David A. Lyons
(dlyons@lyons42.com)
MrTangent
10-Jul-2018: The web pages are coming from inside the house! Static IP + Mac mini + UPS + minimal apache2 skillz =
direct control over our sites. Long live vi index.html.
3-Dec-2006: I have a blog. See pictures of my power tools there.
19-Mar-2005: I hope the new canopy in the back yard, shading my hammock,
proves more durable than the last one.
7-Nov-2004: Shipped Measure 1.0 for Mac OS X.
25-Apr-2004: I have a canopy in the back yard, shading my hammock.
(October update: It only lasted 6 months exposed to the weather.)
18-Feb-2003: I have an easy-to-update Wiki now, including various pages
such as Stories About Dave.
29-Jan-2003: Building a Craft Table.
23-Mar-2002: Corrugated bracing; Garage shelves detail.
2-Feb-2002: Added amazon.com wish lists & more friends.
16-Aug-2001: &LYONS(DAVE) and chemist.
23-Jul-2001: Notes from old BayCHI meetings & AI seminars.
28-Apr-2001: I own 3 cubic yards of gravel.
|
![[picture of Dave Lyons, Sarah Lyons, Tom]](Pictures/WeddingPic.jpg)
|
Last revised 8-Jul-2018
|
|
Personal Info
I married Sarah Lyons on May 22, 1999, and we moved into a
house in San Jose the first week of July
the same year.
Since 1989 I've worked for Apple Computer, Inc.
From 1989 to 1999 I lived in Cupertino, California.
Before that, I lived in
North Liberty, Iowa,
went to Penn Elementary, Northwest Junior High, and West High, all in the
Iowa City Community School District (ICCSD),
and attended the University of Iowa in
Iowa City. I graduated in
December 1988 from the computer science department.
You can read a description of my personality type.
Current Projects
At home
At work
- Working on Finder for Mac OS X.
Dave: The Early Years (1967 to 1989)
(Links in this section open into new windows.)
- From an early age, I liked to operate machinery.
- Kicking a ball at age 3 in Webster Groves (near St. Louis).
- That's me with the stuffed Santa. (My brother, Tim, is the one trying to play harmonica on the comb.)
- I built a Lego crane. Don't know what year this was.
- You can see North Liberty from the air. Dad took this picture from a small plane we were riding in, out of Greencastle Airport. You can see the house (just right of center, surrounded by many trees).
- I think it was 5th grade when I made a calculator costume for Halloween.
- My very short 6th grade story Shoelaces, won me the right to spend my Saturday morning in the public library, along with the several other student winners, autographing copies of our stories for our eager public.
- For a long time I had a chemistry lab in the basement
(and I only injured myself once).
- In 8th grade, I was the centerfold of the ICCSD Newsletter: An Information Publication for Residents of Iowa City Community School District (Volume 3, Number 2; December 1980).
- I drew this picture of my parents' house in junior high art class...
- ...and here's what it really looks like (but from a different angle).
- In the same art class, I did this charcoal drawing of a Boy Scout creeping through the woods (it was modeled after a photograph).
- Brother Tim wrote A Day in the Life of Dave when I was in a junior in high school. He must have been in 9th grade at the time.
- "Choose a realistic event and describe it romantically, or the other way around." This was the assignment when I wrote The Experiment (one page).
- From about 1986 to 1989 I had a goatee.
I did eventually get over this, until I met Sarah in 1998.
- Still during the goatee era, I was occasionally observed wielding an axe.
- Here's what I looked like in Junior High and High School.
- From 10th grade through college, I had a part-time job at CONDUIT Educational Software. When I left, they gave
me this really cool T-shirt.
1989 to present (California):
Family Pictures:
Sarah pictures & stuff:
You can see what
Sarah is selling on eBay.
She also has a wish list on Amazon.com.
Wedding pictures
The year before the wedding, Sarah and I stayed at a bed and breakfast called
The Country Rose Inn.
Other assorted pictures:
Home automation
Weird stuff I designed and built:
- PatchBoy, homebrew audio/video matrix switcher.
- I rigged up a computer to display Caller ID on my Beta-Brite
message board over my TV to announce incoming calls.
- I started a Closed Caption decoder card for Apple IIgs (project stalled; "stone knives and bearskins" version works on breadboard)
Interesting stuff I bought:
- (March 2002) ActiveWire-USB from AcitveWire, Inc. Interface USB to anything (16 bits of digital I/O).
So far I have no specific plans for it, and have only proven that I can blink colored LEDs. Maybe I'll try to talk to the SAA5252 closed-caption
chip that I was playing with a few years ago.
- UCIX (UHF, Computer, Infrared, X-10; bought in 1995(?), no longer available) from
Home Tech Solutions
- Caller ID to Serial kit from ITU Technologies (formerly itutech.com...they seem to be
out of business these days). I use mine
to display caller ID on a message board.
- A Macintosh XClaim TV tuner box from ATI lets me get closed captions into Mac-readable form.
I wrote some software to process the text further, in real time, to provide reasonable capitalization
and better line breaks. I wish ATI would provide some documentation on how to get the rest of the
data that's embedded in the video signal (Extended Data Service), but I have struck out.
I bought a house in June, 1999 and have added phone jacks and
Cat 5 network jacks both upstairs and downstairs.
Home Tech's web pages and staff were very helpful. I had
to crawl under the house as well as in the attic, open up drywall, and buy a 16"-long drill bit.
I didn't do a detailed write-up, but Andy McFadden wrote about his wiring project.
Humor
Links to humor
My relatives
Some friends' pages
Professors & Instructors
Some Random Things Dave Likes
Macintosh software I've worked on
- Macintosh System 7.5 through 7.5.3
- MacsBug 6.5
and later (with Jim Murphy)
- Internet control panel 1.0.2 (part of Mac OS 9.1)
- Finder 8.0, Finder 8.1, Finder 8.5, Finder 9.0, Finder 9.1, and Finder 9.1.1 (for CD burning), Finder 9.2.
- Finder for Mac OS X 10.0 through Finder 10.5, including Time Machine in 10.5.
Apple II software I wrote
- I was a key engineer on Apple IIgs System Software 6.0 and 6.0.1 (toolbox & Finder)
- Nifty List (Apple IIgs programmer's utility)
- Davex (8-bit command shell) (revised 12/99 to be Y2K happy...email me if you care)
- Visit Applesoft CDA
- Dim
- Memory Bar
- DIcEd
Nifty List, Davex, and DIcEd used to be Shareware. They are now freeware, and someday
I'll package these up and donate them to the Lost Classics project. (If you care, remind me.)
February and March 2002: I helped Rich Dreher with the firmware & software for his
CFFA board: Compact Flash for Apple II.
— The firmware presents the storage to the Apple II as one or more block devices, using the ProDOS
and SmartPort conventions.
2006: I wrote most of the firmware for Rich Dreher's
CFFA1
board for the Apple 1 and replicas. — This was a different sort of project. Instead of presenting
the storage to a host operating system as a block device, it's a menu system (and small API) that implements
simple file operations on ProDOS-formatted volumes. It supports a single level of subdirectories and reads/writes
entire files at a time.
A great Apple II resource is A2Central.
Other software I wrote
- 2004-present: Measure for Mac OS X.
A unit-savvy calculator combined with a 3,000-item database of real-world numbers.
- 1986: DimCalc: calculate with physical units attached.
Interesting stuff on the Web
Rumors & Legends
Electronics
Government Info
Local Stuff (San Jose, CA & nearby)
Artificial Intelligence and Language Processing
Human-Computer Interaction
Assorted
Risks to the Public from Computers and Computer-Related Systems
Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.
[ email Dave ]
