Andrew Rutz's blog

Hello Blog-o-mundo

Hello public-blog-o-sphere ! My first name is Andrew, and my last name should be pronounced "roots", but Los Angelenos in the early 1960's were incapable of such lingual contortions, so my family name came out sounding like "ruts".

I went to UC Irvine for this degree, which qualified me to work in the Exercise/Pulmonary Physiology lab at the UC Irvine Medical Center. After hearing a PDP-8 minicompuer humming in my ears for 2.5 years, I transitioned to the world of computers and obtained this degree. I worked at Xerox Corporation in Southern California for several years, writing embedded software for their 120 page-per-minute laser printers.

Some type of "mid-life thing" happened, and I found myself at this school, riding my bicycle 6.5 nights a week to the computer lab, in mad search of "educational satisfacton" which came in the form of a Master's Degree in Computer Science. I had the extreme privilege to have Dr. Urs Hölzle as my research advisor.

Affordable Housing was the next priority, so I relocated to Austin, TX and worked in the AIX kernel group at IBM. I developed a solution so that dbx could identify pthread-level deadlocks in an arbitrary process. My solution would also compute whether there was a "deadlock" with any of a process's read-write locks (I operated on the identities of the set of lock owners. If the more recent set is a (set-theoretic) superset of the previous set, then the number of lock owners is either not changing or increasing. Either case could assist a developer in understanding their program's behavior).

I then moseyed on over (...well... it is Texas!) to Sun Microsystem, Inc.'s Austin site. I work on the Solaris operating system. Initially, I worked on improving boot time, and now I work on device drivers.

When my doctor clears my arteries for a new load of lipids, I go here for some real Texas vittles

Posted at 05:51PM Jul 26, 2005 by Andrew Rutz in :-)  |  Comments[2]