Les Vogel

“It turns out Apple has the best Handwriting technology in the world right now.” and “Apple was the first computer company with a low cost WiFi device.” said Steve Jobs regarding two of Les Vogel’s projects. With over thirty years of experience. Visible projects include: AirPort, iBook, the Newton printed handwriting recognizer, Spreadsheet engine for Ashton Tate, distributed multi-processor OS for Motorola, and flood management telemetry for the TVA. His projects have been reviewed by Time Magazine and The Wall Street Journal.

7/02-Present  AngelTech

Current project is an Android app with a Google Web Toolkit / Google Application Engine back end.

NOAA/PIFSC-web based data dissemination tool using PHP / Oracle 10 / Javascript / JQuery

Move-Wrote a web-service that provides mortgage rates and advertising for the Realtor.com website. Maintained and enhanced their internal Business Intelligence software and provided ad-hoc information for executive briefings. Enhanced MemcacheD with custom features. (Java, JavaScript, MySQL, WebObjects ,Linux, Jasper, TomCat)

Maui Loan-PHP site to track Stolen Goods, maintain a Paycheck loan site. PHP/MySQL.

Pacific Technology-Converted existing Sales Rotor product from FileMaker to WebObjects and AJAX.

Vooji, Ltd-Designed a p2p video conferencing system using Java/Flash, Amazon EC2/S3. Funds ran out before completion.

Élan Vital Galleries-Designed and implemented a system in FileMaker to automate gallery operations, including tracking inventory, customers, sales and mass emails.

Gravier Corp-Designed and implemented a tool for automating wedding coordinators workload. Editor for their wedding magazine.

Arica Institute – Converted legacy database to XML for inclusion on Oracle’s NetSuite Small Business. Custom JavaScript for NetSuite Backend.

Sextant Technologies – Technical and Human interface design for Used Vehicle Locator product.

07/00 - 7/02  Sextant     SF

Designed the application. Implemented the prototype. Recruited and managed a team of 8, including 4 programmers. Created automotive new car configuration tool using WebObjects 5 (Java) and JavaScript, database design, tracking down hard to find Bugs, vendor bugs, and made the code more robust overall. Installed the Xp methodology. My role was as a teacher / coach. I took on all deployment related activities. Configuration: 2 rented racks at AboveNet, with a 100 base-T coming in to a 3Com 12 port gigaswitch. 7 Mac 800/DP’s. An Apache system that fronted our 3 app servers. Each talked with our 2 db servers running FrontBase in a cluster configuration. We had a hot standby system configured primarily to take over the webserver function in case of a failure, but it could replace any other function. MyCarMyWay was designed to be a drop in Automotive component for portals, it was used by ClassMates.com. It had extensive customization capability for look and feel. The main feature was to help the user locate a used car by searching 10 sites and aggregating the results. This was done live using screen scrapping techniques. We would then facilitate the users sending a lead to the appropriate party. The Used Vehicle Locator product developed with for our partner BlackBook was used by Used Car Sales Managers to help them find vehicles from to stock their lots. It was a bit more database intensive.

12/98-2/00  Apple

Hired to help redirect Apple's Newton technology to the Macintosh, was part of the initial engineering design of the iBook. Software technical lead on AirPort, Apple's wireless networking product. (IEEE 802.11b based) Duties: developing the requirements, defining the User Experience, writing the engineering specification, software development budget, recruiting team members, negotiating contracts, writing the drivers for the Macintosh, hardware bring up, managing the vendor “Lucent's WCND” in the Netherlands, and their vendor KarlNet. He also oversaw the AirPort software base station, implemented the MacOS driver, and hired and managed the vendor, Sustworks. Regularly briefed Sr. Management, including Jon Rubinstein (Sr. VP - Hardware) and Steve Jobs. Apple has filed for a patent on his Wireless security work.

1/94-11/98  AngelTech

Oracle-Designed and implemented the database back end for a Jet Engine repair system deployed at GE.

Apple Advance Technology Group-Ported and productized Apple's printed handwriting recognizer to the Newton. The New York Times gave a positive review. At the time, this was the largest deployment of Neural Networking technology. Rewrote the Neural Net kernel in ARM assembler, including a method to maximize cache coherency. Converted the entire product from floating point to integer arithmetic, including various forms of fixed point and offset base arithmetic. Localized German and French versions. Designed and implemented handwriting sample data capture. Proposed several enhancements to the recognizer. Additional work on alternative input methods for the Newton including the porting of T-Cube, a self disclosing input system.

Waverly Publishing, Williams & Wilkins-Prototype Newton book of Griffith / Dambro's "The 5 Minute Clinical Consult."

Syvax/SCI/Apple-Token ring manufacturing QA software.

Learning Company–Design of Word Processor for Middle/High students.

3Com-Ethernet drivers for Apple. Worked with AppleTalk, TCP/IP, Netware stacks.

1/89-11/91  Symantec

Technical Lead of "Q&A for Macintosh" a multi-user database with a natural-language front-end.. Managed 10 including 7 engineers, and 2 designers. Involved with all aspects of the product including user interface design and implementation.

3/86-10/88  Encore Systems

Ashton-Tate-Designed and implemented the spreadsheet for Full Impact™. Many of its innovative features can now be found in Excel from Microsoft. This included R&D of the minimal recalculation algorithm and innovative ways of storing spreadsheet data. We were able to recalculate a 10 MB Spreadsheet on a 512k Mac.

3Com – Remote Console management over AppleTalk for their EtherSeries product. Including TCP/IP emulation over AppleTalk.

1/77-11/78 TELOS Computing

US Navy-Design and implementation of Naval Environmental Display Station (NEDS-1A) which TELOS was developing under contract to Fleet Numerical Weather Central in Monterey, California. Configuration includes five 8080's in a star network consisting of a master systems controller, a communication processor, a display processor, a graphics processor, and a cassette tape controller.

Stanford Technology/International Imaging Systems
Design and implementation of an 8080 based communications system for NASA used in a mobile van. Integrate GOES to the HP3000 and IIS’s equipment for NORDA. Image Processing doing 2D-FFT’s, Warping and Data Fusion combining LandSat, MSS, GOES and other data sets to feed to GIS for the TVA. Used for agricultural and map making purposes.

1/75-1/96  Rhyton Software

Motorola Computer-cX-Design & implemented the kernel for a multi-processor, network based computer for Factory Automation. (rewrote the kernel in 68k assembly language). Other work included I/O Drivers, UNIX tool port, Customer Support, Product Planning, and planning for advanced microprocessor design. Helped design the entire system. Worked on simulating overall system performance to for future microprocessor design.

Boeing Energy-Fail-Safe Configuration Manager. This work involved creating all I/O Drivers and an I/O queuing system. This work cut 3 months (9 man months) off the schedule. The first user of this system was Con-Ed in New York to eliminate blackouts.

Ashton-Tate and Queue Associates-Integrated Spreadsheet / Word processing / Database product. Some of this work was part of dBase III & dBase IV. Antex Data Systems-Hard disk for the IBM-PC, that converted a PC into a XT.

EATON/Cutler-Hammer-Design of a multiprocessor image analysis system for a manufacturing environment. Also responsible for the simulators of this system under VERSAdos and RMS-68k.

AYDIN Microwave-Converted large PASCAL and assembly language program from 8085 to 68000 under VERSAdos and RMS-68k. Wrote drivers for specialized equipment.

Compumotor-Designed and implemented user interface for a Semiconductor Inspection station.

Robinton Products-Designed and implemented remote data collection system.

Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
Designed and implemented a specialized DBMS for Student Registration, Property Management, Facilities Management, scheduling and a Physical Efficiency Battery.

SRI International-Worked on specialized Image Processing Software and taught image science in Taiwan.

Tennessee Valley Authority-Designed and implemented a Data Collection system with over 200 Sensors in 5 states, this system is primarily used for Flood Control and Solar energy research. This system cut flood damage by over 90%. Wrote all I/O drivers and protocol for 10 different Data Acquisition Systems. Dual Processors and Fail Safe Software give this system a near 100% reliability.

International Imaging Systems-Worked on Geometric Image processing system.