John Edweird Miller

john @ timehaven • us

VOCATION

To create meaningful educational apps, and in general, to help make the world a more sensible place.

CAREER

• I've taught and worked at two private colleges, at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, for the Portland City Engineer, and for Metro, a local area government.
• I've managed services, servers, and networks for college and a regional government - including web, email, firewall, and file servers.
• I've taught over a thousand college students, over a thousand classroom hours, while holding liberal office hours.
• I've been a computer programmer, where I wondered many times why more efforts aren't shared among like institutions.
• I've volunteered in my neighborhood, my community, my city, and my region.
• I grew up in my family's grocery store, where I learned how good customer relations and careful management are essential to a business.

CURRENT WORK

Time Haven Media, November 2010 to present: independent iOS Application Developer. So far, I'm the author of five immersive, educational, and entertaining apps.

• Geom-e-Tree — iPhone/iPad
• Geom-e-Twee — iPhone/iPad, for kids!
• PolygonFlux — iPad only
• PolygonTrix — Game-ified Flux
• PolygonJazz — Jazz makes cool music!

Unfortunately, my volunteer work (and political, climate, covid anxiety) seems to expanded to take all available time. This is a corollary to Parkinson's Law!

So, I am taking a Sabbatical from volunteer work during 2024! [LINK].

TEACHING

Lewis & Clark College, Instructor of Computer Science (1972 to 1982):

• Taught all the Computer Science classes (in Math Department) for ~10 years.
• Designed and taught 42 classes and supervised 24 independent studies.
• Authored Programming into BASIC featuring "The B-Machine", under contract with Benjamin/Cummings (Addison Wesley) publisher.
• Installed BSD 4.1 UNIX on VAX 11/780 as an instructor.
• Took the 1975-76 academic year off as an adventure.

ADVENTURE

Timberline Lodge, May 1975 to February 1976: Indoor Maintenance Man: Carpenter, electrician, plumber, domestic water, sewage plant, fire crew.

City of Portland, March 1976 to July 1976: Programmer. Maintained SAM - a waste water run-off computer model for city engineer.

Cycle Oregon, Seven years! Site Team Member (volunteer) for Kickoff, Classic Weeklong Rides, Weekend Rides, Joy Rides, Gravel. Interrupted by pandemic. Takes a lot of mental and physical energy — Highly recommended!

EDUCATION

Washington State University, 1970 to 1972: BS, Information Science. Senior Thesis: An Autonomous Sequential Network for the Solution of Langford's Problem. (What is Langford's Problem!?)

Gonzaga University, 1967 to 1970: Math major. Taught FORTRAN to high school students four of those semesters. Teaching & research assistant. One year as full-time faculty liaison under Academic Vice President.

West Valley High School, Spokane, Washington, 1964 to 1967: Mathematics, concert band, top science student (really).

AN AWARD

EDUCOM, National Center for Research to Improve Postsecondary Teaching and Learning: Best Curriculum Innovation in Writing, for Electronic Dialectical Notebook, November 1988.

The EDN was a network-based Macintosh application that supported collaborative (dialectic) writing in the classroom. EDN provided for the scripting of exercises developed by the leader. Writers were paired and notebooks were exchanged from time to time over the network under control of the script running on the teacher's (lab) computer. At the end of the exercise, notebooks were collected on the Teacher's computer, but I don't think students had a way of leaving with a copy of their exchange.

PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS

• Electronic Dialectical Notebook, Macintosh application, Intellimation, 1992, Co-authored.
• Managing an Ever-Changing User Base, USENIX LISA Conference, Nov. 1993.
• Use of Open Source Software at Metro, INNOTECH, 2006
• What Shape is a Tree?, Gathering for Gardner Conference, G4G10, March 2012.
• The Immersive Bridge between Math and Art, BRIDGES Math-Art Conference, July, 2012.
• Geom-e-Tree, iPhone/iPad App, 2011.
• Geom-e-Twee, iPhone/iPad App, 2011.
• PolygonFlux, iPad App, 2012.
• PolygonTrix, iPad App, November, 2012.
• PolygonJazz, iPad App, January, 2014.
• On Langford's Problem, for G4G11, March 2014.
• The Music of the Polygons, for G4G11, March 2014.

CONFERENCES

I attended many SAGE and USENIX conferences in the late 70's. I've attended OSCON (5x), GOSCON (2x), OpenGovWest, and Open Source Bridge. I attended all but one G4G10-G4G14 (Atlanta) and Bridges 2012 (Baltimore).

COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

Projects: Finite state machines, many simulations, plotting routines, text formatting. Topics taught: computer architecture, data structures, algorithms, computer graphics, numerical methods, operations research. Languages: FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, C languages, Perl, software tools.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Apple Xcode 4, 5 and 6 development system, Objective-C. ePUB format.

Open Office software - spreadsheet, draw, write, presentation. Apple Keynote.

Mac OS X, RedHat Linux, Fedora Core, and a slew of Unixes. Domain Name Service, TCP/IP services, Internet security, cgi-bin scripts, HTML, wiki's. The usual stuff.

I am familiar with Microsoft Active Directory-related utilities, and the basics of the Exchange Management shell and console, but don't know how to manage Exchange or Server. LOL.

COMMUNITY SERVICE

• Voluntarily led a working group that modified and revitalized Trimet Route #39, 2005-6.
  Awarded Volunteer of Year in 2005 & 2016 by Collins View Neighborhood Association.
• Past member, Regional Urban Growth Goals & Objectives Policy Advisory Committee (Metro)
• Past chair and secretary, Multnomah County Citizen Involvement Committee.
  Organized first ever regional (tri-county) CIC conference.
• Past president and secretary, Southwest Neighborhood District Coalition Board (SWNI).
• Past chair (~8 years) for Collins View Neighborhood Association (CVNA).
• Member, Neighborhood Traffic Management advisory committee, Boone's Ferry Road project (successful!), ~1990-91.
• Member, Technical Advisory Committee, Terwilliger Bridge Replacement, ~1992
• Chair, Transportation Committee of CVNA. Worked with Lewis & Clark College on transportation issues.
• Volunteer at the Visitor Information Center in Pioneer Courthouse Square. (Sundays May-October).
• Maintainer of Lobelia Path, North End, Boones Ferry, Collins View, SW Portland, Pacific Northwest, ...
• Member of core founding group, Friends of River View Natural Area.
• Board Member of the Mark Bosworth Fund.
• and so on...

PERSONAL

• Born in Spokane, Washington. I have traveled to Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, the four corners of the USA, France, and Iceland.
• Interested in tree structures, neighborhoods, iterative systems, pattern languages, transportation systems, system & design science, automata, photography, and stained glass.
• Occasional Tuba Player.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PHASE (DETAILED)

I spent 28 years in IT — 15 at the college and 13 at Metro.

Metro, April 2000 to June 2010: System Architect.

• I managed and supervised the Network & Systems division of Information Technology, consisting of three system administrators who supported the Metro Regional Center, the Oregon Zoo, and many other Metro facilities.
• The systems group fully supported Metro's wide area and local area networks.
• Systems fully supported the web platform consisting of Apache, MySQL, Oracle, and ColdFusion, MediaWiki, etc, all running on Linux.
• Systems supported GIS (ESRI), Travel Forecasting (INRO, PTV), Network Appliance filers, etc...
• Systems was responsible for power and cooling of all computer rooms, 24x7.
• I designed and built 33-node Beowulf Cluster with NetApp Filer for TRANSIMS. USDOT partnered with Metro and Los Alamos Labs on this project.
• I served as IT Liaison for various technical and non-technical work groups in the agency, especially the GIS users and the Travel Forecasting section.
• I developed a workgroup-based security model and folder structure for all confidential, project, and staff files across the Metro enterprise.
• In support of the above data warehouse, I developed a web-based account management system that created appropriate Active Directory entries, Exchange mailboxes, staff folders, generated impressive New Account sheets, etc.
• I have been involved in many other technologies, such as Asterisk VoIP, WiFi, VPNs, etc.
• I have advocated for adoption of open source software in public agencies.

Metro, April 1997 to March 2000: System Administrator for Planning and Growth Management departments.

• Managed AlphaServer 4100 for use in GIS.
  In conjunction with Oracle, and a Network Appliance filer, the system supported a data warehouse, and became the back-end to the web platform.
• Managed another AlphaServer 4100 for Travel Forecasting.
  The system ran EMME/2 and other transportation modeling programs.
• Assisted web application developers.
  Servers used Netscape Enterprise Server and ColdFusion to provide dynamic content for both intranet and extranet applications. Projects required infrastructure support and help with trouble shooting.
• Maintained CheckPoint Firewall Security Policy.
• Maintained layer 3 switched network.
• Managed Ancillary services.
  The planning department required use of the Internet, and some specialized software, e.g. a plot rasterization system. We made minor modifications to that system to suit their needs. We developed an FTP platform and policy for planners and their extra-agency partners to exchange data. We supported various Metro domain names with BIND 8 and 9 name servers.
• Managed the DATAWAREHOUSE NT Domain.
  The NT domain was so that we could use a Network Appliance filer to provide Windows workgroup file space (CIFS).

Lewis & Clark College, September 1982 to April 1997: multiple positions.

• System Coordinator (1996 - 1997): coordinated the development of a multi-platform distributed computing environment, and planned for future campus computing needs. Shared (and led) the positions of electronic postmaster, newsmaster, webmaster, system administrator, and account system manager. Installed and maintained proprietary and public domain applications.
• Departmental Lab Manager (~1995): Maintained special-purpose labs for computer science, physics, chemistry, music, art, foreign language, and aided their development.
• Academic System Manager & Scientific Consultant (~1994): Handled all campus UNIX workstations and servers running SunOS & ULTRIX, acquired and installed software, authored UNIX Guide, served and security officer and scientific computing consultant for faculty. E.g converted Mt. Wilson solar telescope data from VAX floating point to IEEE format.
• Senior System Development Analyst (~1986): Designed a Macintosh application; managed a software development lab; installed BSD 4.3 UNIX on a VAX; ported all VMS users to UNIX!
• Technical Support Manager (~1982): Managed and installed VAX-11 780&750 computer systems (VMS); troubleshot, managed, and exported a local administrative database to turnkey database system. managed professional and student employees;