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

I then was a partner and the 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 was 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. Then I spent two wonderful years at The Bakery, a software company building tools for the movie industry, located near Marseille at the Côte d'Azur at the French Mediterranean coast. Now I am working at a startup in Los Angeles and Berlin working on industrial networking.

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 enjoy tricky operating system issues - highly parallel multiprocessor and network applications, low-level networking, and performance optimizations right down to staring at assembly listings if required. I mostly work with Linux and similar systems, less with MacOS and Windows. Especially the deficiencies and disorganized needless complexity of Windows used to annoy me greatly - software engineering is my business - but things did improve somewhat there. Not enough to base a career on it though.

I also ride my bicycles quite a lot, mostly racing bikes, but never competitively. I travel a lot, mostly by bicycle at first but more recently I have discovered backpacking in Asia and have been all over that continent. Twice I had the opportunity to take a year off between jobs, and I used most of that time to see most countries in Asia, off the beaten track. I have seen and experienced more of the world than most people could hope, and I find tit exhilarating. Check out one of my longer trips.

Europe is a wonderful place to live, and I enjoy Berlin's cultural variety and relaxed attitude. I also feel at home in San Francisco and Marseille, guaranteeing that I feel a little home-sick no matter where I am.

Here is where you can find me:

• bitrot.de is my home page.

• trentobike.org is a bicycle touring directory with about 2000 bicycle tour reports in all parts of the world.

• Here in Asia, aka Vagabonding in Asia, is a blog about my time backpacking in Asia.

• Parlay Voo Françay is a blog about my life in southern France.

• Flickr has tens of thousands of travel photos.

• Google+, I very sporadically post here.

• LinkedIn profile

Bitrot.de is installed on a web server in my own domain (www.bitrot.de) hosted by IN-Berlin, a non-profit organization run by people interested in private network communications. IN-Berlin offers noncommercial Internet connectivity at really low cost. They also host trentobike.org.

The first computer I owned that I didn't build myself is a Silicon Graphics Indigo. The SGI guys really knew how to design systems, many of their ideas - such as their cvd debugger - have no parallel even today. Today I use an Apple iMac and two OpenSUSE Linux boxes. The devices in my pocket grew from a Palm Pilot, to a Sharp Zaurus (a wonderful Linux machine with the best keyboard ever built into a PDA), to an iPhone, and now a Galaxy Nexus Android phone and a Nexus 7 tablet for traveling. I like Android very much and have done some coding on it, but there are so many variants that it's easy to make a mistake and spoil the experience by buying the wrong one. I wrote more on that on this page.

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 ran my previous apartment; today I use a bunch of Atmel microcontrollers - amazing what you can do with a 3-euro microcontroller and a WiFly wireless module! Check out the Arduino project if you like hardware tinkering, although personally I don't like their library and prefer to do everything myself. 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 in those days. 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.

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 (C) 1995-2011 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.

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: w6d@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.

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