Resume Of James Mc Parlane

A Little About James

I was CTO of Massive Interactive from 1998. I transitioned to Chief Science Officer in 2016 and spent most of my time researching new ways of accelerating networking infrastructure and stabilising video playback on various platforms.

In 2019 Massive Interactive was purchased by Deltatre, where James’s vast knowledge and experience were put to work, improving the stability and performance of many high-profile streaming platforms and sporting events.

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 80s and early 90s. 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 ’90s, 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. While getting electronic artists online, James started looking into hardware and software solutions enabling people to use the internet via their TV.

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

James joined Massive Interactive in 1998 as Technical Director and later became Chief Technical Officer.

In the last 25 years at Massive/Deltatre, James’ skills and innovative approach to applying technology and user interaction have been recognised with numerous AIMIA awards and two Emmy nominations.

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

(2022-2023) Designing and building a currently unreleased gaming video broadcast platform with a target audience of >100 million simultaneous viewers for mobile, console and television platforms.
(2018-2022) Designing and building frameworks to stabilise and harmonise video playback on televisions and set-top box devices. MedaCorp (Singapore), DAZN, DK (Denmark), ITV BBC BritBox (UK).
Machine learning video processing for the automatic preparation of mezzanine content for video-on-demand systems. (Dendy Direct)
(2018) Designed a VR broadcast system with a supporting attention-based economic system.
Developed VM and generic algorithm-based system for evolving routing algorithms for differing networking conditions.
Consulting and building solutions for various national-scale HbbTV and ASTC 3.0 projects in Australia, New Zealand and the US.
(2014-2017) Architected and helped develop Freeview Australia’s “Freeview Plus” and the Channel 7 and Channel 9 Freeview applications.
(2014) Built DASH Video player for Dendy Direct
Consultant to Foxtel on iQ3 hardware and software development.
(2012) Rebuilt ABC’s triple J ‘Unearthed’ service.
Guiding Enterprise Architect for Massives Storefront VOD System
Designed and developed the first 5 versions of Massive’s core product.
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.
(2006) Architected and developed social media integration and media transcoding SaaS platform (Optus).
(2005) Architected and helped develop the first video-on-demand service for the Xbox360 in Australia (Microsoft/Intel/Telstra).
(2004) Architected and developed Open Source IPTV Framework For OpenTV Set Top Boxes in C
(2003) Video-on-demand server and client prototype for Liberate Technologies.
(2001) Original Big Brother website and IRC Servers (Endemol)
(2001) Architected and developed a real-time sports telemetry system with both streaming and broadcast via PVR (Telstra BigPond).
(1997) Developed a DNS-based content distribution system in the 1990s from scratch, which included indulging myself in one of my favourite hobbies, writing code from scratch from RFCs
(1996) Media delivery system, hardware and software solution for Hotels with a partner from “The Orlando Project” (Warner Inc)
(1993) Prototype neural net (3LBP) based handwriting recognition system for the Australian Electoral Commission.

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 90s, 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 the world would be a better place if enthusiastic struggling artists just got their work onto the then-nascent internet. 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 the 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
HbbTV
ATSC 3.0
TypeScript
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

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

Private Research Interests

Distributed/decentralised computing and infrastructure.
Cellular automata-based physics.
Automatic Content Recognition.
- Architected and developed real-time audio and video ACR (Automated Content Recognition)/Digital Media fingerprinting system (For fun).
Loosely coupled supercomputing/distributed computing.
Media transcoding
MMS/SMS Messaging
Non-linear searching algorithms. Neural networks, decision trees, genetic algorithms etc.
Virtual Machines
Complexity management
Artificial “Life”
Parsing theory.
Computer Languages (Developed several ‘toy’ languages and a macro assembler in 1988)
Virtual Machine/Computing/Language Theory. Written many small utility scripting languages and virtual machines for fun and profit.
“Super-platforms”
Evangelist for Test Driven programming and continuous integration. Everything else from XP I take with a grain of salt when required.
Firmly believe that TSR and “system tray” applications should be tiny and not annoy the user. Develop and maintain open-source C and C++ open-source code libraries for this purpose.
Cross-platform development. Current C and C++ libraries compile under WIN32, Solaris, BSD, Linux and OSX.
There is nothing I like more than debugging multithreaded code.
Bluetooth/WiFi/Context-aware software.

Career Highlights

Commercial Work

Designing and building a currently unreleased gaming video broadcast platform with a target audience of >100 million simultaneous viewers for mobile, console and television platforms.
Designing and building frameworks to stabilise and harmonise video playback on televisions and set-top box devices. MedaCorp (Singapore), DAZN, DK (Denmark), ITV BBC BritBox (UK).
Machine learning video processing for the automatic preparation of mezzanine content for video-on-demand systems. (Dendy Direct)
(2018) Designed a VR broadcast system with a supporting attention-based economic system.
Developed VM and generic algorithm-based system for evolving routing algorithms for differing networking conditions
National Scale IPTV Platform – Freeview Plus HBBTV 1.5 Platform. Front and back end.
Architected and helped develop a broadcast and online music-sharing social network for ABC (TripleJUnearthed)
Architected and helped develop Catch-Up and IPTV Video On Demand system for Sky NZ (iSky)
Architected and helped develop IPTV Media Publishing for British Telecom (BT Vision)
Architected and developed IPTV Framework in JavaScript.
Architected and developed IPTV Framework For OpenTV Set Top Boxes in C
Consultant for the hardware and software selection for the Telstra T-Box.
Nominated for an Emmy in 2008
Nominated for an Emmy in 2007
Numerous blue chip company websites.
- In-flight entertainment system deployed Airbus A380
- Real-time sports telemetry system with both streaming and broadcast via PVR.
- Music e-commerce site (BigPond Music)
- Optus/Telstra/Foxtel
- Endemol (Original Big Brother website and IRC Servers)
Built a NoSQL system with an embedded JavaScript interpreter and indexable distributed object model in 1998.
Custom validating and repairing SGML/HTML/XML parser in C++.
JavaScript engine in C++.
Slashdotted several times for work in open-source projects.
‘Dugg’ and Slashdotted several times for my JavaScript developments.
XPath-like and XSLT-like engines in C and C++ (before XPath and XSLT).
Mail server, IMAP. POP, SMTP and clients in C and C++ for set-top box systems.
SMS and MMS SMSC server and client from scratch from GSM specification.
Early continuous build and deploy Build server and test reporting systems.
High-capacity TCP streaming and UDP packet serving frameworks in C and C++.
Micro-kernel for the Nintendo Gameboy complete with TCP/IP stack.
Video-on-demand server and client prototype for Liberate Technologies.
MetaWrap (2000) Highly scalable XML processing and serving platform with an object-based database and JavaScript scripting language. (Nowadays, it would be called an Enterprise Service Bus. Imagine Nginx, Redis and NodeJS all in one platform. )
Custom hardware solutions for clients.
Prototype neural net (3LBP) based handwriting recognition system for the Australian Electoral Commission.
V8 Supercars
MondoTime. (Figurines)
Application Framework for publishing content on Floppy Disk (C/C++)
(1987)-Loosely coupled distributed processing engine using a biological/cellular automata model of computation. (Nowadays, it would be labelled as a ‘Biologically inspired Map-Reduce engine’)

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-) transitioning into an 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 the printing industry and free ISP for the electronic artists of Sydney. Developed fault-detecting and self-repairing PC-based hardware set-top box for the 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 a 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.