Ken Raeburn's home page

Hi.

I'm a software engineer, currently working at Permabit Technology Corporation.

Me, background info

I went to school at MIT, and worked there for a while, first as an undergrad and later as a regular staff member. I worked on Kerberos and Zephyr, among other things, while I was there. I was involved with the SIPB (including two years as chairman). I also worked with the Lecture Series Committee for a while. More recently, I've been involved with the Gilbert & Sullivan Players, usually being House Manager for one show or another.

I went to work at Cygnus Solutions (which has since been absorbed by Red Hat), working on GCC, GAS, Binutils, and KerbNet (a Kerberos-based offering) in my time there. I left when the Massachusetts office was "downsized", and after a while, rejoined MIT again, working on Kerberos. About ten years on, I left MIT again, and now I've started working at Permabit. Most of the software I've done significant work with has been "open source" software, since even before the label existed. (The picture above is from when I worked at Cygnus. There's a lot more grey in the beard now.)

I like reading some sci-fi and fantasy, though I haven't been doing as much lately as I used to. My current favorites are David Weber and the late James P. Hogan, especially, most recently, Weber's Honor Harrington series.

For more than a decade, I've been experimenting with using the Dvorak keyboard layout, rather than the standard "QWERTY" layout. I don't know if my typing speed has picked up any, and I haven't really been trying, but I do think it has reduced my hand and finger motion while typing, which is probably good since I had problems with tendonitis some time ago. It does seem to interfere with pair programming a bit, when someone else wants to grab my keyboard and type something. (Then again, stopping people from typing on one's keyboard can be a good thing. It really depends on your security model.)

I enjoy Chinese food... well, what some Americans think of as spicy Chinese food, I'm not sure what anyone raised in China thinks of it. My favorite restaurant is a Mandarin/Szechuan place in Central Square in Cambridge, called Mary Chung's. I'm sure I've spent many thousands of dollars there over the years.

Eh, what other random drivel do you want to hear about me? There's not a lot to say.


Free Speech
Ken Raeburn / raeburn at mit dot edu
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