You want to know more about my technical background! Awright! Let’s get geeky.
FTR, “Paul Tanner” is a pen name, the techie stuff is under my real name. But it’s all me. You can compare my Instagram and LinkedIn profile pics if you like.
Watch my fun five-minute presentation at a software conference—you do not need any technical know-how to enjoy it. I have other talks in this conference series but this one is the most accessible.
You can find my software-biz work history, plus links to papers and patents, on ORCID. (I can’t get over this. Am I an orc now?) Briefly, I worked for DEC, HP, Sony, and other big companies doing software for 43 years; primarily compilers and related tools, with a digression into operating system and SQL security for about a decade.
The patents are about security and/or virtual machines. Being patents, they get pretty deep into the hardware and software weeds; but if you read a patent of mine, and have a question, I’m game. The oldest (#5,220,661) was the most fun; we called it “Fuzzy Time.” (The lead inventor has papers about it using that term, but I wasn’t a co-author.) You’ll want to know something about covert channels to understand that one.
Looking at the papers, the first is also about virtualization, and you kinda want to have a handle on CPU architecture to get that one. The others are not so bad; the process ones should be pretty straightforward, hardly any deep geekery in there. Software development process is primarily about task management, which anyone should be able to follow.
As a former security guy, I am keenly aware of the distinctions between evidence, belief, and fact. I say I’m the same person that did all these things; you can believe it or not. I hope you do! Now let’s get back to the writing part.