My coworker a top notch developer, and also a fellow blogger (Through the Interface) Kean Walmsley just figured out that the founder of Autodesk lives not too far from the Autodesk office in Switzerland. Kean lives in Switzerland. So he had a visit and interview with John Walker, which for anyone is a treat and experience of a lifetime.
I got to do the same last year in honor of the 25th Anniversary of Autodesk and AutoCAD and still need to release some of the discussions as I recorded it on video and it was planned to be shown at AU and on the web but plans fell through. John is a wealth of knowledge and a really nice person.
- Check out Kean’s detailed series of interviews with Autodesk founder John Walker. Part 1 is posted now and in true Kean style is very detailed and a great writer.
An interview with John Walker – Part 1
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| John Walker and me in the same location of the ominous warning “Danger de mort”. |
I would love to hear how John’s recent solar ellipse trip to the North Pole went and also his take on the recent CERN experiments in Switzerland and some of the paranoid concerns out on the web that a black hole would be generated and destroy all of us. Note CERN ran a test the other day and all was fine and we are all still here and not stuck in a manmade black hole or time vortex. 🙂
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Update 15 September 2008: John Walker emailed me directly on the two questions I had posted in this post. He had a great time on the voyage to the North Pole to see the solar eclipse and has a web page about it. http://www.fourmilab.ch/images/eclipse_2008/ John also survived the “doomsday device” as some incorrectly portrayed the CERN collider. John lives not too far from CERN and answered with humor as usual “Still here. Uh-oh–SHPLORK!!!” |
"Kean, please email me photos so I can place them in the Autodesk History Flickr library. On a related Autodesk History note I received a box yesterday full of old 80’s Autodesk memorabilia including a ton of photo slides. I can’t wait to go through it perhaps this weekend.
Cheers,
Shaan
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Please post a reminder when Kean posts the additional segments. I really enjoyed it.
Miles,
Thank you. I too am excited by hearing John Walker’s comments and even received an email from John this weekend about my post and will update my post with his comments. I will definitely post when Kean posts more parts of his discussion with John Walker as well I have a ton of more Autodesk and AutoCAD history memorabilia to go through and post publicly including a video with John Walker and me last year and also photos from the old days.
Make sure to watch Kean’s blog as well in a RSS feed reader.
Thank you for reading this blog Between the Lines.
Cheers,
Shaan
John,
I forwarded your message to John Walker.
Best Regards,
Shaan Hurley
PING:
TITLE: The Final Part 4 Interview with John Walker Founder of Autodesk
BLOG NAME: Between the Lines
The final part is now posted. Part 4 deals with a discussion about past and future business opportunities in John’s opinion and in raw no sugar added form.
PING:
TITLE: Part Two Deux of John Walker Interview by Kean
BLOG NAME: Between the Lines
Kean Through the Interface posted part 2 of his 4 part series of an interview of Autodesk founder John Walker hits on the AutoCAD software architecture, APIs, UNIX, LISP, and more.
Hi, If anyone knows how, please send this to John Walker. It is a time fractal based in part on his perigee-apogee calculator.
The complete paper is at: http://www.johnduke.com/Duke2009TidalOrbital.pdf.
Thanks
John Duke
138 Congdon Street
Providence, RI 02906
401-277-9880
Tidal-orbital pan-timescale mechanism of global cooling
Abstract:
A 586 year tidal cycle in the frequency of five month seasons of reduced perigee-sysygy intervals paces the Little Ice Age, the mega-drought of 1,150 CE, and detrital carbonate excursions near 600 CE and 600 BCE. The cycle is caused by perturbation in the length of the synodic month, so its maxima precess with aphelion and scale with eccentricity. In the millennial band it has 1,237, 1,682 and 1,823 year commensurabilities with perigee. Maxima in 1997 and 2000 coincide with abrupt equatorial thermocline depression. Hypothesis: (1) Internal tide resonance in the Pacific equatorial wave-guide triggers the precursor equatorial wave to an equatorially symmetric La Niña (ESLN) mode; (2) ESLN shifts deep Hadley cell convection over the equatorial Pacific cold tongue, thereby reducing the supply of water vapor to the tropical atmosphere; (3) Equatorial primary production increases during ESLN because iron-rich equatorial undercurrent water surfaces; (4) Equatorial tidal forcing is strongest when aphelion passes the vernal equinox and at low obliquity (being more equinoctial all year); (5) A complimentary precessional oscillation in the cross-equator temperature gradient also shifts the inter-tropical convergence zone south at March aphelion.