Post #845797
2026-03-27 14:15 UTC
Replies (4)
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@dabeaz@mastodon.social 2026-03-27 14:24
xv was an integral part of day-to-day research activities. Basically, all we did all day was solve differential equations. This involved a ton of simulation, plotting, data analysis, and visualization. xv was this really modest tool that did one thing really well--make it easy to look at images. You could browse images, adjust color maps, flip between images, and so forth. If you walked by a colleague's workstation on any given day, you'd see like 20 instances of xv running at once. 2/n?
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@linuxandyarn@hachyderm.io 2026-03-27 14:50
@dabeaz I hadn't seen him in decades but in addition to writing xv, he also became the moderator the first BBS I ever joined in Philadelphia (KAOS), and met him at a couple of our f2f gatherings at the Reading Terminal food court. Looking for news about him, though, I only see Ycombinator got their report of his death off gab and Vox Day's website. John had written music for a bunch of alt-right "parody songs" written by Vox Day and called him a friend. So I guess he was no longer the person I thought he'd been.
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@davefischer@hachyderm.io 2026-03-27 15:45
@dabeaz Haven't used xv in... five or ten minutes? (My CNC program outputs a jpg for previewing.)
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@hatter@metasocial.com 2026-03-27 17:08
@dabeaz That's sad to hear, I didn't know him either but as a student and geek it saw many varied uses on my desktops. I still have the email (as I looked it up some months back) confirming that I'd actually paid to register it, having realised (and probably been prompted by someone else) that it's a massively used tool that gives no reason to register it other than the good feels of having done the right thing.