Dan Rice's Weblog

Being Dan Rice

Until some time in my 20's, as far as I knew I was the only Dan Rice in the world. Then I discovered my famous namesake: one Daniel McLaren, born Jan. 25, 1823, known to the world as clown and circus-master Dan Rice. I began to collect Dan Rice memorabilia; today I own several biographies, including the privately-printed "Life of Dan Rice" from 1901. I also have a poster for "Dan Rice's 3-Ring Circus" and a few other small items.

In 2001, a biography appeared under the title Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You Never Heard Of. The title is no exaggeration. In his day, Rice competed with P.T. Barnum, and became the first person to earn the then unheard-of sum of $1000 per week. He was a friend to several Presidents and a key insipiration for four young boys who later came to be known as the Ringling Brothers. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this fascinating character in the future.

Another Dan Rice, whom I know little about, is (was?) an illustrator associated with something called The Jargon Society. I would be interested in information about him.

The work of yet another Dan Rice can be found here. He appears to be an expert on dog and cat breeds. Definitely not my métier.

One the web, I've found an Economic Officer currently based in Tikrit, Iraq, a Texas attorney, a Bainbridge Island realtor, a fellow who owns www.danrice.com, and another fellow who owns both www.danrice.org and www.danrice.net. And, I'm also a market leader in frozen rice and pasta!

Hello World!
Well, it's about time I started a blog! I'm a Senior Staff Engineer here at Sun Microsystems. I've been working at Sun since 1994 (1993 if you count part-time work while I was still a student). I have a Master's in Computer Science from "U.C. Berkeley":http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu and a B.A. in Math and Computer Science from "Swarthmore College":http://cs.swarthmore.edu . My interests at work are mainly focused around mobile 2D and 3D graphics. For the last year or so, I've been the specification editor for "OpenVG":http://www.khronos.org/openvg , which is a new API for 2D vector graphics, primarily intended for mobile devices. I'm also the spec lead for "JSR 239":http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=239 , which provides Java language bindings for the OpenGL ES 3D graphics API. I occasionally get involved in implementation projects within Sun; last year I wrote a 2D renderer in Java (known as "Pisces") which is being used in a couple of graphics projects. I'll be blogging about events and trends in mobile graphics, and whatever else catches my eye. Just for fun, I'll be posting Sudoku number puzzles with some frequency. I'll also discuss how the puzzles were generated and give some tips on solving them.