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. Out 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 assist in keeping the
Los Angeles Smalltalk User
Group running. I've also started back in school,
picking up where I left off 20 years ago.
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.