security:  Deep firewall and IDS experience (including Checkpoint, Snort, ISS, Linux).  Can perform advanced security audits for many platforms and networks.  Have maintained high levels of network security in both backbone carrier and telco environments.  Have designed and project managed high-security computing facilities in Vancouver and Toronto.  Working knowledge of biometrics, smart cards and other high-security devices.  Experienced in computer forensics as well as intrusion detection and prevention.  Extensive general security knowledge and experience in both data and physical arenas.

Hardware:  Very experienced in design and complete life cycle management of high through computing clusters, very large scale SAN infrastructure, and high performance networks.  Deep experience with ia32 architectures and IBM SAN equipment.  Have designed and built high reliability computing rooms and data centers from the ground up.

PKI:  Designed, implemented and managed a national telecommunications PKI (Public Key Infrastructure).  Extensive experience with all facets of PKI including: trust architectures, repositories, digital signatures and associated legislation in Canada and the U.S., and business integration issues.  Security computing facility design experience.  PKI programming and trust modeling experience with enterprise level PKI.

Community:  I’m also an active member in the Open Source Community.  I know first aid, have no criminal record, and am eligible for most security clearances.  I also have my Restricted Fire Arms License and am a certified HAM radio operator.  I am a member of the Vancouver Emergency Community Telecommunications Organization (VECTOR).

EMPLOYMENT

1994 — PresentBlackcat Systems (Private Consulting) Owner/Primary Consultant

• Provides high security consulting for data networks, physical locations and software design.
• Aids in the development of business and marketing plans for high technology start ups.  In addition to my own ventures, I mentor actively in the business and technology communities. (references available)
• Custom-designs programs to suit a wide range of requirements.  Architectural review and assessments as well as code remediation services.
• Open Source Software development.
• Technical and security code audits and reviews.
• Acts as a liaison between startups and the finance community.
• Coding for fun and profit.

  February 2006 — October 2007Cogneto Development Inc.
Chief Technology OfficerFounded Cogneto in February 2006 has helped raise £1.2 million. Assembled a world-class programming team and built software development program deeply meshed with user-centric design and high security programming. Touched almost all the facets of building a first-rate startup. Contributed to a rich patent portfolio spanning over 12 patents.  December 2004 — January 2006Adzilla New Media Inc.
Sr.  Software ArchitectDesigned, developed and deployed a high-throughput, cross platform ICAP server using a multiprocess, multithreaded architecture to handle seamless inline web content modification. Managed a programming group with Java, C++ and Ruby programmers. Was responsible for all development direction, specification, and management. Used cutting edge C++ tools in a heterogeneous UNIX environment including:  BOOST, XMLRPC, and SOAP. Implemented and managed a full SDLC process that included ticket based code control with extensive version management.May 2004 — September 2004Rubicon Enterprises
Owner

• International business consulting, specializing in relocations to South East Asia.

  April 2002 — May 2004University of Dundee
High Performance Computing ManagerManaged the specification and provisioning of a 20TB SAN based primarily on IBM hardware and Tivoli Storage Manager.  Delivered a system that provided 2Gbp/s pure NFS file services. Designed and implemented a new network backbone based around Cisco network equipment.  The new backbone included extensive security, network address translation and intrusion detection.  Built monitoring and configuration tools that self discovered network switch topology, modified network configurations and identified problem areas as the network grew. Built a 100 processor research cluster using a custom PXE and imaging system.  Implemented Sun Grid Engine and wrote a software deployment package for the cluster. Involved in several biological research projects.May 2001 — January 2002GT Group Telecom Inc.
Manager of PKI Development

• Guided the operations GT’s PKI.
• Guided the documentation process.
• Acted in a business development role for PKI opportunities.
• Continued my involvement in application development and maintenance.

  March 1998 — May 2001GT Group Telecom Inc.
Sr.  Ecommerce Architect/DesignerDesigned and supervised the construction of two high security PKI vaults and associated infrastructure. Coordinated a national audit of GT’s networks, systems and physical security that encompassed over 2000 systems, 1000 networks, 3 autonomous routing domains and 16 cities. Performed many data forensic investigations and was a key member of GT’s Computer Security Incident Response Team. Was responsible for network security in all of Group Telecom’s high security networks and added extensive security experience to the team. Designed several PKI based applications in Perl, C, C++, and PHP including the Realtorlink Hybrid Authentication system and Secure Private Internet Messaging (SPIM). Was responsible for the design and implementation of all of Group Telecom’s PKI-centric applications, services and facilities. Provided Sales support for our PKI and security products. Delivered business assessment for potential partners and clients.October 1997 – March 1998GT Group Telecom Inc.
UNIX Administrator/Applications Programmer

• Responsible for all UNIX administration and setup.
• Troubleshooting and maintenance on Cisco equipment.
• First Tier Tech Support.
• Intranet development.
• Internal PC Support.
• Major Project: (solely responsible for design, development, and deployment)
  Enterprise Usage Collection System
  • SNMP network usage collection and aggregation.
  • Database driven with HTML reports (including graphs).
  • Fault tolerant design allowed multiple collection points.
  • Separation of data collection and processing.
  • Customer usage view and query pages (both internal and customer facing).
  • Integration with billing systems.
  • System drives GT’s entire data billing systems for over 2000 networks and is responsible for the billing of millions of dollars of revenue every month.

  May 1996 – August 1997Axion Internet Communications Inc.
System Administrator / MISWas responsible for all UNIX administration and setup.  Maintained large network with an installed base of WinNT and Sparc servers. Extensive experience with Enterprise IT Infrastructure including designing and maintaining DNS, POP mail, sendmail, INN, and caching services for a 15,000 user network. Dealt extensively with both BC Tel Business and BC Tel Advanced Communication. Redesigned network topology and routing. Proficient with all duties relating to running an Internet Service Provider. Designed the user tracking and online time billing program, integrating diverse data sources into an object-oriented database. Extensive product and marketing research.PATENTS

• Several other pending security and identity related patents.
• Tamper-resistant GPS-bound key storage – patent pending.
• Secure Private Internet Messaging – patent pending.

PAPERS

• Raghava, GPS, Searle, SMJ, Audley, PC, Barber, JD. and Barton, GJ. (2003).  OXBench:  A benchmark for evaluation of protein multiple sequence alignment accuracy.  BMC Bioinformatics 4:47.

WORK PERMITS

• Full Canadian Citizenship.

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Here I learned so many of my formative career lessons (including my not-so-fun introduction to VC takeovers *lol*). This was a very fun time in my life and I’ll always cherish these days for their youthful excitement and the deep feeling that I can accomplish anything that I carry with me today.

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On Saturday, Elizabeth and I took a hike in the wilderness and met a very cool retiree who belongs to the clan that owns all the land around Pitlochry. We chatted for the better part of a half hour as we walked back together and had a most enjoyable time. That night was the Ceilidh, a Scottish dance that resembles square dancing. Afterwards came the quiz session; a cross between a drunken game show and a game of Trivial Pursuit. We came in 5th but still had a great time!

All in all a really good weekend. The only thing it lacked was sleep *lol*

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In addition to the bug, we also discovered a flaw in how Cisco implements NAT. Essential NAT (or overloaded many-to-one translation) works by hiding several machines behind a router. All conversations go through the router who remembers who on the inside is talking to who on the outside. From the outside (in this instance, the rest of the Internet) it appears as if all the conversations are with the router and from the inside (our local network) it looks normal.

It’s a good trick and normally provides a reasonable level of security because the outside world can’t connect directly to the machines behind NAT. In theory. In the IOS implementation it seems that the last machine to make a connection out gets all traffic to the router’s overloaded address that doesn’t match an active translation. Basically it boils down to a random chance that an attacker can hit any machine behind the NAT. Sure it’s harder to exploit than a non-NAT network; but then Cisco really should be dropping those packets like any sane implementation of NAT.

We found this bug when we firewalled the NAT to protect against this flaw in IOS, we also turned on IP inspection (our in non-Cisco terms: stateful firewalling). This is what caused the fatal bug in IOS and left us with a router that rebooted every half hour. Ick. Apparently the rest of the Cisco users haven’t noticed that NAT is brain dead in IOS and haven’t tried to firewall it. Cisco is working on a fix but it will be a while; hence the BSD box.

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On the software side I’ve been writing two software packages that shall be appearing in my code gallery soon. Submit_All is a package that allows biologists to submit a protein or DNA sequence and have it analysed by many programs at once on our cluster. The results are presented on a unified page and are cross-referenced. The second thing that I’ve been working on lately is a program to display sequences aligned with graphs and annotations. Good looking sequence displays are very lacking at the moment so I wanted to made something that will look pretty (hence the name Pretty_Seq *grin*). You can have a look below at the image of Pretty_Seq and the archive of Submit_All and see how I’m doing.

[CALLAN,Chris Allan] who I worked with at [GT003,Group Telecom] has come out to join the University working as a guru in the Light Microscopy lab. It’s cool to have someone from home to go out with. He’s been staying with Elizabeth and I for the last few weeks until he gets a place. Canadian world domination proceeds a pace…

This month promises to be fun at work!

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