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This page was last updated 2 May 2010.

Personal Info

Click here to download my resume [PDF] [Alternate location].

I used to be a partner and director of software engineering at mental images , a computer graphics company in Berlin that makes heavy-duty photorealistic 3D renderers (mental ray) and other rendering software integrated into most popular high-end CGI and CAD tools like Autodesk Softimage XSI, Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds max, Dassault Systèmes Catia, Solidworks, and others. In 2007 we sold the company to nVidia. I no longer work at mental images, there is nothing left for me to create there. mental images is no longer the company I helped building, and I see no more challenges there, so it was time to leave.

picture of the award In 2003, we had the great honor to win a Technical Achievement Award (Academy Certificate) from the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences (AMPAS) . That's the place that also awards the Oscar statuettes to film actors and others. Here is the verbatim text:

To Thomas Driemeyer and to the Team of Mathematicians, Physicists and Software Engineers of Mental Images for their contributions to the Mental Ray rendering software for motion pictures. Mental Ray is a highly programmable computer-graphics renderer incorporating ray tracing and global illumination to realistically simulate the behavior of light in computer-generated imagery.

Here is a complete report about the event.

Dear valued German ARD television network, if you ever again need my picture, ask me and don't publish that silly one with the yellow snorkel. I am not making this up, they actually did that. I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I saw that.

My main interests are, obviously, computers, especially computer graphics. I am most certainly not afraid of tricky operating system issues either. I should mention I work with Unix workstations and would never voluntarily work on a PeeCee running Windows or any other so-called OS crufted up by Microsoft. I also ride my bicycles quite a lot, mostly racing bikes, but never competitively. I travel a lot, and mostly but not always by bicycle. Europe is a wonderful place to live. Other than that, I waste most of my fading youth designing schematics and building strange contraptions and freeware projects, and have great fun doing so.

About the bitrot.de and rgba.de Domains

This home page is installed on a web server in my own domain (www.bitrot.de) hosted by Logivision, and on the web server of IN-Berlin, a non-profit organization run by people interested in private network communications. IN-Berlin offers noncommercial Internet connectivity at really low cost. Check out the IN-Berlin homepage for details if you need Internet and/or Usenet access in or near Berlin. Glitches happen occasionally but it works more often than not and one can talk to real people and not some corporate complaint department. The extra rgba.de Domain is hosted by 1&1.

bitrot.de is my personal domain. My home machine is connected to the Internet with a permanent leased line, but with a rather low bandwidth. If you want to send me large amounts of data, put it in my FTP server incoming directory (note that you can't list this directory). However, there is nothing to download on that server; if you are interested in the freeware I publish go to the FU Berlin FTP server instead. (I could use my server, but I want to avoid excessive traffic on my home line).

My home network consists of a Linux firewall (gate), an SGI R3000 Indigo (bitrot), an SGI O2 (cosimo), a fast Linux box for rendering (galileo), a Linux notebook (nitro, a Sharp Zaurus PDA running Linux (I love this thing) and various odds and ends.

I am still in love with Silicon Graphics systems. Graphics and software, especially sound & imaging (to avoid the word Multimedia) and the development environment are vastly superior to everything else I have seen. This home page, and all the freeware programs, were done on my home system, an SGI O2 workstation, and also an Indigo XS24Z for sentimental reasons. These guys really knew how to design systems. I also run several fast Linux boxes, and while I am convinced that Linux has the potential to conquer the world and will do whatever I can to hasten that happy day, but until Linux has anything that even approaches SGI's cvd debugger and profiler, or SGI's or Apple's user interface designers, I'll stick with SGI.

The first computer I owned that I didn't build myself is a Silicon Graphics Indigo. There were many homegrown computers, built from the ground up using my own circuit designs and mostly TTL glue chips (no chipsets in those days), using 6502, 6809, 68000, and 68020 processors. One of the old 68000 boards still runs my apartment. I think that nothing that came after the Sun-3 could be duplicated or improved upon with means available at home. The Indigo later got a big brother, an SGI O2; low-end but still the ultimate home machine. That doesn't mean I don't do hardware anymore, read about it on my Silly Hacks page. There was never any doubt in my mind that software is my true calling though. So much more freedom, and easier to make backups of too.

Privacy Policy

This is a private site with no commercial interests whatever. I do not give any information about your visits to anyone else, and have no intention to do so in the future.

My website is hosted by IN-Berlin, a noncommercial organization that offers high-speed DSL lines with fixed IP addresses. Since I do like to know about the popularity of my pages, I have put small images into each page that refer back to my home site, where Apache does keep the usual logs. Such small images have become known, and abused, as "web bugs" but I do not use them for an evil purpose. (I get about 1000-1200 page downloads per day; not counting cached retrievals and people who disable web bugs.)

Copyright

Copyright (C) 1995-2008 by Thomas Driemeyer

Oh no, a copyright, is that really necessary? Not really, because all publications fall under a default copyright. Mine grants rights not granted by the default one. You are free to copy or reprint any of my pages as long as two conditions are met: I am clearly identified as the author, and there is an URL in an obvious visible location that points back to the original URL at http://www.bitrot.de/.

The idea is that I spent considerable time and effort to create all these pages, and all I get in return is recognition of my name, and discussions about the contents that I enjoy. I want this to stay that way and would feel ripped off if the pages were used without attribution.

I often get asked whether it's ok to link to my pages. Yes, sure, go ahead and link all you like. Occasionally I search for links to my pages and consider the number of links I find an indication of their value.

If you have problems with this copyright, tell me, we'll come to an agreement.

Impressum

German law requires that the maintainer of a web site supplies information about the maintainer. I think that only applies to commercial sites, but I got this free template so here we go:

Anbieter: Thomas Driemeyer
Adresse: Linienstraße 215, 10119 Berlin
Telefon: 030-89092917
Email: w4d@bitrot.de
Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer entfällt; dieses Angebot ist eine private Homepage und ich habe keine USt-Nummer.

Inhaltlich Verantwortlicher gemäß &182;10 Absatz 3 MDStV: Thomas Driemeyer (Anschrift wie oben).

Haftungshinweis: Trotz sorgfältiger inhaltlicher Kontrolle übernehme ich keine Haftung für die Inhalte externer Links. Für den Inhalt der verlinkten Seiten sind ausschließlich deren Betreiber verantwortlich.

Change History
Tell me if you found this information interesting or useful, or if you have comments.
By Thomas Driemeyer. The URL of this page is http://www.bitrot.de/appendix.html. See the copyright notice. Impressum.
 
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