Hi, my name is John Van Vliet. I’m a software developer in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
I have a BSc and MASc in mechanical engineering. For the MASc I studied active vibration damping in flexible robots.
(There aren’t very many flexible robots, but the Space Shuttle’s manipulator arm (CanadArm) is a prominent example. As part of my degree and post-grad work I got to visit the manufacturing and astronaut training facility for CanadArm. That was very cool.)
After that I spent a few years in the oil & gas industry. I worked on the user interface for an oilsands facility in Northwestern Alberta. It was interesting work with lots of big equipment at the end my software. I always like that.
I’m now on my own as a consultant. The variety of work has been interesting:
- A curling simulation (yes, curling, the Olympic sport);
- Hotel management system for a small chain of hotels;
- Casing inspection software for steam injection and oil production wells;
- Real-time camera image acquisition and object placement for a trade show display;
And now I find myself working on analyzing the instrumental temperature record. I stumbled into this one. I was lurking at ClimateAudit.org when the discussion turned to analyzing NASA’s temperature code (GISTEMP).
Then NASA released the code and a group started working on it. There were two problems from my perspective:
- First, GISTEMP is written in Fortran and my Fortran is very rusty;
- Second, it’s way more fun to write my own code
So I did, and OpenTemp.org is the result.