George Flanagin

me@georgeflanagin.com, gflanagin@richmond.edu

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Table of contents

  1. Summary
  2. Interests
  3. Work History / Resume
  4. Professional Boards and Committees
  5. Publications and Conference Presentations

Summary


I am a computational consultant with the research faculty. I instruct and assist with the setting up of calculations in the cluster computing environment that spans the university. My experience comes from the profit and non-profit sectors, and is domestic and international.

Since 2013, I have been at University of Richmond.

Interests and Skills


Professional interests:

Research interests:

No interest:

Generic skills

I primarily work with research software on Linux using SQLite, PostGres, MySQL/MariaDB, Python and SLURM. I have significant, material, recent, and relevant expertise in operating system internals, parallel processing, and interprocess communication. Solid working knowledge of several post-graduate math and computer science topics, and I teach a variety of workshops at University of Richmond.

Native speaker of English. Proficient reader of Spanish technical materials. Less proficient with Spanish fiction and newspapers.

Work History


Logo for University of
Richmond. University of Richmond, Richmond, VA.

2021-present, Office of the Provost, Computational consultant to the faculty who are engaged in academic research computing. The new Data Analytics and Data Science minor offered with several of the University's majors is my focus.

2013-2020, I supported the critical business systems that run the University's business. I am primarily known for having designed and written a new ETL system that allowed ad hoc and scheduled operation, and provided internal stakeholders and our vendors with immediate reports of trouble and confirmation of success. Each transfer was fully audited and audit-able, and the results are stored in a database for statistical analyses.

The ETL system, known as Canøe, was entirely written in Python, and used Oracle 19 and SQLite3 databases. It handled all the encryption and security for the movement of the data, and supported many delivery and retrieval types and destinations, including sftp, Sharefile, Box, AWS S3, Azure, and various flavors of https transports.


Logo for Digital Gaslight, Inc. 2002-2012, Digital Gaslight, Inc., Richmond, VA, Owner/CEO.

Fee-for-service software design, development, documentation and deployment. Of special interest:

Linux/UNIX; Oracle, MySQL and SQLite; C, C++, Javascript, PHP


Logo for VCU 2000, 2002-2004, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA,


Logo for Capital One 1998 - 2001, Capital One Bank, Richmond, VA, Manager of the Program Office for eCommerce.

Vendor selection and evaluation, project management of international contracts, cooperative research with universities. Vendor relationships were sought and managed. Went to India to set up the bank's offshore software development in Bangalore. The Program Office for eCommerce was responsible for all non-credit card financial products, and my direct reports oversaw six to eight concurrent development and research projects.


Previously

Let's simplify things to say that I worked other places from 1980-1998: HP Labs, Boeing Military Aircraft, and KLA.

I programmed my first computer in 1967 when I was ten.

Professional Activities


Boards and Committees

University of Richmond Data Analytics and Data Science, Faculty Senate Committee.

University of Sydney, Board of External Advisors for Information Technology Program, 2005.

Triton-Elics, Inc. S.A. Watsonville, CA and Paris, France, Board of Directors 1996/7, elected to represent the interests of the plurality shareholder during the merger between Triton USA and Elics of France.

An Interesting Patent

User authentication system and method, US 7,725,712 issued 25 May 2010. This patent is for an algorithm that improves the usefulness of one-time-pad cryptography in authentication systems. OTP encryption for authentication is weakened because OTP cryptography relies on both the pad's lack of reuse, and the lack of a repeated message. This algorithm injects noise into the encryption process to mitigate this weakness.

Presentations

When Data Integrations Fail -- A Case Study of Causes and Repairs, MABUG 2017, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

Corral: Bringing non-Oracle applications into the fold, Southeast Oracle User Conference, Charlotte, USA, Feb 2010.

Managing IT Professionals, DAMA International, Los Angeles, 2005.

Doing Active Harm, Patterns of Process, Chaos, and Anti-process in IT, University of Sydney, March 2005. An earlier version of the presentation as a PDF

Patterns of Creativity in Software Development, Music and Film, OOPSLA, Seattle, USA, November 2002.

Keynote address for Software Methods and Tools, 2000 Methodologies versus Madness, Project Management in the 21st Century, Sydney Australia, 2000.

Finding the Hidden Assumptions: Analyzing Psychologically Based Requirements for Software Engineering, Australasian Conference on Requirements Engineering Sydney, Australia, September 1999.

Of Windows, Widgets, and Wings, The Search for Cross Platform UI Devices, First International Conference on Visual Information Systems, Melbourne, Australia, 1996.

Human Factors in the Design of the LaserJet 4, CHI 93, Canberra, Australia, 1993.

Cover Story Doing It: A Safe Software Reuse Project in C++, C++ Report, January 1995, cover, and pp. 22-26. Scanned image.

Community Activities


Diogenes Club, London, UK, 1899 -- present. Member in Good Standing: Unus Inter Pares (One Among Equals). Alcohol & Silence.