RIP Alan J Flavell

Even though I'm rather late.

Many years ago, I used to read certain newsgroups on Usenet quite a bit, including comp.infosystems.www.authoring.{html,cgi}, and Alan Flavell was a regular contributor there and one whose knowledge and postings I respected.

Just now, I searched for "Flavell's law" on a lark and found a definition as well as a link to his personal website—which was down, unfortunately.

So I searched for "Alan Flavell" to see whether it had moved (since it's not unknown for universities to rearrange their URL schemes, or for someone to change departments), and found this message referring to his funeral as having occurred at the end of 2006. Apparently, that was a post on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html; here's the Google Groups version.

Reading that thread, it seems that I was not the only one who saw his influence as a positive one.

RIP, Alan Flavell.

P.S. I've found what appears to be a copy of his web pages at http://niwo.mnsys.org/saved/~flavell/aflavell.html, though sadly http://niwo.mnsys.org/saved/~flavell/www/ is not available.

pnedev

I've had a couple of problems with programming recently (specifically, JSF with Apache MyFaces/Tomahawk).

I figured they might not be of interest to everyone, so I posted them in pnedev. Then I thought that perhaps not everyone knows about that second journal of mine, so I thought I'd mention it.

It doesn't see much use, but it's basically intended as a more techy journal where I post success stories, frustrations, solutions to problems I've had, or similar insights. Feel free to friend it.

(It's one of those venerable old things you don't see much more these days, a shared journal. In fact, its inspiration, jessdev, was what introduced me to the concept of a shared journal in the first place, I think.)