I’ve joined Good Technology. Good develops and sells mobile enterprise software and services – push email, calendaring, etc. They essentially compete with RIM, makers of the Blackberry. But the huge difference from RIM is that Good’s software is entirely platform agnostic.  Their client software runs on many different devices, including Treos, Windows Smartphones and Pocket PCs, Symbian devices (like the new Nokia E62), and, interestingly, some of the early Blackberries.  (I’m currently dogfooding on the Treo 700p Good provided me with – cool!).  Companies needn’t “lock in” to a particular hardware platform – they can even let each employee pick a device/OS they’re comfortable with.  I’m also told that we have a great admin back end compared to some of our competitors – I’ve used it before, but I’m definitely more focused on the handhelds at the moment. 

Anyway, I joined the Advanced Technology Group, a new and very small team here in Minneapolis (the rest of the company is in California) where we’re working on all sorts of interesting stuff.  My boss reports directly to the CTO, and we work pretty tightly with Engineering.  Our charter is essentially to work on stuff that Engineering doesn’t have the bandwidth to deal with.  It may be new product R&D, or just cleaning up some code that we all think will improve maintainability  (So far I’ve done both of these).

So what does all this have to do with audio driver development?  Well, nothing.  It’s something fairly new – though I did do handheld work at my previous company.  I was ready for a change – and, for better or for worse, there’s not much in the way of DSP audio gigs in Minnesota.

So that’s my current status.  We’re still staying with my in-laws (yah, it’s a bit crowded), but we’ll hopefully find a house and get more settled in fairly soon.  And when that happens I’ll hopefully have some time to work on OneSnap again.  I see that a few people have run into bugs – and I’ve run into another issue w/ ON2007′s shared notebooks.

Razorlogix apparently agreed: for better or for worse, they’ve decided to throw in the towel: they’re ceasing commercial hosting in a week or so.  

So I hooked up w/ Dreamhost, and have moved the blog over.  I think everything is back to normal, now.  The big job, however, will be my wife’s blog , which actually has a substantial number of followers…

And, yeah, I’ll get back to posting soon.  Right now, though, I have a new family member that’s taking the bulk of my time.

Is this thing on?  Testing…

Hi, my name is Andrew Wheeler.  I’m an audio driver developer at Sigmatel, working mostly on porting the DSP effects in our current Windows XP driver to the new Vista audio driver model.  I also get involved with SCM when possible, as I find it pretty interesting.  This topic includes ClearCase, Subversion, and Python, my favorite scripting language.

Where do I come from?  I’ve made career of audio DSP and driver development, with a strong focus on 3D audio.  I started my career as an undergrad developing passive sonar systems at Applied Research Laboratories, where I also built my first 3D audio system. 

I then joined Crystal River Engineering, a startup company focused on 3D audio for psychoacoustics research and virtual reality simulation.  (Remember VR?  It was pretty hot during the 90’s.) 

CRE was purchased by Aureal Semiconductor, where we developed PC audio chips and A3D, one of the first interactive 3D audio technologies that took off w/ gamers.  (Though our technology was pretty darn good for the day, much credit can be given to Toni Schneider for the marketing of A3D.  Toni has gone on to do some very cool things in the web world.)  Aureal/A3D was successful enough to garner Creative Lab’s attention, when they promptly sued us into oblivion (despite winning the case, we ran out of money), and bought the remains.  (There was more to it than just that – we probably would have gone out of business fairly soon, regardless.) 

I then joined Spatializer Labs for a brief stint as VP of Engineering , and then joined a now-defunct startup company focused on  providing a "DirectX" gaming API for cell phones.  And that led me to Sigmatel…

This is my technical blog.  I’ll likely be posting any personal/family stuff on my wife’s/family blog, Educating the Wheelers.