In 20 years of computer hacking, I have developed so many tools and applications, I can’t really count them all. From games on the ZX81 to multi-threaded number-crunching apps on a Unix cluster, I have had my fun with almost anything with a keyboard. And it is still itching 🙂
Here are a few of my more older and/or famous developments. Want to learn more about my management-skills? Feel free to contact me (see right column).
germany.net: I ‘invented’ ‘Web 2.0’ and developed a complete online environment with inter-communications tools, web-based email, chat, file sharing. mtalk: The first universal PC based VOIP (Voice Over IP) program. Bandwidths were very limited, so it was kind of a walky-talky thing. Worked quiet well though. It was developed as free, open source software for Linux.
Ad-Breaks: germany.net was the first ‘advertisement’ sponsored system in Germany. I had to come up with new ideas to ‘sell’ advertising to our users. So I took a usual form of TV-advertising and ‘translated’ it into webvertising: Adbreaks. Since the users had to use our proxy, I injected adbreaks even while they were surfing on other websites. germany.net gave them the Internet for free. So users didn’t complain too much about this new invention.
Payment system: The germany.net online service also offered one of the first web-based ‘pay’ services. I developed a payment system that could be used to ‘pay as you go’. We sold software, access to news, databases and quite a lot more.
Multiple: With climbing user-numbers on our germany.net service (> 600,000 in 1999) I had less and less time to concentrate on the development of the system. However, I managed to dedicate 2 or 3 hours of my 16 hours day to developing or enhancing the system. Among other things, I developed a load balancer to share the access-requests among several servers, I integrated a shopping system and an interface to a pager service. I sold my interest in 1999 and left germany.net
I sold germany.net, I moved to the US and started Steyla Technologies,Inc., a research, development and IT consulting company. I was finally able to fully engage myself with technology again. All projects were developed for, or sold to, different clients.
rage: A radio-station ‘in a box’. I developed a Linux based radio station that not only automatically selected music based on different parameters, it also injected advertising, simulated the ‘dj’ and took song requests from the website into the ‘life’ program.
SIGme Pager: A team work between my husband and me, we ventured a little into the world of Microsoft Windows programming. What an experience 🙁 – Anyway: We developed a pager/file-share/communications tool that offered different skins and secured (https) peer-to-peer messaging and file-transfers.
paola: An early ‘AOL’ like online-application (hence the ‘pAOLa’ project title). Build for a company that needed a proprietary system to exchange data, mail and news. The client was developed for Microsoft’s Windows (sigh!), the server was a Linux application. Screenshots: 1, 2
VICO: The ‘virtual’ concierge. I developed a Linux based client-/server system to offer guests in a hotel video- and audio streams in their home languages. In addition, the system offered video-conferencing, news and weather info, games, world-time and video on demand. The guest was able to check bills and to order room-service and other products. The client was based on a diskless Linux system on a 128 Kbyte CF-car
dvbFido: Not exactly built for a client, but that system has given me so much fun, that it’s worth mentioning. It’s a Linux-based Digital Video Broadcast (dvb) tv receiver box in Germany that can be programmed from here via a web interface. It records programmed shows, checks and repairs the received video stream and finally compresses the data and transfers it here. Since the remote site is connected to a variable IP DSL line, I had to come up with an invention that allows me to connected to the remote system any time I want. We can now record almost every German TV show and are able to watch it here about 4 hours after it was broadcasted.
Please remember, these were just a few projects I am able to talk about. In addition to those projects, I am or was engaged in other tasks like:
Network Security: Consulting, Forensic, Investigation, Protection. I have a number of clients that rely on my expertise in regard to internal- and external security, spam-protection and data integrity.
Modern Communications: Secured mail- and file transfers, Voice and Video over IP, Customer Care (Click2Call, Click2Chat), linking national or international subsidiaries with secured communications channels, auto-attendend, process and evironmental controlling by phone, speech synthesis and -recognition.
Online Applications: I have developed several web-applications for internal- or customer communications. Among those are ‘live’ video-/audio recording from a website, a system to collaborate between co-workers (web based spread-sheet, white-board etc.), remote-desktop tools, web-spiders (robots), games, picture analyzes.