Scott's home page

Overview of site

• NonVi Games
• Scott MacHaffie's home page
  • Castles
  • Human Factors of WWW design
  • The craft of human-computer interactions
  • Object-oriented problems
  • SketchRight
  • Scottish and Irish dancing
  • Scott's music page
  • Scott's books

You have reached Scott MacHaffie's home page.

I have a new author site up. I have some Palm OS articles up, such as:

• iPhone keyboard versus Treo (July 24, 2007)
• Cleaning your Treo's address book (July 31, 2007)

Personal

Last updated: April 10, 2005

I am married to a wonderful woman named Nancy. As of March 9, we have twin boys!

We also have three cats and two dogs. Our dogs are named Reigny (a Norwegian Elkhound) and Ahgah (an Afghan).

We have two videos of our dogs up.

• Ahgah digging in the dirt
• Ahgah and Reigny playing in the backyard

My grandmother's paintings are on-line now.

Aikido

I practice aikido and kiatsuho with the Oregon Ki Society. Aikido (at least as it is taught in the Ki Society) has lots of benefits. Some of the benefits are:

• Learning to coordinate mind and body
• Learning to relax
• Learning to do things with less effort

I am teaching a Monday night aikido class at the Oregon Ki Society. This is a small class and is great for beginners. The ki class runs from 7-8 PM and the aikido class runs from 8-9. Feel free to contact me or to stop by if you are interested.

General

I have a castles page. You can visit Edinburgh, Heidelberg, and Chillon, among others.

Work

I'm a Software Developer at Schrodinger, Inc. We make chemistry software. I work on the user interface.

The last company I worked for was Saltire Software. I was primarily responsible for four major commercial packages at Saltire (each package did have significant work done by other people as well):

• SketchRight, a dimension-based drawing program
• FloorRight, a carpet-layout program
• FloorRight Commercial, another version of FloorRight
• PocketFloor, a Windows CE (handheld) version of FloorRight

Research

My master's thesis (in computer science) was entitled "Difficulties experienced procedural programmers encounter when transferring to an object-oriented programming paradigm" I received my Master's degree in computer science from Portland State University in 1994 (my thesis has a copyright date of 1993). I have some of the results online.

At Saltire we did a study on the human readability of mathematics. We developed a metric for the readability (comprehensibility) of both a single mathematical expression, and a sequence of mathematical expressions. We are also doing research (all of this research is sponsored by the NSF) into having the computer generate symbolic mathematics describing geometry and dimensions/constraints on the geometry.

Music

I've played flute now for about 22 years.

Dancing

I really like to dance, both Irish and Scottish dancing. I also sometimes teach dancing, and I have also called at a céilí. I am also researching medieval and Renaissance dancing in both Ireland and Scotland.

In my copious amounts of spare time

I like to read both science fiction and fantasy. I go to science-fiction conventions as well as playing with the Society for Creative Anachronisms.

Je parle français, un peu. Si vous voulez parler français, m'écrire.