November 15, 2000

To whom it may concern:

It was a privilege and a joy to have Don Law on the Latinanet project’s technical team for which I was architect and team lead from July through mid-October of this year.

During that time Don served a myriad functions on the technical team of eight. They included:

• installing, configuring and troubleshooting the Sun servers we worked on
• choosing the proper toolset for the team to use for version and source control, then writing training documentation and conducting team training and troubleshooting
• becoming the key person on the team in the use of the Virage VideoLogger and AudioLogger software, and of RealNetworks’ RealProducer software – all of these making up the encoding / processing workstation which begins the ‘content production’ leg of Latinanet’s operations

  Not only the technical team but the client organization came swiftly to rely on Don’s expertise, unfailing good humor and patience in training others in this area, troubleshooting the tools, and producing needed video and metadata deliverables under extreme time pressure.

• contributing heavily to the sessions through which the overall site and object architectures were defined
• singlehandedly designing, building, testing, installing and documenting the entire content production workflow. This flow uses both Perl and C, together with the Virage Application Server’s tools, running on a combination of Windows NT Server and a Sun server which uses Solaris 2.7. Don was also required to install, configure, and interact with IBM’s HTTP:Server Web Server and their WebSphere Application Server 3.51, which support the workflow. The documentation which Don produced included Use Cases, data flow diagrams, sequence diagrams, installation and troubleshooting instructions, and a user guide for the completed software.
• writing a variety of Unix scripts to facilitate various aspects of the team’s use of the servers

In addition to his extremely broad and deep technical expertise Don exhibited an absolute willingness to learn new technologies; great ability in doing so and in putting the new learning to use; willingness to accept new assignments and roles as the project underwent various changes, and to carry them out in an excellent and utterly dependable way. In fact, he so often anticipated the needs of the project that his soft-spoken “It’s already done” in response to new requests became a byword within the team.

Finally, his personal manner was always gracious, professional, unassuming (since his expertise speaks for itself), the epitome of the ‘team player’, and a pure joy to work with.

For all these reasons, he was universally recognized as THE key player on the team. I – and indeed anyone who worked with him on the project - would unhesitatingly recommend him for any position his modesty would permit him to accept, and would welcome the opportunity to work with him on any future project.

Please feel free to contact me at 301-871-5899 (home) or 703-362-8925 (cell) if I may provide any further information or specifics in regard to any of the foregoing.

Sincerely, Tom Wheeler Luminant Technical Architect