My current job is the founder of a startup,
BitMover, Inc.,
doing first distributed source management systems and then
Linux clusters.
More information can be found on the BitMover home page.
I've worked as a systems designer and programmer at Lachman,
SUN, SGI, Cobalt Microserver, in that order (read the
resume
for more history). I've worked on a variety of different problems,
including operating systems, clustering, networking hardware,
disk hardware, and source management systems. I've also done
quite a bit of technical marketing because I enjoy it and it is
a good way to figure out what customers really want.
The unifying theme of my career has been performance. After years of
writing little tests to measure performance, I finally packaged them
all up and produced the
lmbench
benchmark suite. lmbench measures latency and bandwidth of computer
hardware and software.
Another theme in my career has been to think about future
problems.
The
Sourceware Operating System paper
was written in 1993 when I was worried about Microsoft. I'm less
worried about Microsoft today and more worried about business
models which work for open source projects. Open source is great,
but I'd like to see it provide enough revenue that we all can eat,
pay the mortgage, raise families, and make our investors happy.
Work is ongoing on the Business Public License to solve this problem.
This license preserves the best of the open source and the
proprietary source business models.
I live in San Francisco and divide my free time there between my wife
Beth, woodworking,
more
woodworking,
playing pool. Lately (like the last 3 years) I've
been busy, so my pool game is not what it used to be.
Current work stuff
I'm building a new
source management system
because the existing ones don't solve the problem very well.
Stalled work stuff
Linux
clusters
for the government (this is in the early stages).
lmbench2
has taken a back seat to my other projects. At some point,
I want to get back to that, it's a useful tool. Carl Staelin
has been picking up the slack, he's done a lot of work.
If you've ever worked at a software company of any size, then
this
is hysterical. You have to read it out loud and you have to
try and sound like Hemingway. I do a good enough job that
I periodically go back and read it at SGI. For a small fee
(like a beer), I'll come and read it for you.
A
song
composed in my honor. No kidding. It's pretty cute but you
might need to know a little about Sun's internal politics to
completely get it.
A
letter
that Sun's lawyers once sent out. It's amazing how frigging
self centered people can be. I got yer Java right here, buddy.
A few days later, the net
responds.
Here are a bunch of
quotes
that I either liked or were attributed to me.
