A Little About James

I have been CTO of Massive Interactive since 1998. I transitioned to Chief Science Officer in 2016 and spend most of my now time researching new ways of accelerating networking infrastructure.

Multiple AMIA Award winner. (2001,2002,2003,2004,2005)

Multiple Emmy Nominee (2007,2008)

In A Little More Detail

James has been playing with computers on and off since he can remember. As a youth he cut his teeth on the periphery of the Amiga demoscene and BBS underground of the 80’s and early 90’s. He then followed his passion by studying Computer Science. Fascinated with the potential of the computer as an interactive visual instrument he developed software and hardware for the Amiga and later on the PC to allow the output from the computer to be manipulated and displayed on televisions and video projectors.

In the early 90’s he set up a warehouse, internet cafe and free ISP for electronic artists in Sydney Australia and co-founded the ‘Kollektive’ and ‘Clan Analogue‘ record labels. In the process of getting electronic artists online, James started looking into hardware and software solutions that would enable people to use the internet via their TV.

Because of James’ activity in the early internet security and electronics art scene, he has also occasionally been hired as a hacker hunter, acted as a media spokesperson on computer security issues as well as being chosen as a ‘technical and personality consultant’ on the Matrix movies.

James joined Massive Interactive in 1998 first as Technical Director and then as Chief Technical Officer.

In the last 20 years at Massive, James’ skills and innovative approach to the application of technology and user interaction have been recognised with numerous AIMIA awards and two Emmy nominations.

Here is a list of some of the IPTV/Media-centric projects James has worked on.

Designed still unreleased VR broadcast system with supporting economy system.

Developed VM and generic algorithm-based system for evolving routing algorithms for differing networking conditions.

Architected and helped develop Freeview Australia’s “Freeview Plus” as well as the Channel 7 and Channel 9 Freeview applications.

Consulting for various national scale HbbTV and ASTC 3.0 projects.

Machine learning video processing for the automatic preparation of mezzanine content for video on demand systems. (Dendy Direct)

Consultant to Foxtel on iQ3 hardware and software development.

Rebuilt ABC’s tripleJ ‘Unearthed’ service.

Built DASH Video player for Dendy Direct

Designed and developed the first 5 versions of Massive’s core product.

Guiding Enterprise Architect for Massives Storefront VOD System

Architected and helped develop Catch-Up and IPTV Video On Demand system for Sky NZ

Consultant for the hardware and software selection for the Telstra T-Box.

Architected and helped develop IPTV Media Publishing for British Telecom (BT Vision)

Architected and developed IPTV Framework in JavaScript.

Architected and helped develop the first video on demand service for the Xbox360 in Australia (Microsoft/Intel/Telstra).

Architected and developed Open Source IPTV Framework For OpenTV Set Top Boxes in C

Video on demand server and client prototype for Liberate Technologies.

Original Big Brother website and IRC Servers (Endemol)

Architected and developed a real-time sports telemetry system with both streaming and broadcast via PVR (Telstra BigPond).

Architected and developed social media integration and media transcoding SaaS platform (Optus).

Developed a DNS based content distribution system in the 1990’s, from scratch, which included indulging myself in one of my favourite hobbies, writing code from scratch from an RFCs

In A Lot More Detail

Ran free FidoNET-BBS and ISP for Sydney’s electronic artists in an abandoned chocolate factory in Sydney. In the early 90’s it was clear that there were a lot of underground electronic artists in Australia disenfranchised from the mainstream art scene with no social network or way of getting their work published. I started from the theory that if enthusiastic struggling artists just got their work onto the then-nascent internet, the world would be a better place. I organised some like-minded people into a consortium called “The Evil Brotherhood of Mutants“. We rented a warehouse and gave electronic artists free computers, modems, internet access and web hosting as well as a drop in centre and performance space. The rest is history.

One of the founders of the Clan Analogue recording label.

Started producing rave and nightclub visuals, becoming a very early VJ in 1988. Developed software used by Severed Heads.

Performed music and visuals multiple times at “The Big Day Out”

Technical consultant for first “Matrix” Movie. The Wachowski Brothers and Keanu Reeves wanted someone to base the personality of Neo on. I got to hang out with them and teach Keanu the basics of hacking and hacker culture.

Plausibly responsible for being the reason Kurt Cobain killed himself.

Technologies

Highly proficient in

NodeJS

C#, ASP and ASPX

C and C++

JavaScript, CSS and HTML

PHP

Drupal

NodeJS

Java

XSLT

XML Standards and most other W3 and RFC Internet standards (written own implementation of most of them)

Multithreaded systems and application level programming for WIN32 and ‘Linux/Unix’ platforms.

Interactive Television and broadcast technology development.

Designing highly scalable Internet services.

Graphics and Audio programming in C, C++ and OpenGL.

Video Streaming and Transcoding.

Business development.

Systems design.

User Interface design.

Database design.

Multimodal/Multiplatform systems.

Apache and Browser plugin development.

Low-level networking. WiFi/Bluetooth MAC address mining.

Mobile Phone application development.

Appcelerator Titanium

Haxe

Automated Content Recognition Systems

HbbTV

Will code in VHDL, Java, Eiffel, Perl, Pascal, Lisp, Scheme, M4, Prolog, PHP, Python or Ruby if enticed by danger money.

Private Research Interests

Career Highlights

Commercial Work

Open Source Projects

https://github.com/DrMiaow/node-video nodejs real-time video generation.

http://thumbwhere.com SAAS Social Network, Social Media, Media Transcoding API.

https://github.com/drmiaow/metawrap An early NoSQL object data store I wrote in ~2000 that is currently (2018-) in the process of transitioning into a blockchain powered infrastructure ‘fabric’ for web services, peer to peer content delivery and DNS.



http://radon.set-top.net/ Open TV Application Framework

Past evangelist for dotGNU project.

Articles

Should We Give Our Screens a Primitive Social Consciousness?

Blockchain is probably the greatest — Oh, it’s not for you.

Apple TV: Why it could change your world (If you work in IPTV)

History

2016-

Chief Science Officer of Massive Interactive

1999-2016

CTO of Massive Interactive

1997-1999

Technical Director of Massive Interactive

1997

Information Architect for APL Online (Ammirati Puris Lintas Online) – Now One Digital

1994-1997

Founded niche ISP for printing industry and free ISP for the electronic artists of Sydney. Developed fault detecting and self-repairing PC based hardware set-top box for use in hotel market and fault detecting self-repairing internet gateway based on Linux. Founded The Evil Brotherhood Of Mutants warehouse space.

1990-1994

Worked as a senior developer and later technical director at Doctor Disk/Documenta developing search and compression algorithms for multimedia publications. Developed homegrown supercomputer for the production of trippy rave visuals via genetic algorithms. Co-founded Clan Analogue (Collective/Record label).

1986-1990

Computer Science and Rock And Roll. Amiga, Aztec and Lattice C. PC Turbo C. MC68000 Assembler. PDP-11 Assembler. Pascal, Modula 2, Prolog. Lisp, Scheme. Minor contributor to the Amiga demo-scene and wrote some games commercially. Dabbled in the Australian electronic underground. Developed audio synthesis and sequencing software. Replaced drummer and bass player with an automaton. Released album.

1980-1986

Computer geek-let. Z80, 6502 assembler, BASIC and 300bps modems.