About Darrick

Currently, I'm an Open Sourcerer who works on Linux at the IBM Linux Technology Center (offsite) in Beaverton, Oregon. I graduated from the Computer Science (offsite) department at the University of California, San Diego (offsite). Back then, my specialty was operating systems and high performance computing systems (HPCS). I also pursued (and received) a minor in Management Science (offsite) because I felt like it. See my Résumé.

Before UCSD, I went to Menlo School (offsite) in Atherton, California. Prior to that, I went to The Harker School (offsite) in San Jose, and before _that_ I went to West Valley Elementary (offsite) in Sunnyvale.

Darrick likes...

Computers. Eventually my hobby became my job, leaving me time for new hobbies: Dancing (Scottish Country, various Irish ceildh, West Coast Swing and some murky memories of waltz and Charleston); bicyling for fun and watching cross races; and hiking and camping when the weather allows for it. The mound of computers that my roommates and I collected in school is long gone, thankfully. Really, dancing has been a delightful challenge, both in physically retraining my body to move with more coordination adn grace, and mentally, in pipelining called dances and mapping out moves in leader dances.

I like to write computer programs too. When I was in high school, free time was very plentiful, and the programs flowed out of my hands into the computer. I have had far less free time in college (pretty much none nowadays), so the pace has slowed down quite a bit. However, three programs stand out in my mind as some of the more impressive things I've done. The first was finished while I was at Menlo; the others were done in college.

The Periodic Table program shows an interactive Periodic Table of the elements; you can see various graphs of atomic data, as well as have the program render electron shells in 3D!

A few years ago, Woodley (offsite) wrote a C-based random sentence generator. I later ported the program to Java, renamed it jrand and improved the grammar somewhat. Unfortunately, human languages such as English tend to be contextual grammars, and so the sentences that this program outputs tend to be somewhat stilted. Oh well--it's pretty good for a program that began as a joke!

More recently, I've been working on a collection of programs known as the jGrid Cluster Software. jGrid performs all the coordination work to support efficient parallel computation--job submission, scheduling, execution, and some degree of message passing. Thus far, I've used it to plot Mandelbrot sets and determine primality via brute-force methods. Stay tuned--I will eventually write more interesting parallel programs. (As of 2008 this hasn't happened; I've merely gotten faster computers, a lot of pictures to play with, and the ability to abuse GNU make to parallel process.)

Enough about computers. Years ago, I wore a lot of different hats--journalist, newspaper publisher, bioengineer, and amateur musician. Then college came along, and I've had to cut nearly all of them to find time for my studies. Now, I'm just an audiophile. Generally, I listen to some forms of classical music (medieval and 19th century), jazz, Oldies, and the occasional techno beat. I used to sing with my high school choir, but in truth I simply haven't felt like picking that up any more. Oh well. Maddy says I should...we'll see. School^WLife is stressful, and I don't sing under pressure. Instead, I dance.

My PGP key (as of 2004-12-24):

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download it here (offsite).