Alastair JW Mayer

You should still be able to find anything that was here before, but it might be in different places. My apologies for any inconvenience.

I'm building a new site that focuses more on the science fiction and cutting edge science side of my interests and writing. It's Alastair Mayer's T-Space (and other universes)".

Computers

Beowulf

Space

Papers

Personal

Of Interest

COMPUTERS/SOFTWARE

The design side of software projects has perhaps always appealed to me a bit more than the actual coding -- although coding is fun too. (Jerry Pournelle once referred to me as "the best C programmer [he] knew", but perhaps he didn't know many back in those days.) The architecture of both hardware and software systems intrigues me, I think it relates to my need to know how things work. (Family legend has it that at the age of three I was found with screwdriver in hand and a partially disassembled appliance (unplugged!) before me.)

Computers are a source of endless fascination for me, to say nothing of most of my income. Lately I've been experimenting with the Xen virtualization system. As a hypervisor it has a lot lower overhead than some other systems, although it is only relatively recently that x86 hardware has really supported virtualization. (Xen also supports paravirtualization on older x86 hardware, but guest OS's need to be modified for it.) I've always had fun with virtual systems and emulators; I get an odd kick out of running, say, an Apollo Guidance Computer emulator, or nesting multiple virtual systems and emulators (like running the AGC on S/370 Linux running under VM/370 on the Hercules IBM S/370 emulator on a Linux Xen domain, etc) like some bizarre software matryoshka doll.

Some papers and articles I've had published are here, and you can find some (old) software of mine in this directory. I wrote CoSy (old link, may go away) which BIX and others are based on, but I don't own the rights to the original C code, but recently University of Guelph and Softwords (or their successor) agreed to release that code under the GPL. It's now being developed on SourceForge, and is in use as the basis of Noise Level Zero. I do have most of an first try at a Java version. More recently, I've redesigned the architecture (again) based on a client-server model, see the WebCoSy site (or the in-progress new site) for more details.

A couple of other projects have been holding my interest.

For a while I experimented with IEEE-1394 (aka Firewire aka iLink) and Digital Video (DV). In fact I designed a good part of an automated video tape production system around it, and made some minor contributions to the kernel driver and the Kino/dvgrab video editing system. I used to think that DV might make a good backup medium, at about 13 GB per tape. That's sadly inadequate capacity for current disk systems. Back in the day I toyed with this backfire project, but it was superceded by the dvbackup project at SourceForge.

SPACE

WRITING

I've always been good at writing, that probably comes from being an avid reader. I've sold articles to Byte Magazine and to Final Frontier, both alas now defunct in paper form. Some of my technical papers have been published in various conference proceedings and academic journals, some of which are mentioned on the Papers page. In the course of my IT career I've also written, co-written or edited numerous design documents, specifications, and in-house software manuals.

I also write fiction, when I can make the time for it. The first science fiction story I wrote was I think in second grade, something about a spaceman landing on a planet in the "pink with purple spots universe" and being chased by a critter with a hundred arms and legs, ultimately escaping because said critter tripped over its own feet. I think my work has improved since then. Apparently others think so too: I've sold and published two short stories so far, with a third recently sold to Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, the leading magazine in the field. It should be appearing in the spring of 2010. My other web site has more about my fiction writing.

PERSONAL

Capsule version: Born in London, England just after the Killer Smog of '52, moved with my family to Toronto, Canada on my seventh birthday. Took typing in high school, served in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves in the Signal Corps where they taught me teletype, and learned to operate a keypunch to encode tax returns for Revenue Canada. (Do I know my way around a QWERTY keyboard or what?) Switched my major from Life Sciences (call it pre-med, I was thinking of going into medicine) to Computer Science in third year at college, worked a number of computer- related jobs including stints on staff at two universities. Moved to Denver Colorado to marry Jill in 1989. I've also worked as a chef's assistant, in a print shop, as a farm hand, and on a couple of commercial dive jobs.

Somewhere along the way I found time to go skydiving a few times, SCUBA diving a few hundred times (including under ice, in caves, at night, and on shipwrecks, including the ocean liner Empress of Ireland), earn my private pilot's license, and take archery and fencing lessons. I've visited every continent except Antarctica, although the stop in Africa was just a couple of hours in Cairo airport, and never left Leningrad (it changed its name back to St. Petersburg while I was there.)

I won't explain here just why, but Larry Niven signed my copy of his Neutron Star with the inscription "for Al Mayer, for saving civilization".