User:Nick Johnson

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

Holy crap I think I'm addicted to Citizendium. My Contributions

Background

Nick Johnson has a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering and Applied Mathematics from the University of Virginia. He works as an embedded systems developer in industrial sensing and controls. Outside of work, he is a computer, electronics and mechanics hobbyist.

Interests

In no particular order, Nick is interested in:

• Bikes and Cycling -- city rides, country rides, bike maintenance and repair, bike hacks.
• Organic Gardening -- mmmmm tomatos.
• Traveling -- trying to get to Africa for the first time this spring/summer.
• Computer programming -- compilers for novel languaes or architectures, embedded software development, open source software movement.
• Electronics/Mechanics -- while a computer program is cool, designing a physical device that does something will impress even non-geeks.

As well as whatever Nick forgot to mention here. In general, if you show a passion for something, Nick can relate.

Trivia

• Nick is a vegetarian.
• Nick is a linux geek who has been coerced into using some lesser operating system at work. Oh yes, he is a zealot.
• Nick likes to spend vacations sleeping on the streets of foreign countries.
• Nick has never paid for a haircut, and never will.
• Because Nick grew up in central Virginia, USA, Nick hates cold weather. His ideal climate is about 95F and 400% humidity.

Some Quotes

When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a

little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have.
- Steve Jobs, Wired (March, 1996)

If you need a machine and don't buy it, then you will ultimately find you have paid for it but don't have it
- Henry Ford.

My Focus on Citizendium

I'm mostly interested in writing a lot in the Computers workgroup, focusing on compilers. However, compilers are IMHO the heart of computer science, so I'm gonna touch a little bit of everything from math to theoretical cs to data structures in the process.

My articles that I'm proud of:

• register allocation by graph coloring
• stack frame
• pointer

And that I've contributed to, and am proud of:

• buffer overflow attack
• Unix directory structure

Articles that I intend to fix, or die trying:

• Flat File String (text) based databases
• Java platform

Looking for a place to put this stuff

I started writing an article about pointers, and ended up babbling about hackish things you can do with pointers in C... emulating object oriented programming, and what not.

Can't decide where to put this stuff, or if it may qualify as unpublished/independant research. Thoughs?