Bob Brown

Robert L. Brown
Phone: (408)829-1090
Email: rlb@openeye.com
AIM: rlb408
Y!M: robertlbrown
ICQ: 240789405
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I'm interested in understanding the processes behind reaching an understanding, individually or collectively, of abstractions. Being in a nearly constant state of confusion, I've started detecting a pattern. A couple of other interesting documents I need to read periodically are

I've built a fair number of PCs this year.  Here are a couple of articles on some I put together for engineering purposes at SGI: Keep in mind that this information obsolete VERY quickly.

More links:

The most recent books worth recommending:

The Story of Cron

In 1980 I was the lead student on the  systems staff at Purdue University Computer Science Department where we ran 32/V Unix on a VAX 11/780.  I devised several projects for new grad students that fall.  For one of them, I designed a real-time event-driven simulation program, based on the Franta-Malay event queue (a paper I had just reviewed for CACM). It would read several specifications of events to execute and place them on the event queue.  It would then peel them off in real time (most event driven simulations use virtual time).  Several grad students worked on implementing to this spec, myself included.  Keith Williamson was the "lucky" new student to first receive my spec.  Keith took the program, called "cron" with him to Bell Labs after graduating.  There it went into use on the Murray Hill "research" system, replacing a root-only program written by Brian Kernighan.  Within two years, Bell Labs released it as a standard part of Unix.  I often wonder if Purdue Research Foundation would allow that to happen today.  Another program, "pg" followed a similar path.  Most of the others, including all of the printer spoolers and batch job schedulers, disappeared after several years of production use at Purdue.

We, SGI, sold IRIS Explorer to a fine company of professionals in Oxford, England. They have a web site on it at http://www.nag.co.uk/Welcome_IEC

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Emmett Fox's interpretation of The Lord's Prayer

Imagine living in the late sixties, early seventies, being fascinated with computers, those big, noisy, quirky beasts that you compulsively feed deck after deck of cards. Then imagine being suddenly transported into the future of 1998 and seeing Windows 98.   You'd be absolutely blown away, if only by the screen and colors, and speed and windowing system. You'd imagine that there was nothing these perfect magical computers couldn't do. Infinite power, infinite intelligence. The Krell workshop.

Then your host's magical Windows 98 machine crashes, locks up, wedges.  He sighs and hits the RESET button.

The sense of hopelessness that, even with this magical fantastical power and lifelike interface, man can still not build reliable software overwhelms you, beats you down. You look to escape, back to your punched cards where you actually have a prayer of remaking this future. But you're trapped, you can't go back.

It seems to me that in the last analysis there are only two choices. MacBeth's contention that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing and Pierre Teilhard's "something is afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth." Either there is a plan and purpose - and that plan and purpose can best be expressed by the words "life" and "love" - or we live in a cruel, arbitrary and deceptive cosmos in which our lives are a brief transition between two oblivions. The data are inconclusive as to these two choices, at least if we look at the data from a rational, scientific standpoint... I opt for hope, not as an irrational choice in the face of the facts, but as a leap of faith in the goodness I have experienced in my life.
         Catholic theologian Andrew Greely, quoted in P. L. Berman's "The Courage of Conviction", 1985
 
More about Pierre Teilhard

"And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?"

What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

More about Robert Pirsig

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