All of the pictures I took at Mike's funeral are available to look at. They are not all indexed and some are very large. I hope to get them in time order and with thumbnail index pages soon.
Today is November 21, 2000, the day after my best friend died. He was driving on I95 when an accident occured. He was killed at around 11pm.
I call Mike my best friend because he is and always will be. I met him in the spring of 1986. A tall skinny man who stuck his head in to our office and with a few simple pronouncements changed the way we were doing our work. My first impression of him was that he was arrogant.
When I told my boss this he laughed and told me that Mike could be as arrogant as Mike wanted to be. Mike was that good.
Mike was a programmer. I can give no higher praise for somebody that works with computers. He could make them sing and dance in ways that other people only dreamed of. My first project working with Mike was the BUMP project. This was the BRL USNA file Migration Project. A virtual file system.
The goal of BUMP was to seamlessly expand the amount of storage a computer had by migrating unused files from disk to tape or other off line storage freeing up space on the disk while not causing any visible change to the users file structure. I.e. The name would be there but none of the data. Open the file and a request would go out to mount a tape and shortly there after you would have your data back.
The target operating system was Sun OS 4.1.3, a BSD 4.3. It was also targeted at UNICOS, the Cray Research Unix operating system...
Test time starts and I am there as the Cray representative to make sure that Mike doesn't break anything (Hah!). He and I are sitting next to each other at the console and he starts editing files. It is like nothing I've ever seen before. In 10 minutes of editing he caused me to change editors. I had been a VI user, by the end of that night I was using JOVE, (baby emacs) and I've never looked back.
At the end of that night I had more respect for Mike Muuss than any other programmer I have ever met. He knew his code inside and outside. As I did code review on his work I found that the errors he had made were all of the sort "It will never happen" but even so he made the changes I required and added extra safety tests. In the end, the code that he wrote and I reviewed lives on today. It is the "Data Migration System" of Cray Research/SGI.
Today, Cray Research Computers (from SGI) are just as likely to be purchased as file servers as for their compute ability. Every time some company or agency buys a multi-million dollar file server with data migration, they should tip their hat to Michael John Muuss.
There are three programs that I use almost everyday for network analysis. The first is 'ping'. This program was written by Michael John Muuss. He often complained to me that if he had known this was going to be his most popular program he would have spent a little more time on it.
From the FreeBSD man page for ping:
HISTORY
The ping command appeared in 4.3BSD.
AUTHORS
The original ping command was written by Mike Muuss while at the US Army
Ballistics Research Laboratory.
After that night of learning I started hanging around with this man a bit more. Upstair in room 27(?) of B394 was a lab. At a time before PCs with megabytes of video memory, Mike had a real frame buffer. A beautiful 1024x1024 by 24 bit display. He was doing cutting edge graphics. His raytracer, the BRL-CAD Raytracer is the fastest strongest raytracer in the world. And you can get it at ftp.arl.army.mil for free. All you have to do is fax in a simple form but it is free.
At his suggestion I wrote a program for BRL-CAD. It was a simple program and I was rather happy with it. It worked, it was clean, it was fast, and it was something I expected to be accepted as is. Well that's not what happened. Mike tore that program appart. By the time he was done the program was faster and cleaner and better and the only thing of mine that remained was the "Written by: Christopher T. Johnson". A humbling experence. It was the last time any of my code was ripped apart like that.
Over the next few years I worked closely with him. This included more work on BUMP and more and work in the BRL-CAD system. When I lost my job in the early '90s Mike was there for me. With in the day he had put me in contact with the person that would later hire me.
There is more to write but I need to go deal with some things.
Mike was just there, always.
A year ago I was driving back from Virgina via the Eastern shore I got a flat tire. My Trans-Am is old but I stil like it. I got out the spare tire and I got out my half-inch breaker bar and changed the flat. My spare is a inflatable. I went to fill it and it only 1/2 filled. This worried me greatly but I turne around limpped down the shoulder to a gas station and filled it the rest of the way.
All the way home I worried about that spare going "pop" but I wasn't concerned all that much, Mike was there. I could call him and while it might take him a while to get there, he would be there.
That was the sort of person Mike was. He was always there for people. Even if you did not lean on him you had this safe feeling in the back of your head, knowing that he was there. He was not a man who needed much from people but he was joyful in his friendship, taking joy in your accomplishments, your discoveries, your successes.
Since that day in November I've had to stand up on my own. It is hard. I spent the last 4 days fighting with quaternions. I know there is a simple answer and with a few minutes of discussion with Mike he would have the answer for me or he would have verified my answer. It wasn't that I needed him to give me the answer, but it was very comforting to have him say "yes, you are right."
He was a leader. A quiet leader. He didn't say "Follow me men" and rush forward, nor did he point and say "go, go, go". He said "I'm going this way." and sure enough people followed.
He tought me about language. I'm, by internet standards and American standards, well educated, high school degree and 7 years at collage. But he was able to find the right books, the right way, the right methods that allowed me to learn to write better, if not well.
He found the books that allowed me to understand how my wife was manipultating me. Using language to hurt. Using language to control. Using language to lie with out lieing. He was the person that listened.