Donald Mc Lean

I work for the Space Telescope Science Institute [http://www.stsci.edu] on the Johns Hopkins campus in Baltimore, Maryland. Our public Hubble picture page is at http://www.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html

I am currently working on the AstronomersProposalTool - specifically the ExposureTimeCalculator.

I developed an interest in computers around 1971 from watching Star Trek reruns on television. Yes, I am a nerd (and darn proud of it). My first exposure to programming was basic and assembly on my parents Apple II, but couldn't program my way out of a wet paper bag until I learned a structured language (Pascal) in 1984. I have been programming in C++ since October, 1994. I have been using Java since 1996.

I am strictly an applications programmer. I like to write programs that people find useful.

I have a strange fascination with distributed systems, persistance mechanisms and such. I've been following ComponentManagedPersistence and ContainerManagedPersistence with considerable interest and I have started working on PackagedPersistence. As part of my work on this subject, I've been exploring the problem with objects that are created in an unrecoverable invalid state, what I'm calling NothingHalfBaked. I have also added a page about updating complicated object structures WhenOneLeafDiesBuyaWholeTree.

I am have used TimeSynchronousProcessing in more than one application.

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