Former RogueWave CTO.
Al is no longer with Rogue Wave, he now works for amazon.com! Not sure what his new email address is though.
I'm Al! My Amazon.com email address is alv at amazon.com. I'm CTO here at Amazon.com, just like I used to be way back when at Rogue Wave.
Al is an awesome computer scientist who can teach you complex things with amazing simplicity. He explained Paxos Algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_algorithm) by dramatizing it, convergence in a distributed system by hand drawn diagrams and rate estimation by creating an OpenGL visualization. I wish I get more opportunities to learn from him.