“Necessity is the mother of all inventions”
Geophysical Workstation (1981) – In the 1980s even within a corporation, using computer time on a mainframe was charged to each user and each department. It was then that Shaffiq Kotadia noticed a Tektronix graphical computer and decided that some tasks could be executed on small computers without cost. This was the beginning of the development of one of the first interactive Geophysical workstations and was demonstrated at the Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists and the Society of Exploration Geophysicists in the late 1980s. It was this project that gave rise to the success of Sun Microsystems in Calgary.
The L12 Norm (1982) – In an environment where computer usage was rationed, it was necessary to develop mathematical models that were compact, efficient and accurate and this algorithm was designed to accomplish multiple functions. The first was to replace the conventional averaging model with a more robust, self-correcting model. As a result this was developed to reduce the number of data samples required to derive an average from a set of numbers and automatically remove erroneous data points.
Super Refractor (1983) – From the first project many new computational algorithms were designed that were compact, more accurate and specialized for the smaller workstation platform. The Super Refractor was based on the L12 Norm and was specifically built for Geophysical exploration signal processing requirements.
SNR Stacking (1985) – This was another Geophysical application which was designed from the L12 Norm application. It was specifically designed to generate two “stacks” one a conventional data summation “stack” and the other a signal-to-noise ratio “stack”.
Email System (1996) – Working for an Internet Service Provider (ISP) there was issue in managing client emails. Commercial software was expensive, inflexible and difficult to maintain. Using an Open Source application we designed an email system that served the organization for over 10 years.
FlexLM License Manager (2005) – The organization was losing money in licensing costs with users mis-using the application. We built an application to monitor and manage licenses that used FlexLM technology and were able to save the company significant amount of money.