Alasdair Allan in the House!

Alasdair Allan is joining our band of merry makers here on the MAKE site. Al is the author of a number of books on iOS, Arduino, and connecting them together. A couple of years ago, he and Pete Warden caused a privacy scandal by uncovering the fact that your iPhone was recording your location, all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. He still isn’t sure what to think about all that. From time to time, he stands in front of cameras, and you can often find him at conferences run by O’Reilly Media, normally doing things involving distributed sensor networks.

Alasdair runs a small technology consulting business, writing software, building hardware, and providing training. He sporadically writes blog posts about things that interest him, or more frequently provides commentary about them in 140 characters or less. We’re looking forward to having him redirect some of his precious bandwidth here on MAKE.

Alasdair is a former senior research fellow at the University of Exeter. As part of his work there, he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes which, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of the most distant object yet discovered, a gamma-ray burster at a redshift of 8.2. Maybe if we’re really nice to him, he’ll show us how to do some cool stuff like this.

Welcome Alasdair!