Strange Quarks

Roy Austen (1953-2017), a former colleague, died a few days ago on March 5.

A friend recently told me that Roy had been diagnosed with cancer in January, although he had actually been unwell for months before then.

Not long after the diagnosis, Roy set up a GoFundMe page for medical expenses and for the ongoing care of his son, in preparation for the inevitable.

I really did mean to get in contact, but I got busy and Roy died before I did. At least there was still the fund…

Roy’s main line of work and his passion was photography, but that’s not how we got to know one another.

I bought my first Windows (3.1) PC from his family business, KM Computers.

Then, awhile later, he offered me a job and became my boss…

By the end of 1995 I was in search of my next job after 5 years at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) in Launceston as a computer systems officer then a junior academic in the Department of Applied Computing. A lot of university contracts weren’t being renewed around that time.

Luckily for me, Roy had recently started Vision Internet, one of a small but growing number of competing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Tasmania. It was a small business arising from KM Computers at a time when Internet access was still dial-up, ISDN/ISDL was the fastest you could hope for (128 Kbps), but most people just had a dial-up modem, giving up to around 56 Kbps, less in practice. Vision Internet started in Launceston but quickly added points of presence in other parts of the state, including an Internet Cafe.

In 1995 while still at UTAS, I had helped Roy out by writing a basic customer time accounting program in C that read utmp/wtmp logs and generated simple output when someone else had difficulty doing so.

By 1996, Roy needed a programmer and system administrator and I needed a job. Before accepting Roy’s job offer, I was up front with him that I would probably want to do something different after about 18 months. That happened with Karen and I moving to Adelaide in 1997 where I spent 10 years with Motorola. That move was more difficult than I expected, and at least as hard as Karen knew it would be. In the end, it was a good move.

Ironically, UTAS asked me to come back for some occasional part-time tutoring soon after I started working for Roy, which may have been less economical than if they’d just renewed my contract!

Vision Internet was good while it lasted. To be honest, for the first few months, I couldn’t believe I was being paid to write C  (and Perl) code, something I enjoyed doing anyway. 🙂

The compact machine room doubled as my office for the first year or so before we moved down the road to a more spacious building; not as cushy as my office at UTAS. I actually didn’t mind the machine room too much. A terminal with function key accessible “virtual consoles”, the vi editor, command-line shell, a C compiler, and a Perl interpreter kept me pretty happy. Roy was fine with me working from home occasionally as time went by too. He expected me to keep things rolling and solve problems as quickly as possible, but he was good to me and we got along pretty well.

There were only about half a dozen people working at Vision Internet, fewer early on. Everyone pitched in. Roy and I didn’t always see eye to eye though. For example, at one point we disagreed about who should have super-user privileges; more than I would have liked for a brief time. 🙂

I experienced a number of things during my time with Roy at Vision Internet and learned lessons from some:

• Early mobile phones were fairly bulky. 🙂 Roy gave me my first mobile before I started in the job. Of course, this meant he could contact me whenever. He didn’t abuse that though. A former UTAS colleague took one look at the phone hanging off my belt and declared amusingly: “wanker phone”. 🙂 Even worse when a larger battery was added! Still, I appreciated Roy giving me my first mobile.

• You can’t always spend time doing what you want in a job, even one you mostly like, unless you’re very lucky. I guess I already knew that from being a nurse in the 80s. I had no real interest in sysadmin tasks like applying security patches to BSD Unix kernels, maintaining backups, chasing hackers, worrying about what dodgy things people might be doing with our systems or customer sales, credit card transactions, help desk (shades of The IT Crowd: “is your modem plugged in?”). I mostly wanted to design, code, and test software. Still do. That’s largely why I told Roy I thought I’d want to move on after about 18 months. Having said that, a fair amount of my time was spent writing software in the form of a suite of customer time usage programs, each prefixed with tu, written in C and Perl. We also eventually sold tu to another local ISP.

• The practical difference between code that uses a search-based processing algorithm over a linear data structure that runs in polynomial vs logarithmic time – O(n^2) vs O(n log n). This matters a lot as the number of customer records (n) increases when your task is to write a program that processes customer time usage once per day and obviously before the next day starts. To simplify: given a processing time of a second per customer, n≈300 can mean the difference between a run that takes a day instead of an hour. You can make incremental changes to the processing time per customer (t), but eventually you’ll hit a point where n is too large, e.g. when n=1000 and t is 0.1 seconds. Anyway, I don’t recall what our n and t were, but we hit such a limit with a tu program. When I realised what was going on and fixed it, Roy was delighted and relieved. I was pretty happy too and thanked my computer science education, in particular, the discipline of computational complexity.

Before I left to go work at Motorola, I made sure Roy wasn’t going to be left without someone in my role. This gave one of my former UTAS students (Craig Madden) the opportunity he needed to break into the industry; it turned out well for Roy and Vision too.

At the height of Vision Internet, I remember occasional staff gatherings at Roy’s. He was a good host and I think he mostly enjoyed that period, despite the worry that must’ve accompanied running a business. He was generally optimistic and trusted those he employed. He had his moments, like the rest of us, when he was unhappy or angry, but mostly, he was a good guy to be around.

If I could do so, I’d tell him this:

Roy, I’m really sorry you’re gone and that I didn’t make the time to get in contact. In recent years, I should have told you how much I appreciated the opportunity you gave me a long time ago. Upon reflection, after time spent together at Vision and elsewhere, I think we would have used the word “friend” (now distorted by social media) to describe our relationship, not just “colleague”, even if we didn’t say so. I should have told you that too.

This entry was posted on March 11, 2017 at 5:03 am and is filed under Life Musings, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.