Home Page of James D. Murray
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Basically, I work for other people who pay me to do a few cool things. I have no interest in business, management, administration, legal matters, or doing my own taxes, so it is likely I will always be working for others rather than in a business of my own. Suits me.
I spend approximately 32 hours of my life's weekly allotment working for O'Reilly and Associates as a staff writer (it's more like 70 hours a week when a deadline is fast approaching). This occurred as a result of my publishing a book with O'Reilly titled Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats. O'Reilly decided to put the second edition of my book on CD and allowing purchasers to download new material that I write from an O'Reilly Web site. I also help fellow Internetters via email with their file format problems, and occasionally update my Graphics File Formats FAQ
Well, the popularity of file format books pales in comparison to
subjects such as telecommunications and the Internet, so my book
projects for audio, multimedia, and 3D file formats have been
postponed indefinitely in favor of writing books on the likes of
Windows NT.
It is therefore no surprise that my second O'Reilly publication involves both network communications and Windows NT. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is the only Internet Standard protocol for exchanging management information between a network node (computer, printer, router, telecom/telco device, etc.) and a network management station. It is therefore necessary for Windows NT (and 95 and 98) to support SNMP to be considered as a network host worthy of the Internet. This is a book on SNMPv1 and it's implementation under Windows NT 4.0 and 95.
My third O'Reilly book is about
a very thin slice of Windows NT security--the event logging
service.
My current O'Reilly assignment is to write a set of study guides
for the Microsoft Certified Solution Developers
certification exams. And yes, it's a lot of work.
I also occasionally write for small computer publications and lend a quote or two to other writer's works. Past minor works included two articles for the long defunct C User's Gazette. More current works include an article on the SPIFF file format for the July 1996 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal.
And if you have a chance, pick up and thumb through a copy of net.sex by Nancy Tamosaitis and Ziff-Davis Press. I ran into Nancy on the alt.sex.telephone newsgroup several years ago when she was writing her book. I was granted a very kind mention on pages 106-108.
In addition to working for O'Reilly, I also work for a telecommunications company, PairGain Technologies, in Tustin, CA. I have worked at PairGain since 1993 as a software designer and engineer of their line of Microsoft Windows-based Network Management Stations for the PairGain line of HDSL telecommunications systems. PairGain refers to its technology as CopperOptics. I currently design and implement SNMP-based management software for T1 and E1 HDSL equipment using Visual Basic 5.0 and WinSNMP.
I have worked professionally in the field of computer software since 1987. This came about when a Southern California Apple software company named SnAPP Systems needed someone to port their Apple ][ BBS software to the IBM PC. I had spent many years porting programs between Unix and MS-DOS just for the fun of it and was intrigued with the idea of actually getting paid money for writing software. Unfortunately, SnAPP was soon purchased by another company that had no interest in BBS software, so my project was never finished. They did, however, have a great interest in image processing, video-signals-over-a-telephone-link, and graphics file formats.