This is the website of John Dougan. I'm a computer
scientist and a Canadian from Vancouver who's been exiled
to the insanity of Southern California.
I am fascinated by the differences between beliefs and
reality, how the differences arise, what maintains them and
how to tell which is which. This interest has led me to
investigate many different areas such as economics,
timekeeping, and viking history.
Professionally, I mostly hack on Smalltalk systems with an
emphasis on object databases and semantic data. My current
job is finishing recovering from cataract surgery. My last
job was working for Julian Lombardi at Duke as a Research
Associate in the Virtual Worlds group. We were building a
"Virtual World Browser" application called Cobalt on top of OpenCroquet. The project
is still open source and while it has been on hiatus I’m
looking at restarting it, building on Matthew Fulmer’s
thesis work on making TeaTime more scalable. Outside of
work, I'm interested in information architectures,
particularly hypertext, NLS, Xanadu and the Semantic Web;
software archaeology; command and control of spacecraft,
particularly the robot probes; programming languages; and
parallel/distributed programming. I used to assist in
keeping the Los Angeles
Smalltalk User Group running, that was handed off when
I had to stop attending.
I've never been much for a net presence, but I seem to have
gradually accreted one. So this site is the centralization
of a number of other sites, to make it more convenient for
people to find me.