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I've got two great daughters, Amy (14; yes, a teen), and Alyssa (10), and a wonderful wife, Anne, who teaches art and illustrates childrens' stories. We live in southern New Hampshire, convenient to Boston, the White Mountains, and to the Atlantic Ocean.
I'm a software engineer with Hewlett Packard Company in Nashua NH. For many years, I was the principal architect of the POSIX thread library for both OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX, an implementation of the POSIX 1003.1c-1995 standard with many extensions including nearly everything specified by the UNIX 98 brand ("Single UNIX Specification, version 2", or SUSv2). Our original work on the CMA threading architecture inspired the POSIX standard, and I was actively involved with development of the standard, as well as SUSv2 and the followon project that resulted in both POSIX 1003.1-2001 and SUSv3 (UNIX 2001). I continue to consult on the continuous improvement of the POSIX specification, as time allows; but time is increasingly less cooperative.
As Alpha and Tru64 UNIX fade into history, I've moved on to a different sort of challenge: technical lead on the software component of HP's "Instant Capacity" program, (iCAP), previously known as "iCOD". Not only has this thrust me from an environment that was in essence still "Digital Equipment Corporation" into mainstream HP culture, I've also moved from VAX and Alpha processors to Itanium and PA-RISC, and from Tru64 UNIX and OpenVMS to HP-UX. It's a different world. I'm spending my days answering email, teleconferencing with Texas, Colorado, and California, and thinking about new processors and technologies coming down the road. While I've certainly come a long way, I still sometimes feel like a foreigner who doesn't even speak the language much less know how to get to some tourist attraction; meanwhile, the natives are asking me for directions.
Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, (well, OK, Schenectady, New York isn't quite a galaxy), I attended Union College; a great college from which I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Not that I've ever felt inclined to design an actual circuit since. Which is probably just as well, since my main accomplishment in hardware engineering was the invention of a 2-way diode. (That's an EE joke. You're supposed to laugh. That's OK, I'll wait. Come on, I don't hear anything...)
I've written a book on threaded programming for the Addison-Wesley Professional Computing book series, called Programming with POSIX® Threads; it's been published in Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean. You can find the list of reported errors in my Errata page. (All so far corrected in recent printings.) You can also find the book's example source code on my Threads page, which is somewhat more recent than what's on the Addison-Wesley site. Writing the book was fun, despite the hassle of dealing with simultaneous and conflicting development and writing deadlines. I'm honestly hoping to get started on a 2nd edition. I'm collecting Round Tuits; when I get enough, I'll be able to start. I've been collecting them for quite a while, though, and they're not coming in as quickly as life takes them away.
You'll find me frequently in the comp.programming.threads newsgroup, though I don't post as regularly as I once did.
I enjoy skiing, SCUBA diving, Swing Dancing, skiing, reading (mostly science fiction and fantasy), playing piano, hiking and backpacking, and all sorts of other things. I've had extremely little time for any of these things since our children arrived, but, yeah, on the whole the kids have been worth it.
Both my daughters are into drama, and have been acting for years. My wife, an artist, has been designing set paintings for some of their shows. Last winter I finally got sucked in, too, working on set construction and running the backstage crew for the "School Edition" Les Misèrables. While it entailed a number of 20 hour days, it was oddly exciting to see "my" sets up on stage. Alyssa played "Gavroche" and absolutely captured the theater when she was onstage; Amy and her two friends nearly took over the "Master of the House" scene as the happy drunk girl squad. I've followed that up by building a house on stage for Anne of Green Gables, a "pier"(ish thing) for Once on this Island... and I'll definitely be continuing with subsequent shows.
At home, of course I use a Mac. (I will never understand why everyone doesn't, and the fact that some actually like Microsoft will just have to remain one of those inexplicable mysteries of nature.) The Mac always been the best and easiest to use, and Mac OS X makes it also a strong UNIX development platform. (If only they'd get their thread cancellation fixed!)
I'm using a liquid-cooled dual processor 2.5Ghz G5; my wife uses a dual processor 1Ghz G4; both of my daughters are now using Intel 17 inch iMacs, which are pretty cool. Our 4 macs are networked, with 3 downstairs on wired 100Base-T and Amy's eMac up in her bedroom on Airport; all routed through a Belkin wireless router on an Adelphia cable modem. I've upgraded from iMovie to Final Cut Express HD for home video editing, and I've used iDVD to make a couple of DVDs. iPhoto is great with the digital camera, though Anne complains the "photo album" (whatever that is!) has gotten pretty empty. I've even started climbing the steep slope of learning Cocoa programming but, truthfully, haven't found time to get very far.
I play very rarely with a blog since Apple made iBlog software available for free through .Mac some time ago. It can be found here. One of these days I may start a new one with iWeb.
You can find miscellaneous thread-related stuff at http://homepage.mac.com/dbutenhof/Threads/Threads.html.
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Semi-permanent memorial section
An Internet friend of mine, W. Richard Stevens, passed away on September 1, 1999. We "met", virtually, when he reviewed my book. He was tough, fair, and perceptive. He was also one of the best (and popular) technical authors in "the business". We corresponded frequently while he was developing his last book on Interprocess Communications, which dealt extensively with threads. I reviewed his book, completing the cycle, I suppose, in a way. He was a great person, and his books will remain a treasured resource for thousands of UNIX programmers for decades to come. |