Jonathan Coxhead

Just for amusement value, where I have referred to something I don’t know about a web page for, I have linked it direct to a Google search for that thing: for example in the Round section, there is a reference to the Newnham Folk Dancers. It lets you find any other references on the web that might interest you, even though they ceased to exist c1930. Other references are more sensible!


Work

I am employed on a contractual basis to do multi-media software development, specialising in multi-threaded real-time streaming media. My main client is NXP Semiconductors. My full résumé is available on this site (also as PDF).


Berkeley Morris

Berkeley Morris is the San Francisco Bay Area’s oldest and finest Cotswold Morris team. I joined in March 1998 and haven’t looked back.


Calling

I have called at ceilidhs (or barn dances) with 3 different bands in England since 1995: the Stomp Happy Tribe, the Round Band and Bugger the Haddock (a k a Batter the Haddock in their more refined moments—which are few and far between).

Currently in the US, I participate in the BACDS English Ceilidh series.


Family

This is my family tree, represented in an idiosyncratic, but highly compact, format. It only contains the recent members, because it has not (so far) had the benefit of any actual research. I plan to add lots of pictures to it in January 2002. You can find the Greek pantheon there too, just for fun.


Games

I used to play games a lot more than I do now. My favourite board game is Dragon Pass, by Robert Corbett and Greg Stafford of Chaosium, published by Avalon Hill, though I haven’t played it for quite a while.

I also used to play in a weekly rôle-playing game session with Michael Abbott, John & Diana Cox, Jackie Duckhawk, Tim Duckworth, Rhodri James and Stuart Wray. Until recently this was Mike’s Champions scenario, which has its very own web page, but that has recently reached a natural break.

Here is An Adults’ A B C.


Gog Magog Molly

Gog Magog Molly is Cambridge University’s only display dancing troupe. We first danced to celebrate Cyril Papworth’s 80th birthday, and our dances are derived from local traditions.


Granta Morris

Granta Morris was Cambridge’s mixed Cotswold Morris side. We practised on Mondays in the Old School, St Barnabas Church, Mill Road, Cambridge.


The Inter-Varsity Folk Dance Festival

IVFDF is an annual festival held at a different university each year. I was the publicity officer for IVFDF ’97, held in Cambridge.


Pan’s Menagerie

OMG! Molly dancing in San Francisco!

Err ... what’s molly dancing?

Say no more!


The Round

The Round is the Cambridge University English Country Dancing Society. Historically, it is descended from the local branch of the English Folk Dance and Song Society and the Newnham Folk Dancers, so it is a true “town/gown” mix. I was on the committee.


Science fiction

I read far too many books, of various different sorts. As well as writers who are no longer working (e g J R R Tolkien), or who publish only infrequently (e g Alan Garner), or who have produced some books I like amidst a larger corpus (e g Robert Holdstock), there are 5 authors currently writing whose books I dash out and buy as soon as I hear about them (if not before).

Steven Brust
who has a web page of his own, with his own views on his books, which makes interesting reading.
Guy Gavriel Kay
author of The Fionavar Tapestry (which really ought to have been the Fiónnabhair Tapestry, or something), Tigana, A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of al-Rassan.
Tim Powers
whose excellent first novel The Anubis Gates seemed for a while like the pinnacle of his career, but whose recent books (in particular The Stress of her Regard and Last Call) have quelled any such doubts.
Neil Stephenson
the ultimate hacker’s author—read Snow Crash to find out what’s going to happen in the next 10 years, and The Diamond Age for the next 50. He also co-writes as Stephen Bury (Interface, The Cobweb).
Gene Wolfe
uniquely among this list, not an action/adventure writer, though his books are not short on plot or incident; but primarily someone who makes the process of reading itself a sheer pleasure.

It’s odd that these are all Americans (with the exception of Guy Gavriel Kay, a Canadian). Maybe that’s because American writers are under more commercial pressure to produce books more frequently.


Software

OSLib

Although a professional software engineer, I haven’t released much software into the public domain. My main effort in this area is OSLib, which is a set of functions and C headers to provide complete coverage of the RISC O S application programmer’s interface in C (names for all functions, data structures and reason codes), and is the only library to do so. OSLib is now maintained by Tony van der Hoff.

DefMod

DefMod is the tool used to make OSLib from “module definition files”. It’s released as part of OSLib.

The C Language

Most of my professional work has been written in C, so it’s only natural that I take an interest in its development. The C 9X Draft International Standard is now available for public review, and so of course I had to produce my comments. Thoughts about David and Goliath spring to mind, but I enjoyed expressing my thoughts anyway ...

POP3 via Telnet

A small proglet of use only to Origin colleagues with Demon accounts that allows you to specify localhost (i e, your own machine) port 4321 as a POP3 server. It copies POP3 request on that port to the Demon POP3 server, using a telnet proxy on gatekeeper.origin-it.com. This lets you run e-mail software (Pegasus, Eudora, etc) to read your e-mail.

You need a C compiler and library to compile it. I used gcc from the Free Software Foundation and Cygwin32 from Cygnus Solutions on a Windows 95 machine.

Unicode

My name.


Web publishing

I have written a Short H T M L Primer which contains the fruits of my experience with H T M L, as well as some pet peeves.

My main idiosyncracy was using grave (`) and acute (´) accents for quotation marks. These seem more likely to occur in matched pairs than the TEX solution of grave accents and apostrophes, and look nicer than straight single quote marks ('). Well, I think so. But in these days of Unicode, you can use real quotation marks ‘ ’ “ ”.

With H T M L 4·0, the “document character set” for all H T M L pages becomes Unicode, and that will solve all these problems (at the cost of lots of new ones! :-) *).


Brief Curriculum Vitæ

Tiffin School;
Peterhouse, Cambridge;
University of Cambridge Computing Service;
FEGS Ltd;
Acorn Computers Ltd;
Origin (Cambridge; Santa Clara, CA);
Philips Semiconductors (TriMedia Business Line, Software Services Group, TriMedia Centre of Excellence—Sunnyvale, CA; Systems Innovation and Integration Group—San José, CA);
Trading as a sole proprietor.


*If you have an H T M L 4·0 browser and a Unicode font, here’s another way to get a smiley face: ☺