Some facts about me

Trivia

• I’m a Navy veteran. That gets me employment preference at the Post Office.
• I’ve been “mentally contaminated” since ‘85.
• Hidamari no tami are strangely soothing.
• Go Bears! Golden Bears in my immediate family include my dad’s dad (business), my dad (electrical engineering), my sister (French literature) and countless cousins. The “all-Cal” experience is one I have in common with Jim Gray (B.S. ‘66, Ph.D. ‘69), Marti Hearst (B.A. ‘86, Ph.D. ‘94), among others.
• Prototypes have a life of their own. Some University POSTGRES applications that gave us pause.
• Sometimes, so do class projects. I was surprised to find that one of mine had been used for course readings at several universities.
• Sadly, my Erdös number is no longer smaller than Dourish’s.
• Yes, the “M” is there for a reason. You wouldn’t think this would be a problem, but it turns out that there are other people named “Paul Aoki” doing computer-related research, notably Paul K. Aoki at UW.

Software experience

I’ve worked on several different medium-large software systems (i.e., systems in the ballpark of 100-1000 KLOC - that’s total size, not how much I wrote!). Outside of the companies for which I’ve worked full-time post-Ph.D., I’ve written software for:

• Illustra Information Technologies
  The first commercialization of POSTGRES. Formerly known as Miró Systems and Montage Software; acquired by Informix Software, which is now part of IBM.
• Garlic
  . A heterogeneous multimedia object management project at IBM Almaden Research Center, which became part of DB2 DataJoiner.
• Mariposa
  A distributed DBMS project that formed the basis for Cohera; acquired by PeopleSoft, which is now part of Oracle.
• Sequoia 2000
  A global change research project that included a large geospatial database component.
• POSTGRES
  One of the original “object-relational” DBMS systems, and the basis for Illustra, Cohera, PostgreSQL, EnterpriseDB, etc.
• General Electric
  I worked briefly at Ilex Systems, a company that did contract work on a nuclear reactor core monitoring system written by GE’s commercial nuclear reactors (3D-MONICORE). This was actually more fun than it sounds like when I describe it (largely thanks to the utterly crazy John Plevyak, but don’t tell him I called him that…), but it also convinced me that writing new software is a lot more fun than maintaining old software.

Hacks ‘n’ patches

Most of my open source code has to do with research projects – these are basically gists, from the days before GitHub. Grab what you like, but be warned that I’ll probably trash any email I get about this stuff.

• hilbert.shar
  This is a hacked-up version of the Hilbert code generator from the Utah Raster Toolkit. Through the use of the GNU Integer class, it has been extended to support up to 32 dimensions and 32 bits of resolution (though CPU and space requirements are unlikely to allow both at the same time).
• sphere.patch.amd64
  Some fixes for the NIST SPHERE 2.6a distribution of speech audio tools. (The base distribution from 1997 can be found here.) The patch enables the distribution to compile and pass its regression test suite under Ubuntu 10.04 amd64. However, before bothering with this, you should really look at LDC’s page on dealing with SPHERE-formatted data, and make sure that you can’t just use SPHERE 2.7 from 2012 :-).
• ich4-rh73.patch
  A context-diff patch for Linux kernel 2.4.18-5 to make it recognize the IDE controller in the Intel ICH4 chipset (as used in, e.g., the Dell Optiplex GX260 and Dell Precision Workstation 650 series). You can install RH 7.3 fine without the patch, but the IDE controller will be operating in PIO mode…reading a DVD can drive CPU utilization to 100%.