Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

General

My name is Jake Billo, and I’m a Computer Science student at the University of Waterloo. This site contains links and information on both my professional and personal activities. To contact me, please send an email to jake at jakebillo dot com.

I also consult as part of a partnership, EdgeLink Consulting for computer and technology work, including computer service and repair, home networking installation, and business web development contracts.

Academics

I am enrolled in the co-operative education program at UW, and will be attending university until sometime as yet undetermined in 2011. My last official work term was for eight months from May 2007 to December 2007. I’m currently at school for eight consecutive months from January 2008 until August 2008.

Prior to attending UW, I completed my Ontario Secondary School Diploma at St. David Catholic Secondary School in Waterloo. During my Grade 12 year, I took an independent study credit in Computer and Information Science and received a 99% in the class, representing the highest academic grade given in the course section.

I completed two significant development projects during high school.

• Snowdrift, a technical skills demonstration of Java network and encryption programming, and
• Prism, a functional attendance monitoring system that functions with a barcode reader.

I continue to independently develop minor utilities and scripts on an as-needed basis.

Employment History

My most recent employer was Research in Motion (RIM) for an eight month position, which completed work terms three and four of the UW co-op program. My official title was BIS Tools Developer, and I developed internal applications to assist with various BlackBerry Internet Service projects. I will be returning to RIM in September 2008 for a four month contract.

Before RIM, I worked at IBM Canada as an Information Developer for WebSphere Development Studio Client for iSeries in Markham, Ontario. I spent two of my six official work terms (Winter and Fall 2006) with IBM, and in total worked for the company for sixteen months. From April to September 2006, as well as January 2007 to the end of April 2007, I worked remotely and part-time from Waterloo as a Student On-Call employee.

Prior to working for IBM and my enrollment in the UW co-op program, I was a Marketing Assistant for Maplesoft in Waterloo, Ontario. My specific role in Programs Marketing on the Lead Generation team involved data mining, script writing and database work. I worked for Maplesoft both part-time and as a full time summer employee.

I’ve also performed a small amount of contract work for the Waterloo Catholic District School Board. Students of some Waterloo Region high schools may hear my voice in some Flash and Dreamweaver MX tutorials.

Personal Development Projects

Besides my academic programming projects, I’ve also undertaken several independent and team efforts to develop applications:

• XenonMKV is a Visual Basic 2005 interface to convert MKV video files to function on the Xbox 360. It is under active development and is open source under the General Public License (GPL).
• Ethanol, the stable iteration of my custom designed weblog/content management system. A test version is available on this domain, while a fully-functional version with over 50 users is in place at ev98.net. Viewing privileges on ev98.net are restricted to registered users, due to the nature of user-contributed content.
• Aerosol (also known as Ethanol4), a temporary codename for the next iteration of Ethanol. Features include a completely revised front-end user interface, caching and templates support, and full AJAX content editing - which degrades gracefully without JavaScript support. Aerosol also takes a more WordPress-like approach to authoring websites. It is my goal to eventually release the application as an open-source project, with product support and additional features on a commercially licensed basis.As of June 2007, development on Aerosol and any new features in Ethanol was suspended indefinitely, as development on some core components would conflict with work I perform for Research In Motion. To avoid misappropriation of intellectual property, only security-related and obvious bug fixes will be created in the future.
• Assorted Java, C# and Visual Basic 2005 applications for specific solutions. These applications are typically used in a PC support role, and due to their customized nature and unsupported features, they cannot be made available for public use. However, these applications include:

• A router password search/recovery tool for the most common brands of home networking equipment. This tool is especially useful for users who have forgotten their password for the device, and have PPPoE connections requiring an additional username and password. To avoid calling the ISP’s technical support and requesting a password reset, the utility allows retrieval of the authentication credentials.
• A centralized frontend for spyware/malware detection and removal applications.
• File system utilities, including those for categorizing directories and batch renaming operations.
• A HOSTS editor utility to quickly repair damaged HOSTS files.