Neil Hoggarth's Web:
Interesting People Links

Romana Machado, a.k.a. "Cypherella"

"Software engineer, author, cryptoprivatist, professional model, hot-blooded capitalist ...". Creator of the Stego program for the Macintosh. Steganography is a technique that enables one to embed data in, and retrieve data from, graphics and audio files without causing any apparent change to the image or sound. This can be useful (in combination with a strong encryption system) for sending secret messages, particularly when you want to conceal the fact that you are sending encrypted traffic.

Patrick Combs

Patrick Combs has written a book on how to be a successful American college student and spends a lot of his time working the lecture tour circuit. This does not, to my mind, constitute interesting (sorry Patrick!). However, he has an incredible story to tell. He received a phony check for $95,093.35 as part of a junk mail advertisement, deposited it with his bank through an ATM as a joke, and was amazed to find that the money got credited to his account. It took the bank a month to notice what had gone wrong, by which time Patrick had drawn the money from his account in the form of a cashiers check and stuck it in a safty deposit box, in the same bank.

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, while working at at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He is now director of the W3 Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations with the mission to realize the full potential of the Web.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie, the creators of Unix.

When Bell Labs withdrew from the Multics project Ken Thompson started to develop the operating system which became Unix. Dennis Richie helped with Unix development and created the C programming language, in which all but the very earliest versions of the system was written. He is co-author (with Brian Kernighan) of the definitive book describing C and now works as head of the System Software Research department in the Computing Sciences Research Center of Bell Labs / Lucent Technologies

Eric Raymond

Eric Raymond maintains lot of open-source software, FAQs and web pages. He's the author of an influential and much referred to essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" - a comparison of traditional software development models with the model adopted by the Linux community. This essay is credited with helping to persuade Netscape to publically release their browser source code.

Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen is a former Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and until recently was the company's Web usability guru. His useit.com site features an interesting column on Web usability called Alertbox.

Neil Hoggarth, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford

Page last modified: Friday 06-Aug-2004