About Duncan
Sinclair
I am a based
in Glasgow, where I work
as a System Administrator at Strathclyde
University. This probably makes me a bit of a nerd, but a nerd
who appreciates culture, music, style, and people.
The nerd in
me is a fan of Unix-based systems, including Mac
OS X, OpenBSD and Solaris.
I particularily like Macintosh-based systems for their elegance,
beauty and simplicity. I dislike using windows-based systems, and
I could live without the boring, complex, and ugly PCs that go with
them. Many people believe I have a magic touch over computers. Who
knows? I think that a lot of computing is a bit of a
black art...
The artist in
me is having a hard time getting out (see illustration on my
home page). This might be due to me being
left-handed, but the artist being right-handed. But while I
cannot produce fine art,
I enjoy experiencing any truly artistic expression. In particular
I feel that art should have something to say, some meaning to get
across, and should challenge the viewer or listener in some way.
(Make sure and check out my poem!)
Perhaps for
this reason I have relatively modern
tastes in music. I tend not to listen to much pop-music, but
I do like a lot of classical work. My main thing though is dance
music - house, techno, trance, all those kinds of things. Sometimes
you need it to concentrate the mind, sometimes to just let go
My style should
speak for itself. I am a great believer in aesthetics.
If you can't be bothered creating something and making it look good
- don't bother showing it to me.
With people,
I like to do just the normal kinds of things - going out, having
a good time, maybe playing squash, having a drink or two, or maybe
going to the cinema. I have lots of friends spread perhaps too thinly
around the world, but there is always room
for more.
In a previous
life I gained
a Master's degree from The University
of Glasgow, based on my research in Functional
Programming. This involved investigating how HCI research could
be used to make creation of graphical user interfaces for functional
programs easier. I also have a Honours Bachelor's degree in Computing
Science from the same institution.
My interests
in Functional Programming are not as strong as they used to be,
but I have some controversial beliefs concerning what speculative
evaluation could do for threaded or parallel execution of functional
programs, what the best way to debug functional programs is and
some other heretical view points.
I have a number
of research papers available either at
Strathclyde University, or else
at Glasgow University.
I am now more
involved in Information Retrieval. I contributed to the STAMP
project which has recently come to a conclusion. My main contribution
was in the indexing strategies used for the document retrieval.
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