Isaac Jones

Highlights & Projects

• September, 2005: I attended ICFP ICFP and gave two talks.
• October, 2004: I now work for Galois Connections.
• March, 2004: One of my blog entries got a mention by Debian Weekly News, and Slashdot published my review on The Haskell School of Expression (and ACM TECHNews picked it up too.)
  
• February, 2004: I'm maintaining the Debian package for darcs which is an advanced revision control system.
• January, 2004: I am now officially a Debian Developer.
• October, 2003: The Cabal Project has a web page now. Please check out the proposal that I wrote. I'm leading this project and looking for Haskell developers who are interested in helping out!
• August, 2003: I went to London for a week and then Sweden for vacation with the beautiful and charming Anna. While I was there, I attended the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). Here are some pictures. You can also read about it on my blog.
• June, 2003: walters and I just relesaed a patch to apt which implements secure updates (we call it "apt-secure"). It was great working with Colin again! We also owe some pieces of this this to the authors of rapt who implemented something similar a while ago for their fork of apt.
• I'm a big fan of the Haskell programming language. Haskell is a general purpose, purely functional programming language. You can get the Hugs interpreter (very portable) here. To learn Haskell, you might first try Helium though I haven't used it myself. I learned first from the gentle introduction and then from The Haskell School of Expression. I have also seen and like The Craft of Functional Programming.
• I recently wrote some documentation for the Control.Monad.State module in ghc.
• Check out the Haskell Unsafe Debian Repository which Ian Lynagh maintains.
• I enjoy rock climbing (especially at Vertical Adventures), backpacking, the game of Go, writing, playing the viola and guitar, and of course hacking on free software.
• I maintain Hugs, darcs, xppaut, and haskell-mode for the Debian GNU/Linux system. Check out the status of my packages.
  
• I recently graduated from The Computer and Information Science Department at The Ohio State University
  
• Visit The Opensource Club web page.
  
• To see some talks I've given, read below, or visit the club's lecture archive (currently down).
  
• Here's a picture of my girlfriend, two other friends, my cat, my bike, and my computer. (Yes, that is the back seat from a van in my living room.)
  
• Look at some pictures of my trip to Sweden and London!
• Look at some pictures of my trip to the UK.

Non-Geek

• I enjoy rock climbing (especially at Vertical Adventures), and outdoors at Hocking Hills.
• I'm on the vestry of Saint Stephen's Episcopal Church which is a wonderful place here in Columbus, Ohio for liberal minded Christians who believe that community action should be a part of serving God.
• In the Summer of 2003, I went backpacking in Sweden, and attended a functional programming conference (ICFP).
• In the Summer of 2000, I had a backpacking adventure in Scotland where I hiked most of the West Highland Way. I'll be backpacking a bit in Sweden this summer.
• I enjoy the game of Go, writing (should I put some of my writing online?), playing the viola and guitar.
• The Columbus area has a lot of great stuff going on in the summer, including Picnic With The Pops where you can sit on the grass and listen to the symphony. CAPA has a summer movie series where you can watch older movies on the screen in the beautiful Ohio Theater.
• Please see the upcomming school of music events. Most are free and open to the public.

Work; Past & Present

• 2002-2004, Senior Programmer at Aetion Technologies, LLC
• In the summer of 2000 I did an internship with Cisco Systems in San Jose, CA. I worked as a developer on the Internetworking Operating System ( IOS)
• During the 2000-2001 school year, I worked as a full time developer for the Informational and Instructional Computing Facility (IICF) in the CIS department. We developed a new timesheet system whose source code will be available Real Soon Now.

Talks

• I often give talks on Free Software related topics for the Open Source Club
• A Tour of Haskell covering module design and pattern matching.
• Haskell Monads and Typeclasses - an introduction to some slightly more advanced techniques.
• Intro to Emacs, from a user's perspective
• An Introduction to Linux and Unix for Newbies in LaTeX, outline or slides
• The Standard Template Library
• Advanced Java Topics, GUI Programming (Swing) and Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
• Introduction to the Lisp Programming Language

Research

• From 2002-2004, I worked for Aetion Technologies which is associated with the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research at Ohio State. I developed algorithms for abductive reasoning.
• In winter and spring quarter 2000, I worked with Gerald Baumbartner on the brew compiler project. Brew is based on the Java programming language with a better object model.
• From the spring of 1998 to the fall of 1999, I studied under Dr. Mary Jean Harrold, doing research with the Software Engineering Research Group:
  • DUlCET - Definitions & Uses Covered on an Executed Test
  • A page about my Dynamic Pointer Analysis research(August, 1999)
  • A Presentation on Relevent Slicing(October, 1998)
• Please read about theAristotle research group And the prototype, Aristotle Analysis System
• My research in the summer of 1998 with the Reusable Software Research The Find Copies Project
• More talks I've given can be found at the Opensource Club's lecture archive.

Code Repositories

• darcs (which includes my Debian pacakges): http://www.syntaxpolice.org/darcs_repos/

Press and Writing

• March, 2004: Slashdot published my review of The Haskell School of Expression.
• March, 2004: ACM TECHNews also syndicated my review.
• March 2004: My article How to get involved in free software mentioned in Debian Weekly News
• November 2003: Several of my projects and Aetion's work mentioned in the Haskell Communities and Activities Report
• July 2003: Apt secure mentioned in Debian Weekly News

Misc

• I'm the founder and formerly the slave to the Opensource Club (to claim that I'm any kind of leader would be to claim that I know how to herd cats). The club's current slave is Nick Hurley
• Use Linux!
• Transcript (Current as of Winter 1999)
• (outdated) View my Resume in either Postscript, Adobe Acrobat, or html formats. Please use html as a last resort ;-)
  

Quote; Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game