Welcome to my little corner of the web. I've put this page here primarily as a starting point for people who are interested in learning more about things I've done, and also to some extent for people who might want to know who I am. I have sometimes been curious about someone whose work I see, and since I'm involved in a number of open source software activities and am easy to find (thanks to my unusual name), I decided to create this page. Maybe you saw this URL somewhere, heard a presentation I gave, met me somewhere, or ran into something I've done out in the world of open source software. Maybe you just stumbled across this page by chance. Either way, here it is.
All that said, I find that updating my web page falls quite low on my priority list. Therefore, I have mainly written about things that are relatively persistent aspects of my identity rather than focusing on transient things as I may have done in the past. I try to update this page when some major event happens that causes some of this information to be out of date. Since there is no guarantee that you are reading this page shortly after I have written it, you can't necessarily assume that these changes are recent, but hopefully the information here is at least broadly accurate.
I am a person of the male variety who was born in 1969 in the USA, and have lived in the Washington, DC area most of my life. I am married with no kids (as of this update, March, 2008). Or maybe I have kids now (as you read this, not as I write it!) and am therefore so busy that I haven't gotten around to updating my web page. But probably not as this would be a good place to have links about them.
By profession, I am a software engineer. Although I no longer spend the majority of my time coding, I have, over the years, found myself focusing primarily on tools development, and I still write code in that area. I also write some code in my spare time, and I consider the creation of good software to be both a vocation and an avocation. It is something that is a core part of who I am, and I consider myself very fortunate to be able to spend my days getting paid to do what I like to do. I am also a musician and have other interests that fall completely outside the world of technology.
I presented a paper on a specific approach for incorporating a form of software test coverage into an automated test suite. You can read the paper if you are interested.
The world of software and technology occupies a slice of my non-work life as well. I am a light participant in various open source software projects, and I volunteer as a developer for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system distribution where I maintain a small handful of packages.
I have always enjoyed development software tools, particularly in the areas of build, test, and configuration management. I have two such tools that I have made into open source projects. Both are hosted at SourceForge and also have their own websites.
One of these tools is my automated test framework, QTest. QTest first appeared as part of BCS, the Baseline Configuration System, which I posted to comp.sources.unix back in 1994 or so. Although BCS is no longer useful and I have long ago stopped supporting it, the test framework I developed for it continues to be used today, and I have made may improvements to it. The coverage system in the paper I sited above is fully integrated with QTest.
In addition, I have a build system called abuild into which I have put a substantial amount of work. This is an object-oriented build system of sorts, but I won't go into details here. If you want to know about it, check out www.abuild.org.
I have a few additional small open source projects, and I have also given some presentations at the Northern Virginia Linux Users Group.
Another passion of mine is music. I play in the City of Fairfax Band and also help out with a lot of the behind the scenes work, having served on the board of directors and helped out with various other administrative duties for several years. My strongest musical interests are in what we somewhat inaccurately refer to as “classical music.” My musical taste tends toward more modern works (from the late 19th century to the present), but I can appreciate the entire genre as well. I am a very active classical music listener and enthusiast and have a decent formal musical education as well. I love listening to music because it is, as my former wife so aptly put it, a “whole-brained experience.” I love to listen from an emotional perspective as well as from an intellectual angle. For me, these two aspects compliment each other, and each aspect allows me to appreciate the other more. I definitely do not subscribe to the philosophy that talking about music or analyzing it takes away the magic. For me, it enhances the magic. I heard someone say once that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. My response to that is, “What's wrong with dancing about architecture?” I also enjoy listening to jazz from time to time, but I know very little about it. Maybe I'll study it more sometime, but for now, that's one type of music I can just enjoy without really taking it apart.
I have a variety of other interests, some mainstream and some less so. I have always been a big fan of puzzles of various types but especially mathematical or logic puzzles. I enjoy recreational mathematics and the study of mathematics for its own sake. I also enjoy tactile manipulation puzzles like Rubik's cube, even in higher dimensions. I have played a minor role in the maintenance of a four-dimensional magic cube analog and was the second person known to solve this puzzle. I also enjoy playing first-person Myst-style adventure games on the computer, though I don't have much time to play them that often. I'm always up for a good game of Boggle or Scrabble as well.
On a different track, I have studied various forms of energy healing including Healing Touch. Many people, particularly those in the engineering world, tend to be skeptical about energy healing. To be honest, I have some skepticism myself, but I generally believe in it, having had many first hand experiences of both giving and receiving energy treatments. There are many aspects of the practice of energy healing that are, like practice of religion, very subject to an individual's cultural background and personal preferences. There are, however, certain aspects of it that I believe to be objectively true. It is clear that our bodies have energy fields that can even be concretely measured. It is also clear that our minds can effect our bodies, as anyone who has ever felt a physical reaction to a thought or memory has experienced. We can also say with certainty that our energy fields are affected by our physical health and our moods. I believe that we can teach ourselves to become more sensitive to the state of our body's energy field and those of others and that we can learn to facilitate healing by learning to pay attention to, respond to, and even influence those fields. Somewhat related to this, I have also taken classes in Kundalini Yoga, which I find to be both a great form of exercise and a great channel for getting out of my intellect and into my spiritual side from time to time.
Also, I guess it's worth pointing out that no one has ever accused me of being a man of few words.
If you would like to send me private email or verify something that I have signed, you can download my GnuPG public key block.
I hope you've enjoyed reading this page. If you should want to
contact me for some reason, you can reach me at the email
address ejb -at- ql.org.
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