David's research projects

I have always liked to build things and I have always liked to try to improve on existing solutions. I am also a strong believer in the saying "the impossible just takes a little more time". I often think that I can solve what others have not yet solved and I am not afraid of failing since I think there is no shame in failing, thus I dare to try. Which means I sometimes take on "impossible" projects. And guess what? I usually solve what I set out to solve. Some times it takes two days, some times it takes five years, but I do solve it!

So, here is a little info about some of my bigger projects.

P2p research

During a project at our local computer club in 1997 we realised it is possible to make fully distributed, totally serverless, fully scalable peer-to-peer systems. That is, it is possible to make millions or even billions of computers work together in an organised manner without any central servers, without any computer being a boss over the others.

When most people hear the expression "p2p systems" they think of file sharing. However, p2p systems can be used for much more, for instance chat, instant messaging, Internet telephoning, radio and TV (sent from home users computers), distributed calculation systems and many more applications. Distributed calculation systems are already used to design safer more energy efficient aeroplanes and to search for better medicines against HIV. So I think p2p systems will benefit humanity.

Between the autumn 2000 and summer 2006 I worked full-time researching p2p algorithms. I wanted to figure out how to do what I wanted to do in p2p networking, and how to do that well. Not just rush away and build some p2p application based on primitive algorithms just like most others were doing. Nothing wrong with that, but since everyone else were already doing that I thought I would do things my way. The good news is that I am done with my research! If you want to read more about my project go here: www.randpeer.com

Mandelwork

I have been programming since I was 13 but it wasn't until I was 19 that I wrote my first big computer program. (That was in 1988 by the way.) It was a program that could calculate fractals of the type Mandelbrot. I called it Mandelwork and it indeed was hard work to make. In 1992 I won the programming competition of the PC-world magazine with that program. The reason that I won the competition probably was that I was one of three persons in the world that independently invented and managed to implement "contour following" / "boundary tracing". That is the calculation method that has made it possible to zoom Mandelbrot pictures deeper and faster than ever before. Our calculation method allows you to zoom pictures using a common PC that previously required a supercomputer!

Unfortunately my program does not run on modern PCs. But if you really want to check out what Mandelbrots are I nowadays recommend the program named Xaos. Even if you have no idea about what Fractals or Mandelbrots are I truly recommend that you download Xaos and take it for a spin. You will not be disappointed, Xaos is probably the best Mandelbrot program ever made. It's beautiful! It has real time zooming... Xaos is available for most operating systems. If you run Windows download "WinXaos" from their download page. Xaos web site: xaos.sourceforge.net