Alastair JW Mayer

Parts of this site are undergoing or about to undergo reconstruction. You should still be able to find anything that was here before, mainly I'm adding sections. 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

Computers are a source of endless fascination for me, to say nothing of most of my income. 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. See the CAVOR page for info about a rather ambitious project to create an engine for building GIS, CAD, and similar sorts of programs that combine geographic/spatial and attribute data.

I've also been playing a bit 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. I've also thought it might make a good backup medium, at about 13 GB per tape. My backfire project is on hold, but take a look at dvbackup for a working example.

SPACE

Another big interest of mine is space exploration and development, I was even a candidate for the Canadian Astronaut Program at one time, although my interests are a little further out than what NASA has been doing. Like Lunar colonization, and building some serious megaprojects on Mars. Here are some papers I've had published on those subjects.

WRITING

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.

I've sold articles to Byte Magazine and to Final Frontier, both alas now defunct in paper form. I've also had papers published in various conference proceedings and academic journals, some of which are mentioned on the Papers page. As for the numerous design documents, specifications, and in-house software manuals I've written or worked on, well, that's not my favorite kind of writing.

The Venaticorum Artifact is a novel I'm in final edit on. The working title was originally "Pyramid Scheme" but Dave Freer and Eric Flint already have an SF novel out with that title. Not that titles can't be reused, but I don't want to confuse things, and if I sell it to Baen (whom I had in mind while writing it), they'd change the title anyway. An exoarchaeologist working on a dig gets bushwhacked by artifact smugglers. An undercover agent of the Homeworld Security Agency is murdered, but manages to pass on a sketch of an alien artifact the terrorist cell he was infiltrating has hold of. That artifact is the key to an ancient spacefarer trove, possibly an arsenal. The exoarchaeologist thinks he's seen something like that before.

Okay, the blurb needs work. I have several other stories in the works, including how a young British soldier in the Boer War and Nikola Tesla team up to turn H.G. Wells's Martians' weapons against them; and the secret Apollo 18 mission to recover Soviet technology (and perhaps something else) from the Moon.

PERSONAL

You want a bio? Pictures of the wife (Jill) and kids (three, including twin boys)? Perhaps real soon now.

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".