Projects I worked on...
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Prior to school
Grad School
Marble Associates
Post Communications
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Font Editor (11/88)
Computer Magazine PC Plus Published the
PASCAL program PLUSFONT in a the article "Vitamin F for the NL-10" in
the German computer magazine "PC Plus". The magazine published the
code (700 lines of code, 4 hexdumps of fonts).
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Practical Microelectronics Experience (1980 - 1990)
Home Use For a while I was seriously thinking
about persuing a career in electrical engineering, as I collected a lot
of experience over the years. My bigger projects were a Hifi
Pre-amplifier together with the matching 400W-MOS amplifier
and a Geiger-Mueller-Counter. Through these and several smaller
projects I collected invaluable experience in understanding circuits and
in the use of welding equipment. I got an idea of hardware debugging
and the use of tools like oscilloscopes.
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Computer Basics and System Administration (1983 - present)
Personal Computer Maintenance
I collected first experience with digital technology (as
opposed to analog electronics, as mentioned above) with
a 4-bit computer at age ten. This piece
of technology had 512 bytes of memory and a six-digit
hexadecimal display (wow!). However, this helped me to
understand the basics of computer architecture early on.
When I changed to a Commodore 64, the knowledge
earned earlier was helpful to learn Assembler
(after getting comfortable with BASIC).
Luckily my next computing platform was an Intel 8086
(although I also conisdered Commodore Amiga). I got
extremely comfortable with MS-DOS and later MS Windows
3.1 (I even checked out MS Windows 2!). I changed to a
80386 at some point, sticking with Microsoft. This
particular machine changed over the years, as I replaced
pretty much all the hardware in the box. Through these
tasks and by making Win3.1 run, I learned system
administration for a non-networked machine.
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Personal Web Page (1995 - present)
13.470 - Computer Aided Engineering
This class was a lot of fun, as it was taught by
Professor John Williams.
This class had quizzes and problem sets every week. One of the first
problem sets was the creation of a personal homepage. I was
faszinated by the simplicity and power of html. Ever since my page
became a site. And after MIT purged my account, the pages moved
to
Geocities. I told the world I am out there, and as a reward,
I got a rating from Yahoo: Cool Site.
[view listing]
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SplineSculptor - A CAD system for Coffee Mugs
13.471 - Design and Implementation of
Computer Aided Engineering Systems
This unique class at MIT had not quiz and no final - but a
term project. It was challenging and a lot of fun: "Create
a software system to design coffee mugs collaboratively in
a networked environment." This was a team task, and our
system is quite remarkable. Of course, our team won!
[details]
Team: Bob Beretta, Michael Jastram, Gerard McHugh, Dexter Mootoo
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Inspection and Feature Extraction of Marine Propeller Blades - Master
Thesis
Design Laboratory of the
MIT department of Ocean Engineering
In this thesis, I developed an algorithm which is used to "localize"
a set of points towards a sculptured surface. This algorithm is
implemented in Praxiteles 8.0, a software package used by the Navy
to inspect propeller blades.
Through my work I learned about the difficulties of numeric analysis
and that computers are not as precise as they should be!
[thesis online]
Team: Steve Abrams, Michael Jastram, Takashi Maekawa, Prof. Nick M. Patrikalakis
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Java Database Interface
SilverPlatter
A customer in the publishing industry provided access to its databases
with different tools on various platforms. To investigate the
feasibility to use one tool - written in Java - on all platforms, I
performed an analysis.
Team: Michael Jastram
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Implementation Study for a Bibliographic Research System
SilverPlatter
Following the above mentioned report, Marble was performing a detailed
implementation study for the client's main product, which included the
user interface mentioned above. Focus of that deliverable was how to
focus the next release of that product and which features to push to be
the main features, as well as streamlining the whole product development
process.
Team: Michael Jastram, Matthew Stecker, Chris Popple
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Implementing a Communication Server
Eastern Technology Group/ Trans National Travel
A travel agency was planning to make their booking system available to a
number of satellite offices and in the future on the Web. The system
was running on a Tech-7 Unix system. The nature of the setup required a
communication server, which was communicating to the Tech-7 and an
Oracle database, serving data to connected clients. The server had to
reflect some business logic and was also performing caching to improve
performance.
Team: Michael Jastram, Larry Presswood (Eastern Technology Group)
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Redefining Academic Publishing
SilverPlatter
A player in the academic bibliographic industry was investigating how
to improve the process of academic publishing by building an
electronic infrastructure, which would act as a framework for
publishers, librarians and knowledge workers. This framework featured
a commerce model, trust hierarchy, etc.
Team: Michael Jastram, Jean-Marc Padova, Chris Popple, Dean
Foulis, Matthew Stecker
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Prototype of a Metadata Collecting Database System
SilverPlatter
The client mentioned earlier needed a "proof of concept" of one
subsystem which has been investigated in the mentioned report. Within
eight weeks, Marble developed a prototype which was capable of reading
bibliographic records of any format. The system was standardizing the
records, and, most important, removing duplicates.
Team: Dean Foulis, Bridget Frey, Michael Jastram, Jean-Marc
Padova, Chris Popple, Karl Schmidt, Matthew Stecker
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Statistics Tool
Marble Associates
To allow immediate feedback from visitors of the Marble web pages,
developed a statistics tool, consisting of a client, which was running
in the web browser, and a server, which was also written in Java. The
client presents a question and a button for each possible answer. When
the user votes, the answer buttons are replaced by a diagram which
represents all votes so far.
Unfortunately, I cannot demostrate this applet at this time, as I don't
have a computer to host the server application. Geocities only provides
space for web pages (and as it's free, I don't complain).
Team: Michael Jastram
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Corporate Memory Infrastructure
Marble Associates
This tool recreates the Marble internal webpages on a regular basis from
Marble's central project file system. It is completely e-mail
controlled - it reminds people to update their active projects and
detects missing documentation. It also accepts submissions of web pages
and reflects the recent open e-mail traffic of staff members and
archives these mails. [Intranet simulation]
Team: Michael Jastram
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Java Tutorial
Marble Associates
To accelerate the learning process of new technologies, Marble had an
internal education program. Every employee had to maintain a tutorial
and keep it up to date. The Java tutorial was my responsiblity.
Team: Michael Jastram
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Agent Technology
Marble Associates
To be on the cutting edge of technology, every associate, was releasing
tech-briefs, for internal information as well. I was performing research on Agent Technology.
[view report]
[view notes]
Team: Michael Jastram
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Comming soon...
N2K
Comming soon...
Team: Michael Jastram
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