William Ahern

Designed and engineered back-end transport and transcoding systems.

RemoTV allowed users to stream multimedia directly from their personal computer to any internet connected device--cellphones (including OEM handsets, not just smart phones, but including Blackberry and iPhone), gaming consoles, etc--without requiring separate software installation. Protocols, formats, and codecs were altered on-the-fly to suit the requesting device.

$1.3 million in funding prior to closure due to 2008 Recession.

• Portway: Secure multimedia VPN between central servers and desktop-server. Works through NAT firewalls, allowing desktops to serve locally stored or generated audio/video. Automatic routing updates through DNS-based topology registry, and utilizing X.509 ECC certificate authentication. Fully distributed design; no single point of failure, nor intervention required when servers go offline.
• RTSP Relay: Reverse RTSP proxy. Normalize RTSP communications, and transcode HTTP streaming formats and codecs (iPhone AAC, Flash FLV MP3) from RTSP source content.

Senior software engineer and architect. Responsible for design, construction and maintenance of various systems level components.

• Microsoft Exchange Accelerator: Links Barracuda Spam Firewall with Active Directory/LDAP organization database by lightweight, event based, caching interconnect daemon. Seamlessly supports both LDAP and SMTP (fallback) recipient verification.
• Barracuda::Bayes: Constructed Bayesian statistical analysis component including a custom, fault-tolerant and self-healing embedded database for token storage, international script/character set (I18N) word boundary parsing, and Markov chaining.
• Barracuda SMTP Daemon: Independently constructed lightweight, high performance, filtering, event based SMTP (E-mail) server. Supports single-pass streaming filtering, encompassing all of RFC821/2821 communication, RFC822/2822 parsing, MIME decomposition, Unicodification and attachment decoding. Filtering modules can be written in C, Perl or Lua as loadable modules. Filtering policy implemented through execution of a declarative policy script. Automated code generation produces over 80% of the intermediate C source code, reducing bugs, development time, and increasing the the ratio of source which can be statically analyzed.
• Support Infrastructure: Built and maintained a highly secure environment through which technical support personnel remotely access tens of thousands of Barracuda appliances around the world. This involved constructing a robust, multi-layered authentication and authorization infrastructure within Barracuda's network and accompanying support included within each appliance.
• Spearheaded refactoring of build infrastructure towards a non-recursive Make paradigm. Allows for defining a complete directed acyclic graph of project dependencies across the entire source tree (comprising millions of lines of code). This provides invaluable insight for both engineering and product management.

Changes and additions to the JINSA Online content management system. Technical consultation as issues arose.

• Created new JINSA store. All data kept in central XML repository, using XSLT templates for presentation. Real-time USPS shipping rate quotes using their XML web services interface.
• Related article document-vectoring engine. Worked closely with the original author of the Text::Document Perl module to increase the document parsing and scoring speed. Batch processing of JINSA's document set went from hours to minutes.
• Integrated site administrator authentication with the underlying system authentication framework. The project mostly consisted of writing mod_auth_bsd, which links Apache's HTTP Basic Authentication functionality with the BSD Authentication framework (similar to PAM) employed in OpenBSD and BSDi Unix.
• Refactored various backend elements to generate XML for metadata storage and content presentation. Rewrote custom PHP XML processors to utilize XSLT templates. Home page, Recent news and side bars generated from XML using XSLT. These features tied into the custom CMS, and so re-transformed with change or addition of new content, not simply on each page view.
• Automatic RSS feed generation from XML site content using XSLT.
• Automatic weekly e-mail digests advertising new site content to members.

Worked for the e-Solutions group within AG. We developed self-service web-based solutions primarily atop clients' ADP Enterprise/Horizon and PeopleSoft HRMS/ERP systems.

Online e-mail service which provides a web based client mail interface to filter out SPAM. The service linked to existing POP3 or IMAP accounts, or used pseudo-anonymous proxy e-mail addresses managed by Mailshell.

Assisted students with computer laboratory issues. Handled university student computing services accounts; i.e. Unix account registration, e-mail issues, etc.