David Strickman Fox

February 12, 1959

My background is in user interface technology, and my talent is implementation. For many tasks (such as making the computer hardware work properly), the best user interface is no user interface: it should just work. To paraphrase Einstein, the number of questions the user must answer should be as few as possible, but no fewer.

Publications and Conference Papers

• Experience Report: Using Functional Programming to Manage a Linux Distribution Clifford Beshers, David Fox, Jeremy Shaw, ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming 2007.

• Composing Magic Lenses, David Fox, ACM SIGCHI '98. Discusses how to implement Magic Lenses that can be placed on top of one another to yield useful and interesting results. The method developed uses a variation on class inheritance called Dynamic Inheritance.

• Pad: An Alternative Approach to the Computer Interface, Ken Perlin, David Fox, ACM Siggraph 93.

• The RightPages Image-Based Electronic Library for Alerting and Browsing, Guy A. Story, Lawrence O'Gorman, David Fox, Louise Levy Schaper, H. V. Jagadish, IEEE Computer, September 1992. (Also see the RedSage project.)

• U.S. Patent #5,350,303, Method for Accessing Information in a Computer, Filed 10/91. David S. Fox, Hosagrahar V. Jagadish, Lawrence O'Gorman, Guy A. Story. Covers the idea of displaying page images while using the hidden results of OCR.

• Anti-aliased Ray Tracing with Covers, David Thomas, Arun N. Netravali, David Fox, Computer Graphics Forum 8(1989).

Professional Experience

• 2001 - 2007: Software Engineer Linspire, Inc.
  • The company is developing an operating system based on open source technologies to provide an alternative to Microsoft operating system products. The revenue model is subscription and service based.
  • I am the team lead for hardware compatibility. Team responsibilities include
    • updating and integrating kernel support for new hardware, along with ancillary software for hardware functionality,
    • developing and supporting the Linspire hardware detector, and other software which configures and monitors hardware such as network management, hotplug management, etc.
    • Gathering and analyzing hardware and general operating system information from our user's machines
    • Developing database plus web client tools to make this hardware information useful to various departments in the company
  • Since the Linspire engineering team is small, I have been intimately involved with all non-web engineering issues.
  • I wrote our first warehouse program, which reprocesses all the software products in the Linspire warehouse (an extended version of the Debian Linux distribution) with menu entries that conform to our specifications and other modifications.
  • We are currently writing a set of development tools to provide to the developer community. This includes
    • An autobuilder, which allows the building of packages in a controlled build environment targetting different distributions on a single machine. It is integrated with various source code management systems, such as CVS, TLA, APT, Subversion, and eventually Mercurial, Darcs, etc.
    • A repository manager, which allows packages to be uploaded to a Debian style repository.
    • ISO remastering
    • Build and install package version dependency handling

• 2000: Software Engineer exobox, Inc.
  • A startup company developing software for a Smalltalk based Internet Appliance system.
  • Smalltalk development using the Squeak environment
  • Developed a new Linux distribution for an embedded system with 16 megabytes of disk and 32 megabytes of RAM. The main innovations close attention to minimizing the requirements of each package and dividing many of the standard packages into smaller sub-packages to break dependency loops.
  • Worked on Linux kernel support for USB and flash memory devices
  • Worked on Linux boot loader support for flash memory devices
  • Reverse engineered a number of Internet Appliance platforms both of competitors and partners.

• 1998 - 1999: UCSD Department of Cognitive Science - Post Doctoral Position
  • Continued research on multi-scale user interface systems with professor Jim Hollan.
  • Ported Bederson's Pad++ system from Tk to Scheme.
  • Development of automatic foreign function interface generator for the Bigloo Scheme compiler.

• 1989 - 1993: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill - Member of Technical Staff
  • Research and development of a digital library system called the RightPages, the first system to allow access to both the graphics and text of scanned print documents.
  • Hyper-linking of table of content entries to article pages.
  • Used optical character recognition to allow full text search.
  • E-mail alerting based on user interest profile when new documents arrived.
  • Document analysis using a geometric grammars describing the document layout.

• 1985 - 1988: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill - Senior Technical Associate
  • Became a full employee of Bell Labs.

  • Worked on graphics algorithms with Arun Netravali, now President of Lucent Bell Labs. Several fast anti-aliasing algorithm projects, one publication
  • Tested development versions of Bjarne Stroustrup's new extensions to C, now known as C++.
  • Encryption and graphics research with Don P. Mitchell (developer of ClearType at Microsoft Research.)

• 1984: Powerbase Systems, New York City - Programmer/Analyst
  • An an early `user friendly' database written (unfortunately) in BASIC.
  • Wrote software development tools in C and BASIC

• 1983 - 1984: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey - Consultant
  • Worked with Interactive Video Research Group, part of the Computer Systems Research Group (aka area 1138, later 1125.)
  • Worked on some computer graphics and interactive videodisk projects
  • Wrote an assembler for Ikonas graphics engine microcode.
  • Wrote a Chyron emulator, which is something related to character generation for live video.
  • Investigated fractal surface generation, a hot topic at the time.

• 1982-83: Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island - Research and Teaching Assistant
  • wrote a syntax directed editor and interpreter for Pascal
  • Teaching Assistant for Andy van Dam's Graduate Computer Graphics course
  • Languages: Pascal, C
  • Systems: BSD Unix on VAX 11/780, Three Rivers' PERQ, and Sun Workstations.

• 1978-79: Applied Data Research, Princeton, New Jersey - Programmer
  • Porting the EMPIRE financial modeling system to run on a Honeywell 6000.
  • Wrote a character based business graphics software package for EMPIRE, handled issues of axis labelling, range normalization, scatter plots for multiple data sets, etc.
  • Probably Fortran.

• 1977: Princeton Gamma Tech, Princeton, New Jersey - Programmer
  • Programming for an X-ray spectrum analyzer system.
  • Alpha Microsystems assembly language.

• ongoing: Fox Enterprises Inc. real estate, Piscataway, New Jersey - Vice President

Education

• 2000 - present: UCSD Department of Cognitive Science - Visiting Scholar

• 1991-98: Ph.D., New York University Department of Computer Science, Media Research Lab.
  • Worked with Ken Perlin on multi-scale user interfaces
  • Dissertation title: Tabula Rasa: A Multi-scale User Interface System.
  • Implemented Tabula Rasa (in Scheme)
  • Taught Introduction to Computer Science section for one semester, also lectures on C++ and Unix
  • LISP, Scheme, CLOS, PERL computer languages
  • Began working with the Linux operating system
  • Created DISMAL (Dis Mode Ain't Lotus), a spreadsheet calculator for Richard Stallman's GNU Emacs editor, soon to be part of the official GNU Emacs distribution.

• 1987-89: M.S. Columbia University Department of Computer Science.

• 1978-83: B.Sc. Brown University Department of Computer Science.
  • Teaching Assistant for graduate level computer graphics course taught by Andries van Dam

• 1972-77: Member R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. Computer Club
  • Computer club featured in Ted Nelson's seminal book `Computer Lib / Dream Machines,'
  • Member from 8th through 12th grade.
  • Fortran, Snobol-4 (Spitbol), PL/I, JCL on an IBM 360/91 mainframe (using punched cards!)
  • PDP-8 and PDP-11 assembly language
  • Fortran, SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligance Language), and PDP-10 assembly language
  • 3-D computer graphics on an Evans and Sutherland LDS-1 (line drawing system with a hardware matrix multiplier) attached to the PDP-10.

References

• Prof. Ken Perlin, http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/perlin/
• Prof. Jim Hollan, http://hci.ucsd.edu/hollan/
• Don P. Mitchell, DonPMitchell2@hotmail.com

Compile time options are bugs.