Jamie Zawinski

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Jamie W. Zawinski (born November 3, 1968[1] in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), commonly known as jwz, is an American computer programmer responsible for significant contributions to the free software projects Mozilla and XEmacs, and early versions of the proprietary Netscape Navigator web browser. He still actively maintains the XScreenSaver project, used by most Unix-like computer operating systems for screenblanking.

Zawinski is currently the proprietor of the DNA Lounge, a nightclub in San Francisco.

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Zawinski was first hired by Scott Fahlman's Lisp research group at Carnegie Mellon University, came to California to work in Robert Wilensky and Peter Norvig's group at Berkeley, and in the early 1990s was hired by Richard P. Gabriel's Lucid Inc., where he was eventually put to work on Lucid's proprietary Energize C++ IDE; a major portion of the IDE was a text editor. Lucid decided to use GNU Emacs due to its free license, popularity, and extensibility. When the project ran into problems, Zawinski and the other programmers were forced to begin making fundamental changes to GNU Emacs to add new functionality; tensions over how to merge these patches into the main tree eventually led to the famous GNU Emacs/XEmacs fork.[2]

Zawinski worked on the early releases of Netscape Navigator, particularly the 1.0 release of the Unix version. He became quite well known in the early days of the world wide web through an easter egg in the Netscape browser: typing "about:jwz" into the address box would take the user to his home page (a similar trick worked for other Netscape staffers). Also due to Zawinski, users running a Unix or Macintosh version of the browser would see the Netscape throbber change to a ship's compass when a page was loading. In addition, Zawinski says it was he who came up with the name "Mozilla".[3]

Zawinski was a major proponent of opening the source code of the Mozilla browser, but became disillusioned with the project when it was decided that the code would have to be rewritten. He resigned from Netscape Communications Corporation on April 1, 1999.[4] His current occupation is now running the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

— comp.lang.emacs

Peter Norvig in Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years: "One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub."

Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment (also known as Zawinski's Law) relates the pressure of popularity to the phenomenon of software bloat:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

—Jamie Zawinski, Jargon file entry

It may have been inspired by the humorous Law of Software Development and Envelopment at MIT, which was posted on Usenet in 1989 by Greg Kuperberg, who wrote:

Every program in development at MIT expands until it can read mail.

—rec.humor.funny 1989 MIT reference

  1. ^ http://jwz.livejournal.com/profile
  2. ^ Zawinski, Jamie (2000-02-11). The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism.. Retrieved on 2006-09-26.
  3. ^ Zawinski, Jamie (1996). nscp dorm. Retrieved on 2007-10-12.
  4. ^ Zawinski, Jamie (1999-03-31). resignation and postmortem.. Retrieved on 2006-09-26.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Persondata
NAME Zawinski, Jamie W.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES JWZ
SHORT DESCRIPTION American programmer
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Quotes"
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