My Resume
(Update on the below statement): It has been confirmed that Mr. Peter Berry has comitted nameslandering and been the reason for my difficulties in finding a full time job to date. I will be proceeding with the options available to me soon in order to put an end to this matter. (The original statement): Its come to my attention that Mr. Peter A. Berry (co-founder of SharedPhone International) has been comitting name slandering when companies and individuals contacted SharedPhone with regard to my resume. Please note that this matter is being investigated by myself and that only myself should be contacted when looking for reference checks with regard to my resume. Should a person or company wish to get in contact with the original inventor and developer of the payphone on a SIM product (currently named SharedPhone) then I should be contacted from this web site and not SharedPhone nor Mr. Peter Berry. It is with great disappointment and questioning that I have come to learn of this by Mr. Peter A Berry's own admission via email. I am confused as to why he chose to follow this unprofessional course of action when we were such good partners in the start up of SharedPhone. However, Mr Peter Berry has proven his lack of ethics and judgement with this course of action. Working Life Employment 05/2006 - present: Freelance Software, Web and Wap developer To date I have taken on software development projects on a freelance basis mostly for USA based clients needing work done ranging from developing software (desktop applications and servers using C# .NET, .NET Compact Framework, C++ Borland Object Builder and Visual C++ - even backwards compatible applications compatible from Windows 98 to Windows XP, some requiring software update functionality and rebrandible user interfaces and others requiring encryption, compression, sockets based TCP-IP networking, installation packages, Linux compatiblility, and some specifically aimed at PDA platforms such as Pocket PC 2003, Windows Mobile 2005 and Palm OS 5 and newer) for startup companies to WEB development (maintenance work and from scratch work using PHP, ASP.NET, MySQL, MsSQL Server 2005 and 2000, Java Applets, Javascripts, CSS, HTML, web graphics). Lastly WAP sites using WML and XHTML mobile edition with the ability to adapt presentations for different screen sizes and content formats as supported by different handsets along with SMS services and MT (OBS) billing and Google Earth integration into location based services for geo tracking and realtime updating. I am available for SIM Toolkit Application development (and research as well as consultation to validate the viability of potential products and patents along with conceptualizing and development of new products) - use my 'Contact Me' link to the right of this text to get in contact so we can discuss the work you have in mind and see if we can come to an agreement thats sound. 01/2003 – 04/2006: Technical Director and Senior Software Engineer Benefits: 20% Share holder in SharedPhone Intl. (PTY) LTD. Permanent management level position at SharedPhone International (PTY) LTD in the Telecommunications sector in Cape Town, South Africa (Western Cape). Duties & Responsibilities Design and develop a suitable software solution to implement the SharedPhone product (www.sharedphone.co.za) - suggested and developed a SIM Toolkit based solution using JavaSIM and Gemplus JavaCards to produce GSM SIM cards acting as a public payphone on a SIM solution in 2003. Resolve technical issues and assist during the process of SIM card order placement and delivery with various countries. Write product proposals for additional SIM Toolkit based solutions in the GSM and CDMA market. Research and development of new SIM card based products and services. Technologies and platforms used Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows XP Professional, Linux, Ms SQL Server 2000, MySQL, PHP4, Visual Studio 2003 (C# desktop applications and Windows Services, extensive use of threading, database connectivity and SQL queries, Socket programming of TCP socket connections as server as well as client, load balancing by design of memory queues and logging to Windows Event Log Viewer as well as Event Log monitoring for QOS insurance and automated system recovery and failure reporting). SMPP 3.4, SMTP, POP3, HTML, WAP, HTML, C++, Apache. JavaCard 2.1 GSM SIM cards, SIM Application toolkit development (extensive use of event registrations including downloadable events and proactive commands including TIMER_MANAGEMENT and USSD 8bit to 7bit conversions and PRO_CMD_RUN_AT_CMD to perform at commands and then inspect results – assisted handset manufacturers in correcting missing STK Class 3 support). GSM 11.14_rel98 specification, GSM 11.11_rel2000, GSM 03.38, GSM 03.48, HTTP 1.1, GSM 27.007, J2ME, Visual C++ Embedded (Windows Mobile 2003), Visual C++ 7.0, Borland CPP Builder. These activities comprised researching various GSM standards and other protocol specifications and then implementing those protocols according to the 7 layer OSI protocol layer model. Software development activities also comprised technical understanding of the IP stack and the TCP and UDP stacks. C++ software development were conducted on Windows 2000 Advanced server, Windows 2003, Windows NT 4.0 and Linux based platforms to implement server software interacting with the STK products via peer-to-peer formatted messages. Work on the SIM card also comprised development of algorithms to convert 8bit coded strings compiled from user input to 7bit septets and then to send as unstructured supplementary service data and then to report back the responses to the user. 05/2000 - 01/2003: Application Architect Benefits: Share Options when company listed on LSE as iTouch PLC Permanent senior level position at iTouch South Africa (PTY) LTD in the Information Technology sector in Cape Town, South Africa (Western Cape). Duties & Responsibilities 1.)Design software systems and integration strategies. 2.)Write solution proposals and product development proposals for external clients. 3.)Act as team leader during project development, integration and testing phases. 4.)Design database structures and software processes for new projects. 5.)Assist in trouble shooting and resolution of technical issues. Technologies and platforms used Sybase 11.9.2, MySQL, PHP3, J2EE, JSP, Tomcat, JavaBeans, Redhat Linux, Ms SQL Server, HTML, WAP, C++, Bash shell scripting, Windows 2000 Professional, SMPP 3.4, Apache, CVS, Perl, Java (console based server software on Linux, extensive use of threads and socket programming) Skills Matrix Expert/Specialist (3.5 years experience) JavaSIM programming (SIM Toolkit on GSM SIM cards) Expert/Specialist (7.5 years) PHP Programming (WEB and WAP Applications, object orientated approaches, email thing clients etc). Solid (2 years) - Last used 13 November 2007 ASP.NET 2.0 Programming (WEB and WAP Applications, content & presentation separation methods, portal solutions etc). Solid (5 years experience) - last used 12 November 2007 C# programming Expert/Specialist (18 years experience, both non-commercial and commercial) C++ programming (Object Orientated design and development) Extensive (7.5 years experience) Technical proposal writing Expert/Specialist (7.5 years experience) WAP site design and implementation Extensive (7.5 years experience) MySQL database design and SQL query statements Extensive (5 years experience) Ms SQL Server database design and SQL query statements Solid (6 years experience last used 07/2006) SMPP 3.4 implementation and SMS based services (Mobile Originated) Solid (6 years experience last used 03/2006) Java programming Extensive (3 years experience last used 09/2005) J2EE Tomcat, JSP and bean based development Limited (1 year experience last used 12/2002) J2ME programming Extensive (2.5 years experience last used 11/2002) Linux bash shell scripting Limited (2.5 years experience last used 12/2002) Sybase database design and SQL query statements and stored procedures writing. Limited (2.5 years experience last used 11/2002) Perl scripting on Linux Achievements 03/2003 Developed breakthrough Payphone technology on SIM SharedPhone Intl. (PTY) LTD 04/2001 Employee of the month award at iTouch South Africa during application architect & client liason work on Vodacom4me project. 09/2000 Employee of the month award at iTouch South Africa after second month of employment. Languages Read, Write & Speak fluently: Afrikaans English Binary and hexadecimal Education To Complete (in progress) 01/2006 to 11/2009 BSc. Computer Science (Computational Intelligence) Degree at UNISA in Cape Town, South Africa (Western Cape). This is a distance learning university. Subjects Computer science theory C++ Object Orientated Programming Computer networks and protocols Philosophy Linguistics Mathematics Artificial Intelligence Nearly Completed (up to first quarter of 4th and final year) 01/1995 to 04/2000 BEng. Electronic Degree at University of Pretoria in Pretoria, South Africa (Gauteng). Subjects Computer engineering Advanced engineering mathematics Control systems Telecommunications Analogue electronics Digital electronics Programming in C Control Systems (from PID closed loop feedback systems to adaptive predictive modelling, s-transform and z-transform for discreet modelling) References Karl Pienaar (+27 82 577 1862) SharedPhone Intl. (PTY) LTD Reference for iTouch is in process of being found (most of familiar staff has already left company, expecting to have meeting with CEO for reference). Please contact me for this reference. Career Objective & Availability Career Objective I would prefer a contract or permanent position. I prefer performing the following work: -Software Architectural design work -Client liason and consultation work -Technical proposal authoring work -Programming work. -Proposal development and writing. -Problem resolution work. -Research and Development work. These activities will be undertaken in the GSM/telecoms industry, software retail, WEB development and mobile industry (applications, sites/wap and SMS, USSD, OBS, IVR). Availability I am available with 1 month notice. I am willing to relocate. I have citizenship in/work permits for South Africa. I have a passport. Profile of Mr. M.J. Conradie Introduction The profile has been compiled with the aim to list past software and hardware related experiences, breakthroughs and the nature of Mr. M.J. Conradie. To this extend, there is an overview the main highlights since Mr. M.J. Conradie started programming meaningful software at the age of 12. Why consider events from the start? Because experience in job interviewing of programmers as an Application Architect and Team leader has proofed such experiences to give a true reflect of a candidate's potential and value. His early days (from start to university) Marius Conradie has been developing software since the age of 12 years old. Most of these programs were graphic based or text window based (as was the norm in the Ms-DOS era of software packages) and would communicate with a piece of hardware via a printer port (using combinations of data bus lines and signal lines to provide bi-directional communication) or serial port or even the analog inputs a joystick port. The electric circuits developed during this period were small circuits usually centered around the typical operational amplifier chips (LM748's) in combination with transducers for sensors and NPN BJT transistors (mostly 2N2222) and basic RC circuit blocks using electrolytic capacitors. At the age of 16 he entered a young science expo competition in South Africa and won gold on the provincial level and silver on the national level for a project consisting of a C program written for DOS that graphically displayed images composed from the scanning and sampling of an ultra-sonic transceiver (consisting of a transmitter transducer driven by a 555 based square wave generator and buffered by an op-amp based buffer in order to generate a stable 40kHz signal for transmission - the reflected and refracted signals would be sampled by a receiver transducer feeding a inverting op-amp based amplifier which produced a 2uV to 2V amplification ratio to the analogue input of an 8 bit prescaler analogue to digital converter feeding the DOS based program via the parallel printer port pins). At the age of 17 he became interested in the nature of computer viruses (in 1993 these consisted of boot/partition viruses, indirect/direct file viruses, polymorphic viruses and stealth viruses) and decided to enter the young science expo held later that year. While researching computer viruses with self developed tools to extract sectors from hard drives and floppy disks and learning to read disassembled code of suspect program files he developed an anti-virus software system over a period of 6 months. Near the end of this period he concluded that the best way of dealing with computer viruses would be to identify them without prior knowledge of patterns unique to each virus type. He succeeded in developing an effective software component for identifying and curing a disk or hard drive from boot/partition viruses by identifying a sequence of machine codes that each successful boot/partition virus must have in order to exist long enough to spread to other storage mediums. He received gold medal and entrepreneurial award on provincial level for this project (for which he gathered confirmation statements from the then South African leading computer virus research laboratories of his work) and finally received a silver medal on the national level. At the age of 18 he became interested in the design and development of embedded microcontroller based single board computers and spent 8 month reading Intel datasheets of storage components (including the then relatively new non-volatile flash ram devices) and micro controller devices (specifically the MCS-51 family of 8031AH/8051BH and 8051GB-now obsolete and the MCS-86 family of 80286/386/486/586). At the end of this period he had saved enough money to afford building one (including the production of a printed circuit board double side with through-hole plating). He designed his first SBU using an old copy of TANGO which was a DOS based PCB layout CAD program. After the design and calculating the production cost based on per centimeter square surface and number of holes to drill and through-hole plating required he concluded that he needed to reduce the size of the circuit board layout. By the third attempt he had reduced the original size by 60% and came in well within his budget for his first controller board. This board contained a 8031AH, 32K static RAM, 8K/16K/32K compatible EEPROM slot and a 32K Flash RAM chip (P28F256A's which were bought from Intel distributor at a low price since these devices were obsolete with higher capacity and faster access time variants coming in). After this several other variants based on the MCS-51 chips were designed and built until the last one done for his third year digital electronics project. During this period, having access to an assembler compiler for this chipset he developed and used his own C to assembler translator IDE with which he was able to develop new firmware faster (given that the EEPROM chips took 30 minutes to erase in the UV eraser, detecting and correcting software logic errors became cumbersome when trying to implement a file system on the Flash RAM and interact with an LCD display and keypad and A/D converters). During his university years he explored Linux from Slackware to Redhat and the use of XWindows for implementing software during which he briefly explored Lesstif (an open source version of Motif Widget set). For his design and manufacturing project at the end of his third year he decided to develop a product to replace expensive ECG systems in third world countries by implementing a reduced production cost system for capturing the ECG pulses using a differential OP-AMP , high amplification non-inverting OP-AMP and 12 bit A/D converter design connected to a low cost desktop computer running on Linux with a real-time graphing and tracing application implemented on XWindows using XForms as the library for the graphical interface. XForms were chosen above Lesstif to expedite the application development (thereby lowering the development cost) and to allow for development time towards recording the PQRST complexes (heart pulse beats) to file while scrolling the graph across the screen in real-time. The system was also able to replay recorded ECG's and to save then to postscript file for printing. Sample ECG electrode stickers were obtained from his brother who was at that time a medical doctor in a state hospital. Commercial software development started while he was in his second year of electronic engineering at the University of Pretoria (an accredited tertiary institute) when his first outsource development work comprised development of parts of a distributed logistics system for a contractor developing the complete system as an inventory management system for the South African Air Force aircraft maintenance group. Since then he has development an 80 user project inventory tracking system for a local telecoms company Telkom SA (PTY) LTD. This system was developed using C++ Object Builder connecting to a small central database containing the inventory, tracking barcodes and location and status and quantities. This work was done as a student vacation job while earning credits towards his degree's required practical work for the four year degree. Subsequently he has also done technical field work with the radio construction department of Telkom responsible for linking base stations between network operators and installation and alignment of microwave mini-links forming part of the back bone network infrastructure between MSCs and clusters of base stations. During his final year in electronic engineering Telkom SA who was providing a bursary for his studies ended the program for unknown reasons and he was left approaching his final exams for first semester and without income to support his studies or accommodation. He attempted to provide income while studying fulltime by being employed by the department of applied mathematics at his university as a Linux administrator. After several months it became apparent that this was not sufficient to continue the remaining months of studies at the University of Pretoria and reluctantly he decided to end his studies in search of employment as a software programmer. At iTouch South Africa (his first full time employment) In June 2000 he was employed at as WAP programmer at iTouch South Africa (PTY) LTD and told that he would need to learn Java before actively developing content feeds and mobile services. The first work given to him was to download WEB pages of a client, clean the html and save the pages as plain text in a directory structure for another WAP programmer to take and incorporate into a WAP site version of the content. After one day of frustration at doing such mechanical work he decided to spend that night learning Perl in order to write a Perl script to automate the process and expedite the work. The next day he started his Perl script and reduced the work from 10 working days to 3 working days of downloading, cleaning, organizing and saving WEB pages on a WEB site containing around 9200 html pages document wine farms, regions, wines, reviews etc. After this accomplishment he was given a C program which could thus far not be debugged and which would give iTouch the first in South Africa capability of sending OTA settings via binary sms to handsets (at this stage OTA's were in draft form and a joint specification between Nokia and Ericsson). He decided to proof that Java was no problem if you came from a C/C++ background and spent one hour identifying the bug (during his age from 12 to 18 he has debugged a substantial amount of C and C++ programs) and to rewrite the product in Java while learning Java and to produce a program in a form that can be utilized in many different ways. After the third working day he delivered the first OTA to a Nokia handset and Ericsson handset in South Africa using this program. At this stage he won employee of the month award for developing this capability while also designing, implementing and coordinating the creation of a new WEB and WAP based email thin client solution complete with registration process and Sybase based database structure and integration into this OTA software. After six months of employment at iTouch he decided to attempt to return to Pretoria University to finish his degree in engineering, however iTouch offered him a substantial increase in salary and promotion to Application Architect if he would stay and act as team leader at Vodacom SA on a project for the network operator where iTouch services and content would be integrated and developed on their Nextenso platform (based on Oracle, J2EE, JSP, Tomcat, XML). He accepted this offer and during the year 2001 acted as application architect on this project while compiling product proposals, technical specifications of work to be conducted, timeline measurement of work component completion, design of DTD tag structure for content feeds and specification of XML based implementation of PHP content feeds as well as development of the majority of java based services on the vodacom4me.co.za portal. The work environment was onsite at client (Vodacom SA) in collaboration with the providers of the Nextenso platform (Alcatel Altech Telecoms). After four months on the project he received another employee of the month award from iTouch South Africa. In 2002 he returned to Cape Town to the home base of iTouch to continue as Application Architect after implementing bash shell scripts for the automation of java source code generation based on the DTD of the content feed and several questions towards the user. This reduced the turn around time on development of new services from two working days to 30 minutes (excluding customization if needed). During his employment at iTouch (which ended at December 2002) he developed new java based and C based software (backend server software) and PHP based front-end services and placed them into production with a turn around time of 10 working days. This is besides his responsibilities as team leader and designer of new systems and consultations to the company business analyst and product managers. All programming activities at iTouch were conducted on Linux RedHat platforms with only data mining and report generations for product managers conducted on Ms SQL Server and Windows 2000. At SharedPhone International (his second employment period) In January 2003 he was offered full time employment at SharedPhone International PTY LTD (then established as The JavaSIM Project PTY LTD) after proposing a solution that became known as SharedPhone. He was approach with a challenge to propose the technical realization of a payphone product that could run on any handset on a GSM network, that could not be subject to fraud (by uninstalling the software from a phone for example) and that will always be accurate and up to date on the billing of a voice call (even if the handset's battery runs dead halfway through a call) and that can terminate a call when the preset amount has run out. After three days he presented a proposal for the product based on SIM Toolkit and referencing the relevant GSM specifications (which he downloaded and reviewed from ETSI and 3GPP a year before in search of new technologies) and defining the exact proactive commands and events that would be utilized in the GSM 11.14 specification. Since he did not know what SIM supplier would be partnered with he recommended the SIM Toolkit application be implemented in a SIM vendor independent language (JavaSIM) instead of Ansi C (requiring a native toolkit for a specific SIM supplier). When development of the proposed product started it was on Goldkey SIM cards which required him to understand the elementary files and directory files on a GSM SIM card as well as the process of creating unencrypted Ki and IMSI values on a blank SIM before loading the application onto the SIM card. He had to follow the process hands on from blank sim card to creating response data (generated and encrypted Ki, IMSI, Access Control Class, PIN1,PIN2,PUK1,PUK2,ADM3) sent back to a network operator and create the APDU command scripts for creating (initialization and personalization of ) a SIM card that would register on the network with the correct algorithm before loading the compiled and converted STK applet onto the SIM card. Once this product was developed he realized that JavaSIM has severe limitations in basic programming requirements such as number ranges. JavaSIM had only one number type, the signed short integer which has a value range of -32767 to 32768. Since the SharedPhone product was intended for third world countries to enable employment and sharing of a cellphone to increase APRU per SIM on a GSM network, the product had to accommodate number ranges from 0 to at least 10 000 000. Some West African countries have currencies where MTs 1 000 000 would roughly be equivalent to two minutes worth of voice calls. He decided to spend two weeks designing a new numbering system that could reside on top of the limited numeric data type available while maintaining mathematical correctness over the complete value range and while not complicating the algorithms needed on the SIM card (the applications had remain within a 32 768 Bytes size limitation to avoid running out of EEPROM space on a SIM card). He succeeded in developing a numbering system with its matching addition and subtraction routines and number to UTF-8 character conversion routines. His next challenge was to establish a mechanism by which to compensate for accuracy on the billing structure which would start to lag after several timer intervals. Timers were allocated and executed on the handset by the SIM application and therefore were subject to the issue of fragmented "timer tick" counts not adding up to 1 second durations since the quartz crystal based clock timing of microcontrollers were rarely in periods that would account exactly to seconds or for example to exactly 1ns on the second. Once he succeeded in developing the SharedPhone product for GSM SIM cards and after changing from Goldkey to Gemplus as SIM supplier, he assisted Motorola software engineers in updating two of the models (a low cost handheld cell phone and a medium priced desktop GSM phone) to be compliant with SIM Toolkit Class 3 (to support all sim toolkit APDU’s). During his employment at SharedPhone he received 20% shares in the company and became Technical Director and senior software engineer responsible for assisting countries with the deployment and BAP process of SIM card orders based on the SharedPhone application. He also developed other products from time to time consisting of implementation of protocols such as SMPP in order to connect to the SMSC of a network and exchange short text messages for value added services as well as unformatted peer-to-peer sms for remote management of the SharedPhone SIM cards. To assist with the SMPP back end system requirements for value added services he learned C# and Visual Studio 2003 and developed a set of Windows Services with multithreading and multi memory queues to enable a message delivery and reception rate of 30 messages per second. To cut down on the turn around time required for the creation and setup of a new M.O. service (mobile originated text messages) he designed and developed the system such that 90% of the work is automated including auto fault discovery, reporting and correction processes. One aspect of this system that deserves mention is the design of a HTTP based tag system that could be created by any person with little technical knowledge and then either embedded into existing web sites or hosted as a separate web site per service. The tag system allowed responses to be posted and for a default tag system to identify behavior and responses in the event of errors (unknown keyword in sms, too many connections to the web server, web site unavailable etc). Through this system he designed it such that 50 threads per service would run to overcome the delay of seconds between receiving text messages – posting values and getting the response tags and sending a reply. The system succeeded in cutting down the turn around time requiring IT programmers from 2 weeks to one day for a complex system and down to 15 minutes for a standard system. He demonstrated a complete email client implementation on this system that allows a user to check email, reply/compose email, and read email all via text messages sent from any cell phone. The system even allowed each cell phone to manage and use book marks of services hosted on the system. To test the quality and speed of the system developed in C# (described above), he developed a multithreaded SMPP server in Visual C++ in order to simulate high speed message reception and transmission to the system (the C++ system was inherently faster than the interpreted c# .NET based system). The complete system comprised 8 Windows Services plus an additional QOS service, 2 databases with 12 tables in the main database for managing the configuration and behavior of each service and 6 tables in the second database – all designed and implemented using MySQL with a second database server machine setup as fail-over database. After selling half his shares last year during a merger with a South African company and having finalized the SharedPhone product into a form that required only parameters in elementary files on the SIM to be set, he is now looking for a new challenge to take on and turn into reality. The next ten years In his private time he has started research into defining a reasoning model for software by which the bridge between artificial intelligence (pattern recognition using neural networks, statistical modeling and fuzzy logic is applied without context) and real intelligence can be laid. He is two years down the line with his research and at a point where the reasoning model requires one final problem to be solved which will result in software algorithms capable of producing original thoughts and conclusions while interpreting their interactions with the real world within context of the specific situation or dialog or conditions. To this end he has commenced studies through a distance learning university (UNISA) for a degree in computer science specializing in computational intelligence. His aim is to further these studies towards a PHD doctorate in artificial intelligence in order to attain the background and understanding he concluded as required to solve the final problem regarding the mapping of one vital aspect of the model to a software algorithm which will then be proofed correct using discreet mathematics and datasets.
© 2003-2008 All rights reserved by Marius J. Conradie