Donal Fellows
My Tcl site is at https://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/tcl/ (though definitely out of date these days) and my primary email address is mailto:[email protected] (though I've many others.) Officially, I'm working in the Research Computing Services , which is part of the University of Manchester , and I'm working on doing Resource Description, Discovery and Brokering in Grid environments.
I used to work in the Department of Computer Science here on a system (called Rainbow) to provide a design framework for asynchronous hardware (of great interest in the low-power embedded market) with a substantial formal underpinning so that engineers may reason about their designs with minimal help from a formally-trained Logician. And it was this second part of the requirement that made what we were doing interesting, since engineers can throw together a system that provides simple design support frighteningly quickly (even without a rapid-prototyping tool like Tcl/Tk.) Any system that can demonstrate the correctness of a piece of hardware before it goes into a multi-million dollar production run is commercially a very good thing indeed! Take it from me, it can't be done with just any old random language...
I've also worked on Computer-Aided Assessment (i.e. setting, taking and marking full exams by computer) in a fascinating mix of Java, XML, RMI and other technologies. And before that, I was working on updating GTKWave to be less disgustingly crufty. When I say that Tk is far nicer to use than either GTK or AWT/Swing, trust me. In a couple of months, I'll switch to working on getting UNICORE to talk to Globus as part of the Grid Interoperability Project. And maybe sometime I'll even dig out relevant URLs...
I'm a member of the Tcl Core Team and TIP Editor [L1 ]. I'm also a maintainer of various bits of the core. Some people seem to think I am a 64-bit platform expert; I'm not quite sure what gave them that impression.
I'm interested in GUIs, Tcl/Tk, Java, Reasoning About Programs, general elegance of interfaces to computing systems, and many other things besides. Curiously, I'm not currently deeply into Jacl or TclBlend, despite it being an obvious thing to get involved in. I plead lack of 48 hours in a day...
If you find your Wiki page has been mysteriously edited to look better (while not losing any of the content) then the chances are I've been at it... :^)
I was active a lot in the bulletin boards on https://www.tcl-lang.org/bboard/ but don't have time these days. :^(
DKF
Fast Facts
- Tcl user since late betas of version 7.4.
Some pages in the Wiki that are particularly laden with my fingerprints...
- Arbitrary Precision Math Procedures
- Counting a Million Lines
- Drag and Drop
- Fraction Math
- Geometry Managers
- Halting Problem
- How do you justify text in Tcl
- Reading PNG Image Dimensions
- Tcl Performance
- Telnet
- Widgets in the Initial Tk Package
- Bayesian Spam Filtering
- Fitting a new Rear-End to Arrays
- TIP #257: Object Orientation for Tcl
- XOTcl Method Traversal Order
- Tcl on RosettaCode
- Scrolling widgets and borders
- A Hidato solver
Pages which have a lot by me, but a lot by other people too
- (Hmm, this list is out of date)
In the half-bakery...
Work in progress
I have noted that some people think that the :^) smiley indicates that the smiler has a broken nose. Well, my nose isn't broken. I just think that :^) looks more like a face than :-) or :)
AMG: I see you have taken to renaming the Category links to not include the word Category. If this is a style we want to adopt wiki-wide, I think it should be built into the interpretation of the <<categories>> tag. Perhaps you're just experimenting.
DKF: Mainly experimenting, though when there's a lot of categories it makes sense (category lines look really bad when they wrap).
LV I'm uncertain what AMG meant by "built into the interpretation", but I believe that the categories tag now has specialized behavior when generating its hyperlinks. It is my understanding that, for a while now, if one specifies a word - say Wiki - as an attribute for the categories tag, the rendering software first looks for a page called Category Wiki, then for a page called Wiki.
AMG: I meant that the server's implementation of <<categories>> can be changed to automatically strip the word "Category" from the generated HTML.
LV You might add that suggestion to the wikitcl ticket system and see what Jos thinks about it.
AMG: Not me. I actually prefer to have the word "Category" there. After having experimented with it a bit, I found that I don't much care for the new %|% feature, especially when it's applied to URLs. Then again, I need to take a look at a page with a wrapped category line, to see just how bad it really looks.
DKF: I only plan to do it to “my” pages.
gold test of revived links
