C Dan Run, C Dan Program in Unix and on PC’s

A friend told me about a powerful new operating system called Unix.  So, when I saw a book on Unix in the bookstore, I bought it and read it in a single sitting.  And I wanted it.  I wanted to know where I might find Unix running where I might have a chance to play with it.I found out that U.C. San Francisco’s Medical school had a branch at the Veteran’s Hospital where they were using a VAX 11/750 and some PC’s for research in neurology, so I volunteered to help develop and improve C programs on the VAX and the PC.  One was a handwriting analysis system and the other was a set of graphics and statistics programs on a PC.  They liked my work, and soon I was being paid part time on a university grant.

4.2 BSD Unix on a VAX Four Reels

Soon, California State University, Fresno opened up their Computer Science Department and needed a full-time technical person to install, configure, and manage their equipment.  So, when I started, a student consultant handed me a few 9-track tapes for VMS and Unix and said he was moving to Los Angeles.My system was a VAX 11/730 with 1 megabyte of memory and 110 megabytes of disk.  That system ran VMS some days of the week and Unix other days.  Fortunately for me, the faculty decided to stop teaching VMS and focus on Unix.  And I was given the names and phone numbers of Unix system administrators at a C.S.U., Stanislaus and San Diego State University.I called Casey in Stanislaus and we set up a UUCP connection between his PDP 11/70 running 2.9 BSD Unix and our VAX.  Unfortunately, no driver had been developed the Hayes modem we had, so I copied another modem driver and modified it to work with the Hayes and voila!  It worked.  So, we set up UUCP connections and configured sendmail and UUCP to relay email.  And for us, that was really, really cool!

VAX 11/785 – A “Real” Unix Machine

Our little VAX was dog slow and low on disk space.  And funny thing, but I found a company selling off an old Apple Lisa with Xenix, accounting software, and two 5 megabyte disk drives.  I also found a company who sold additional serial ports for the Lisa, and I found my Lisa performed under Xenix almost as well as the VAX, though with much less disk space.  So for grins, I brought it down to my dungeon where the VAX was, wired in some terminals, and let students use it together with the VAX.At that time, the Engineering Department had a beautiful VAX 11/785 running VMS, and they were shorthanded and needed someone to customize their CAD and engineering software to work with their  Tektronics color terminals.  So, the head of the Computer Science asked me to give half my time to the Engineering Department.The programs were written in Fortran under VMS and included GTSTRUDL and some other software.  When I was done, I was able to represent structural engineering designs in code and simulate stressors such as seismic shocks and wind and simulate the deflection both visually and numerically and identify which elements were most likely to fail.I fell immediately in love with this VAX.  But, my projects were complete and my time with the Engineering Department was over.Then Harold, the department head gave me the good news:  the Computer Science Department received an extraordinary deal on a VAX 11/785.   When it arrived, I installed and configured 4.3 BSD Unix immediately.  It was a fire breather–a system with a faster clock speed and two whopping megabytes of memory not to mention 400 megabytes of disk!  Ok, I know.  Your ancient Palm pilot would blow that out of the water, but at that time, this power put a lump in our throats.

AT&T System V

About the time the VAX 11/785 arrived, AT&T donated a 3B5 to our department and donated a 3B15 and several smaller 3B2 systems to the Agriculture Department.  Convergent Technologies also donated several MiniFrame workstations, and suddenly we were busy setting up Unix systems everywhere.While faculty discussed pros and cons of Sun Workstations and Intel based Unix systems, I continued wiring systems up, getting the video projector working, and helping faculty with their MacIntosh and PC systems, and helped students learn Unix, Turbo Pascal, C, Cobol, Fortran, Lisp, Prolog, and other things related to Computer Science.I made many friends among the faculty and students at C.S.U., Fresno who are still friends to this day.  But, when I was young, it was hard for me to be caught between friends fighting constantly over department finances and politics.  Several years, I learned to help resolve conflicts more effectively and learned to enjoy it.  But, at that time, I felt I would be happier working independently than in this politically charged environment.

Independent Unix and PC Consulting

After leaving C.S.U., Fresno, their Agricultural Department called to have me install and configure their AT&T 3B15 system and several of their smaller AT&T machines, and I soon found I loved working as an independent consultant for awhile.

Actuarial Work

A small phone company learned about my skills in Unix and called to have me work on their Unix workstation.  An actuarial firm hired me to put my mathematical skills to work and create spreadsheets with sophisticated pension plan calculations, and I considered becoming an actuary.

Engineering Calculations on Steroids

A friend at church owned a small civil engineering firm and performed many of his calculations on a microcomputer.  One flagpole footing calculation had do be performed iteratively.  It took several minutes to run and did not provide very accurate results.  I rewrote the program and produced highly precise results in 1 1/2 seconds.  Deeply skeptical, my friend ran several calculations and checked them, and when he finally became convinced, he wanted other programs modified as well.

dBASE III+ Programming

The Adult Literacy Counsel and the Cancer Registry called on me to develop dBASE III+ programs for dealing with seminar registrations and tracking donors.  And, in the gaps between projects, I built and sold PC’s.  I also evaluated and considered getting involved in selling Aircraft Maintenance maintenance managing systems for airports, but did not feel ready.

HVAC Accounting System on Xenix

Then HVAC company hired me to purchase, install, and configure a multi-user Xenix based system with accounting software for HVAC companies and to train their staff to use it.

Unix Administration for NASA

Soon to be married and desiring more steady work, I took on a contract to work with NASA Ames Research Center as a Systems Administrator in July 1989.  There, I managed a VAX 8800 running VMS and a network of Sun workstations, a MIPS system, and a Sequent.  I was also asked to do research and development of a project plan to migrate the Information Sciences Division from VMS to Unix.Due to budget cuts, a friend within NASA clued me in on the possibility that my position and the position of one of my two assistants would be eliminated at the end of my contract, and Ingres made me an offer.

Heintz 57 Variety Unix and Ingres

Ingres initially hired and trained me to join their staff of about 200 technical support engineers.  I was trained in the installation, configuration, and administration of Ingres as well as professional support, customer satisfaction, and time management.Since Ingres was supported under VMS and nearly every variant of Unix, part of our training involved installing Ingres into our internal tech support systems where we scripted and tested bugs so Development and QA engineers could develop fixes.  We provided work-arounds where possible and tracked and delivered patches and maintenance releases when appropriate.

Internal Unix and Database Support

Soon my system administration skills were very apparent to the team.  So Ceferino Lamb and I formed the Internal Support Team.  Initially, we supported approximately 80 Ingres Installations on approximately 40 variants of Unix and VMS, and I performed many Unix system administration duties as well.  I was then sent to USENIX in Nashville, Tennessee to study advanced systems administration and was shocked to find out just now nerdy and geeky the Unix wizards were.  In truth, we were probably all looking at each other and thinking that way without really noticing, “Hey, I’m one of them!”

Left Behind

One of my duties in the Internal Support Team was to serve as a liason to Cray Research.  Ingres ran in Cray Y/MP and X/MP-EA systems, so Iwas sent to Minneapolis to take a course and get to know some of the database porting engineers there.  The Cray cafeteria reminded me of a church retreat in the mountains, and the data center was the most beautiful data center I had seen with various Cray models in various colors.  They told me that if you’re paying millions of dollars for a Cray, you should have the right to choose your color.Then came the shock of my employment at Ingres.  I was in my temporary office at Cray early in the morning when one of my friends at Cray told me Ingres had been acquired by ASK and that I should call my manager.  I grabbed the phone immediately and called, but there was no answer.  I felt as if the rapture of the church had taken place and I had been left behind.  And, then we all remembered we were two time zones ahead of California and it was only 6am at Ingres.  I waited a couple hours and called again, and my manager laughed.  Of course I still had a job.

So Many Unix Variants

People wondered how I remembered so many Unix variants.  In truth, it was not as difficult as it sounds.  If you categorize the Unix variants by their foundational structure, you have those based on AT&T Unix, Berkeley Unix, and Mach.  And then you have a few attempts at dual universe variants such as Encore, and older versions of Pyramid’s and Sequent’s Unix offerings, and Convex.  But, most, by and large, were very close to one of those three variants.  A few like Apollo and Prime were entirely different, but most stayed close to their foundations.All in all, I supported Ingres installations on approximately40 variants of Unix and VMS for Ingres, provided Sun desktop supportfor Direct User Support, and support of Unix systems for the Education Department.  I also trained staff in quality assurance for the Ingres installation packages and served as the final sign off approving distribution of new product to customers.

Ding Dong, Oracle Calling

At Oracle, as a Senior Unix System Administrator for Production, I served on the security response team together with Mary Ann Davidson and several others, served as the point person for scanning the systems and mentoring the system administrators in shoring up security.At home, over the years, I downloaded or purchased and installed FreeBSD and various flavors of Linux including Slackware, Turbo Linux, Redhat, Fedora, Mandriva, Centos, GoS, Ubuntu, and perhaps others.During my graduate studies in Advanced Systems and Databases at Stanford University from 1994 to 1997, I did most of my software engineering projects on my own Linux system, tested them, and ported them to the Solaris and DEC Unix systems at Sweet Hall for credit.

Professional Linux Experience

Early on, Linux was not considered a commercial operating system.  By the time I went to work at Clickmarks, Linux had nearly nine or ten years to mature into a commercial product.At Clickmarks, as Chief Systems Architect and Director of Operations and Information Systems, I built the IT Department responsible for all internal and external systems for the company and helped build the Support and QA Departments.  Functioning as a hands-on director, I purchased, configured, installed, and managed several Linux web and database servers while hiring the team responsible for ongoing support.  Our environment consisted of several routers, firewalls, intrustion detection devices, Apache based servers with FastCGI, load balancers, Oracle servers, Tomcat, email, and other services.In 2001, I moved back to Fresno following a divorce and built several websites, first using my own Linux systems, and then later, using C-panel hosting until I got tired of it and reverted back to using a Virtual Private System which would allow me to enjoy full Linux control.   There, I installed and configured Apache, PHP, memcache, APC, MySQL, WordPress-mu, and set it up with automatic subdomains and multiple virtual websites.In 2005, I provided technical administration of PeopleSoft installations on Unix systems for IBM’s customers of their Applications on Demand service, and from 2007 until recently, I trained, mentored, and assisted the system administration team in Linux and Solaris administration while architecting and developing pharmacy reporting systems based on Perl, shell scripting, and Oracle PL/SQL.

I am amazed at the contribution many dedicated developers have made to provide some of the best CMS and Blogging packages available.

I loved watching them mature from clunky, table based systems to secure, flexible, high performance, modular, commercial quality systems

The Old Days

When Mozilla, the first browser came out closely followed by Netscape, I coded everything by hand in HTML.  Since I was into Unix System Administration at Oracle at the time, I waited on the edge of my seat for Dan Farmer’s hideously named network security analysis program called Satan.  I quickly became familiar with how HTML code could be generated in Perl and other languages.

Later, I discovered I could monitor all my systems in Oracle’s Enterprise Systems Center via the web.  So, I took measurements and colors of all y systems and coded them into Pov-Ray to generate a life-like ray traced image of our data center.   Then, I used that image to develop an internal website for giving real-time statistics on our sysems by clicking on the picture.

I got a laugh when people looked puzzled and asked where I was standing when I took the photograph.

NoDivorces – Migration from Static to Dynamic Websites

In 2001, after leaving Clickmarks to take care of my family during my struggles with divorce, I developed a website called NoDivorces.com.

For years, I used NetObjects as it allowed me to focus on design and content rather than technical details.  Still, good SEO required moving away from tables and into CSS.  I also found it cumbersome to develop database driven websites that way.

Enter Content Management

finding static website development limiting, I began using various Content Management Systems for my blogs and websites.  Initially, I worked with PHP-Nuke, then explored the world of CMS systems including Postnuke, B2evolution, mambo, xoops, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and TikiWiki.

The nukes used tables to position elements on the screen, and therefore it was difficult to keep the prime content high up in the document for SEO.

B2evolution seemed to be a great improvement over PHP-Nuke and PostNuke offering multiple blogs with tabs along the top for selecting them.  In addition search engine friendly URLs (SEFURLs) could be customized.

Mambo merged with Joomla, and Joomla seemed to be more user friendly–a beginner’s CMS, and a quite powerful one at that.  So, I took some time to master it and ran a few websites on it.

But I wanted to explore the Wiki’s a bit.  For awhile we used one at US Script for documenting and communicating between staff.  So I read up on the pros and cons and settled on TikiWiki for some of my websites.  I stayed with it from TikiWiki 3 through 6 and then found it too cumbersome to maintain sites on Drupal, WordPress, TikiWiki, and Joomla at the same time.  So, I began to migrate the rest of my sites to Drupal and WordPress.

C-Panel and Virtual Private Systems

During these years, I hosted my sites on Plesk or C-Panel hosts settling on a reseller’s account on C-Panel.  However, I longed for the comfort of an old, familiar Linux prompt.  Being an old time Unix hack (system architect), I found it limiting to be confined to a C-panel.  I wanted to see the ownership of files.  I wanted to be free to fire off a pipeline of commands at the Unix prompt using sed, awk, grep, sort, uniq, find, xarg, or anything else.  I loved being able to set up an APC cache or memcached.

Drupal: Multiple Sites, Single Installation

After running updates on about 20 WordPress and Drupal installations on a regular basis, it became second-nature but time consuming and boring.  But, since I now had a VPS, I could put all my Drupal sites into one installation.  I believe I could have done that under C-panel as well but it was much nicer under my VPS.

By using prefixing, I could store all the Drupal based websites into a single database or split them into separate databases.  I could limit various sites to specific themes or modules, or I could make certain themes or modules available to all sites.

WordPress: Multiple Sites, Single Installation

When I set up the Drupal sites into a single installation, I seriously considered converting all my WordPress sites to Drupal since WordPress did not have a good multi-site and domain mapping solution at the time.  However, the multi-site feature matured a bit under WordPress 2.9 until it was rock solid under 3.0 and above.  And about the time 3.0 came out, the domain mapping plugin matured.  This gave me the ability to map other domains into subdomains I had created in my main WordPress installation.

However, many administrators had difficulty setting up Domain Mapping, so I helped a few for awhile.

Prior to working at Oracle, I worked 4 years for Ingres where I was trained in SQL development, Administration, and Performance.  During my stay, I performed countless installations into approximately 80 systems based on about 40 variants of Unix and VMS.  I provided maintenance and troubleshooting on installations damaged while reproducing bugs reported to the support department.  I also served as final sign off and approval for Release Management and trained support staff in installation and QA of installation packagesLater, while supporting Unix systems with Oracle installations, I took training in Oracle Development, Data Modeling, and Database Administration, and I began studies in Computer Science at Stanford University at the graduate level in two areas — Advanced Systems and Databases where I studied Database Theory, Distributed Databases, and Transaction Processing in addition to Software Engineering and Operating Systems.

Oracle Experience

At Oracle, I evaluated several automated network backup systems from Legato, Alexandria, StorageTek, and others for their security and ability to keep up with the generation of Oracle archive logs and their ability to coordinate well with that activity.  I also  developed systems and database monitoring agents for EcoTools.Later I joined a team of world class database and systems experts to form Oracle’s Enterprise Systems Center for applied research and testing in large enterprise systems scalability, performance, and reliability.  Here, I configured Oracle and the underlying system and performed heavy load tests against multi-million dollar Oracle database servers from Sun, HP, IBM, Sequent, and Pyramid.After evaluating test suites from Mercury, Pure, and Performance Awareness, I selected preVue from Performance Awareness.  At that time, it was the only product that would facilitate a quick setup of a proxy between the client and server so we could capture OCI traffic, parameterize it, and quickly set it into a large scale simulation of thousands of concurrent users without requiring a setup of a large number of front end systems with client applications.  In this case, we were interested in testing the database — not the front end client software.Later, at PeopleSoft, as a staff analyst, I assisted customers with issues in Oracle connectivity, SQL performance, and PeopleSoft installation and upgrades.  Although I worked primarily with Oracle, I also worked with SqlServer, DB2, Sybase, and Informix.  Later, PeopleSoft asked me to join a team of eSupport architects to build a system of sophisticated remote diagnostics capable of diagnosing many connectivity and performance problems.Clickmarks later hired me as their Director of Information Technology.  Here my DBA work was limited as I had hired a DBA to fulfill that role, but I played a small part in supporting production, development and test databases on Solaris and Linux.  At IBM, in 2005, I supported PeopleSoft installations for the United Nations and other large organizations primarily on Oracle with a few on SqlServer.At US Script, as a Senior Oracle Developer, I architected and developed Medicaid Pharmacy Encounters systems for several of Centene’s health plans primarily in PL/SQL, object oriented Perl with DBI, and PHP.  I also managed several old programs under Oracle Report 6i.Since September, I have had a little break from Oracle and have been working on websites using MySql instead to keep my SQL fresh in my mind.

When Linus Torvalds came out with Linux in 1991, I had nearly a decade of Unix administration and C development experience.During that time, I built the technical environment for California State University, Fresno’s Computer Science Department installing and managing Unix systems based on Berkeley 4.2 and 4.3 BSD and AT&T Unix including a room full of Convergent Technology systems.Afterward, as an independent consultant, I installed and configured Unix systems for the Agricultural Department, a phone company, and an Air Conditioning company before going to work for NASA where I managed networks of VMS and Unix based systems and developed the project plan for migrating the Information Sciences Division from VMS to Unix.Following that, at Ingres, I supported Ingres installations on approximately 40 variants of Unix and VMS for Ingres, provided Sun desktop support for Direct User Support, and support of Unix systems for the Education Department.  I also trained staff in quality assurance for the Ingres installation packages and served as the final sign off approving distribution of new product to customers.At Oracle, as a Senior Unix System Administrator for Production, I served on the security response team together with Mary Ann Davidson and several others, served as the point person for scanning the systems and mentoring the system administrators in shoring up security.At home, over the years, I downloaded or purchased and installed FreeBSD and various flavors of Linux including Slackware, Turbo Linux, Redhat, Fedora, Mandriva, Centos, GoS, Ubuntu, and perhaps others.During my graduate studies in Advanced Systems and Databases at Stanford University from 1994 to 1997, I did most of my software engineering projects on my own Linux system, tested them, and ported them to the Solaris and DEC Unix systems at Sweet Hall for credit.

Professional Linux Experience

Early on, Linux was not considered a commercial operating system.  By the time I went to work at Clickmarks, Linux had nearly nine or ten years to mature into a commercial product.At Clickmarks, as Chief Systems Architect and Director of Operations and Information Systems, I built the IT Department responsible for all internal and external systems for the company and helped build the Support and QA Departments.  Functioning as a hands-on director, I purchased, configured, installed, and managed several Linux web and database servers while hiring the team responsible for ongoing support.  Our environment consisted of several routers, firewalls, intrustion detection devices, Apache based servers with FastCGI, load balancers, Oracle servers, Tomcat, email, and other services.In 2001, I moved back to Fresno following a divorce and built several websites, first using my own Linux systems, and then later, using C-panel hosting until I got tired of it and reverted back to using a Virtual Private System which would allow me to enjoy full Linux control.   There, I installed and configured Apache, PHP, memcache, APC, MySQL, WordPress-mu, and set it up with automatic subdomains and multiple virtual websites.In 2005, I provided technical administration of PeopleSoft installations on Unix systems for IBM’s customers of their Applications on Demand service, and from 2007 until recently, I trained, mentored, and assisted the system administration team in Linux and Solaris administration while architecting and developing pharmacy reporting systems based on Perl, shell scripting, and Oracle PL/SQL.

Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting dis- covery or progress, there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. -C.N. Parkinson

Castle

I walked into the training room at work, got my binder and name tag and sat down.  The seminar was called,  “Making Your Dreams Come True” by Marsha Weider.

What did I get myself into?  Cinderella dreams?  No.  Something vital.  Without it, nobody succeeds.  Without it, life is a meaningless existence.  But, with it, the sky is the limit.

To give you an idea, Martin Luther King had a dream when most people merely had a complaint.  King new what the dream would look like when it began to happen, and he knew how to tell people about his dream.  He knew the value of that dream and how willing he was to march with people to see that dream come true.

Artificial Intelligence

How many times do we hear people put down the wisdom, maturity, or intelligence of someone who has a dream?  “It won’t work.”  “You’re not ready.”  “It would be cruel for me to put you into a position where you are bound to fail.”  They credit themselves with  intelligence to predict the failure and lack of potential other people.  They’re incompetent.  They’re arrogant.  They hold back their team from reaching their potential.  Their intelligence is artificial.  Were it real, they would contribute to the success of others.

The Forest Gump Effect

How much do we love to watch movies like Forest Gump?  Nobody in his right mind would expect Gump to amount to anything in life.  Bet everything seems to go his way magically.

We think only idiots actually believe in this stuff, but we want to believe it anyway.  Why?  Because it gives us hope.  If Gump can do it, maybe so can we.

And that is the right mind set.  Why?  Because it leads us to do something.  And as Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”  Of you don’t do anything, you’re being a big zero.

Substantial Cliche: Dare to Dream

There is a reason “Dare to Dream” is a cliche.  Someone considered the phrase to be substantial and copied it.  So did others.  It spread.

What is your big dream in life?  What is it you want most to do before your time is up on earth?  What do you want to do before you die?

What moments in your life do you remember when you felt most energized, proud of your accomplishment, successful?  Is it something you would love to spend the rest of your life doing?  Or is it something you would like to expand on?  If you’re a religious person, you may want to spread the news of your religion.  If you’re a musician, you may want to play music.  Or perhaps it’s art or finance.  What is your dream?

Do you have a passion to help people?  Do you get excited reading missionary magazines or news on the Peace Corps?  Do you have a dream to travel the world doing something?  Taking photographs?  Recording the sounds of wildlife?  Are you a computer nerd with a dream to build the next Google or Microsoft or iPhone killer app?

Sometimes we think we have to throw away our dreams to make money and fulfill our responsibilities to our families.  But, if you can be responsible, have integrity, do the right thing for your family and your world and fulfill your dream at the same time, then why settle for less?

Often you are most profitable when you are engaged in your dream.  Your dream job or career does not have to be one listed in the top ten money making careers to be profitable.  You will tend to be best at what you love.  So, work with passion.  If you have to sacrifice some of your income at first, but you can make it and pay your bills if you tighten your belt and make some sacrifices, go ahead and plot your course, make your plans.  Talk to people about your dream.  Make a to-do list for your big dream and schedule it into your daily plan.  Try to increase the amount of time each day you spend in that dream and find ways to make it profitable so it meets your needs and the needs of your family.

The Bible says in Proverbs 29 v 18, “Where there is no vision the people perish“

Remember that the next time someone calls you foolish for having a dream.  They are not in a position to make a difference.  You are.

Cherish your dreams!  They are the substance of life.

Dan w/Martin D-35-12

Smart managers hire employees

• to add or protect income and stockholder value of the company,
• to build morale, and unity,
• to increase competency, efficiency, effectiveness
• to get a specific job done
• to help the company succeed

If you have an employee that has a track record of making or saving millions of dollars for previous employers, it isn’t wise or responsible to leave millions of dollars on the table without a good reason.At this time, there are millions of dollars that your company does not currently have simply because you have not hired Dan yet.  Isn’t it about time?

Have you ever worked for awesome management?

I have.  And it feels great.  Savy managers know how to keep their fingers on the pulse of the company.  They work in harmony with upper management.  They know what brings stockholder value and pleases the board of directors honestly for the long term and not only for the short term.They know industry standards and best practices and know when to apply them and when not to apply them.  They know priorities, how to communicate them and manage conflicts.  They know business scalability and how to decompose and re-architect processes to remove barriers to scalability effectively.  They don’t buy the old saying, “Cheaper, Better, Faster: Pick Two”.  They feel part of their purpose is to employ creative thinking and make all three possible.Savy managers are in tune with their company’s vision and their employee’s dreams and know how to capitalize on the synergy to create win-win situations.  Savy managers know how to raise morale and keep high.  Savy managers win trust.  They win the trust of their management and their employees, and they keep that trust.So, why would a savy manager hire Dan?Because he has a heart and a drive for the things savy managers love and the drive, experience, and ability to help make it happen.  But, what about his accomplishments and skills?

Notable Accomplishments

Centene (US Script)

Before Centene acquired US Script, Centene’s health began using US Script for processing their pharmacy claims.  However, US Script was not ready to take on hundreds of millions of dollars of Medicaid claims since it had no state mandated pharmacy encounters systems in production.In attempts to dodge sanctions and lost reinsurance revenue, programmers drew up some quick and dirty PL/SQL scripts so that some claim reporting could be done.  However, most of the programs had serious flaws in logic and output format and lacked logic necessary to handle corrections, audits, parsing and processing error response files and data mining missing pharmacy and physician NPI’s.Dan inherited this and turned it around.  He worked with management at the health plans and US Script to assess and meet immediate and ongoing needs of the health plans getting and meeting commitments on priorities while re-architecting the entire encounters system.  In the process, Dan trained three senior Oracle PL/SQL developers, mentored one manager, one lead developer in Perl, and the Unix system administration team as needed.   Dan also assisted other groups with finding and correcting problems in the online adjudication system (in C) and the Eligibility system (in Perl), and some of the Oracle Reports and worked with RT, Toad, SpecBuilder, and developed Perl programs to produce Excel Spreadsheets with DBI access to our Oracle Databases.

Clickmarks

As new Director of Information Technology, Dan and the entire company moved into a new office where the network consisting of a borrowed wire hanging over a wall from the company next door. Web and database servers were stored at AboveNet in San Jose.Within a few days, he received a midnight call from the CEO and a couple Vice Presidents.  The load on the corporate website had gone through the stratosphere when an advertisement was prematurely released.  Dan and the Vice President of Engineering drove to the colocation facility in San Jose to reconfigure and install additional equipment quickly to alleviate the immediate crisis.The next day, Dan had a QA analyst set up and fire off Silk simulations against a test web server to identify the culprit and spotted a Perl script that was a 14,000 line CGI program.  The engineer modified it to run under FastCGI improving performance by 135 times.  The company soon obtained a substantial international contract from Vodafone.Dan continued to handle technical needs of the company staffing and directing the IT Department through a period of rapid growth and through a transition from being a service oriented company to a software development company as well as the transition from Perl to Java/JSP.  His department was responsible for all internal and external networks including desktop support, business systems, development, production, testing, support, and sales.  These included several Linux and Windows systems, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPNs, Apache web servers, and Oracle Database servers, one of which was on Solaris.

PeopleSoft

Dan served customers of PeopleSoft’s Global Support Center as a staff analyst before being selected to help form the e-support architecture team.  Using Motive technology, Dan and two other engineers developed a sophisticated automated diagnostics system in Java and Javascript.  Dan also developed the integration adapter to connect Motive to Vantive so cases could be logged and tracked through either environment.Dan and the architecture team were flown to New Orleans to present this new environment to customers at PeopleSoft’s trade show in New Orleans.  Dan was also selected to develop and provide formal training to the GSC in the use of this new system.  The team was disbanded and the project tabled when Motive adopted one of our innovations designed to overcome a shortcoming in Motive’s base product, and that was the ability to coordinate analysis of a network of multiple systems.

Oracle

Working in the Production Unix System Administration team, Dan managed the project to migrate global print services from VMS to Unix, mentored system administrators in security, participated in evaluation and implementation of disaster recovery systems, developed and implemented numerous EcoTools monitoring agents, and was selected to serve on Oracle’s Security Response Team.  Later, Dan was promoted to join an elite team of systems and database experts to form the Enterprise Systems Center where he helped build the Enterprise Systems Center–a data center for applied research in performance, reliability, and scalability on large scale systems from Sun, HP, IBM, Sequent, Pyramid, and SGI.  Dan installed and configured several multi-million dollar systems, their storage systems, and database configurations and helped his director staff the department.

Ingres

While serving customers with technical issues, Dan was selected to manage approximately 80 installations of Ingres releases residing on 40 different Unix and VMS variants and later had final sign-off on product before Release Management released product to customers.  He trained new analysts to do installations  meticulously to give a final QA on the installation packages.  After tightening QA this way, customer satisfaction rose dramatically while customer calls to Direct User Support dropped equally dramatically.

Education

BA in Applied Mathematics with Minor in Physics from California State University, Fresno.27 Units of Graduate Study in Advanced Systems and Database Programs at Stanford UniversityCompeted twice in Mathematics Competition at CSU, Fresno taking 1st place one year and 2nd place the other.Extra coursework in Engineering, Architecture, Music, and Business.

Professional Training

Advanced System Administration from Sun, Sequent, HP, and USENIX.Database development, administration, and performance from Oracle and Ingres.PeopleSoft installation, upgrade, development, and administration from PeopleSoftBEA Tuxedo development and administration training from BEA.Project Management from PMI and Microsoft Project from CompUSA.Professional Software Support from Professional Software SupportMotive eSupport DevelopmentCray Vector Programming in C from CrayOther: ITIL, METL, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, Management courses, IBM Mainframe Programming, via CBT and video libraries.

Current Certifications

For Technical and Management Certifications see Certifications