About John Apperson (The technical details) ..

For the last 15 years I have worked at several large aerospace companies doing circuit board design, programming, and systems administration.

Recently I have been converting CMstat Ingres tables to a MatrixOne object oriented database. I have also been working on automating the property values in a Concept schematic by loading them from values found in various databases. I'm also creating web pages to interface with Matrix through embeded MQL.

Before converting our Ingres tables to MatrixOne I had been involved in moving large parts list databases from various sources to an Ingres relational database using (SQL) embedded 'C'. I have also created some cgi programs to provide a user friendly interface to that database.

One thing in my recent past that I am proud of is designing several circuit boards for NASA. Several of those boards are on their way to mars via the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft. Others will be launched with the Cassini spacecraft.

Previous to consulting for NASA I worked on some automated systems administration tools for Sun workstations. I don't like doing repetitive work (isn't that why computers were invented?). So I created some file management programs that let users coordinate there own work flow. I also created programs to automate backups for those systems and moved old archive information to an HP jukebox. Since I don't believe in being the center of the universe I created an http server to let users in our department search and retrieve old archive information found on the jukebox. Basically I automated my systems administration job so I could work on other things I was more interested in, like programming and circuit board design (crisis free vacations and consulting were nice too!).

A little about my circuit board experience. The reason I was sent to NASA to design circuit boards is that I had been lucky enough to work with a pioneering group of engineers who were some of the first to design surface mounted boards for high reliability aircraft and space applications. Most of the surface mount team left the company and make lots of money. I stayed behind and kept updating the land pattern formulas that I had developed earlier. We found out a lot about surface mount parts from some our early mistakes (Error is a great teacher if you can afford it!) Well after we adjusted the formulas our company became very successful at high reliability surface mount design. I wrote several programs based on those formulas that let us create error free CAD designs. We created circuit boards that fly in many military aircraft including the F16. When NASA wanted to start using surface mount designs in their spacecraft they came to us for advice.

So at home in my spare time I created the CadStd program. It was written in Borlands Delphi. I began programming in Turbo Pascal way back when version 1.0 came out for CPM!!! At work I program in C writing X windows applications. I used to think X windows was fairly complicated (after all it was written by a group of MIT students) until I tried to write windows 3.1 applications (there is only about 5 times as many windows interface commands as there are in most programming languages!). Borland came to the rescue and really made it easy to write code for the windows 95 market.