Dave Olson's home page

Clean-shaven (this picture in Aug 2008). Qfter 35 years with a beard, I decided to shave it off in late 2007

Quick jump links for this page

Links to pictures (mostly ones I took)

Non-work interests

Reading; mostly Science Fiction (not sci-fi), mystery, and good fantasy
Finding and drinking good beer, ales, stouts, etc.
Bike riding (I was commuting 39 miles a day from Palo Alto, through Mt. View, Sunnyvale, and on down Zanker to Tahoe Networks on my Trek 5500; now it's only 8 miles each way. Occasionally I get out for some longer rides. One of these days, I may even do some longer touring again (not too likely though, since I managed to snap (complete breaks) both my collar bone and shoulder blade near the end of the 2003 Santa Cruz Mt Challenge, and that somewhat discouraged longer rides for the time being...)
Cross country hiking (trails are for sissies; Real hikers like chaparral!). I've included a list of interesting SF Bay Area hiking links here. OK, OK, distance wise, most of my hiking is on trails but I do a fair amount up and down ridges and the canyons and creeks around the area.
Cross country skiing
Folk Music. I'm a member of the San Francisco Folk Music Club.
Caves (including a few guided "wild" cave tours; good thing mud's slippery!) Good cave links come and go, so rather than constantly updating them, I'm suggesting that folks just use their favorite search engine. I'm not a serious caver, by the way, in the sense of exploring wild caves.
Trains (especially steam; old trolley's are fun too); best when operating, of course! Coal-fired really is as bad as the old books described them (but fun!). I had several nice links here, but in the past year, they've disappeared, and I've had trouble finding interesting replacements. Every time I find some, they tend to disappear within a few months; this is a bad sign... It almost makes me want to grab full copies of the sites when I do find them, although that's a bit rude.
Here's some, though; by Jerry Appleman (he has some traction and trolley photos also).
Some pictures of the engine that pulled the steam excursion train (SP 2472) that ran from San Francisco to the 1995 Gilroy Garlic festival. I rode it from Palo Alto down and back, and it was a lot of fun to actually go somewhere on a steam train, rather than just a "ride". making them available. The 2472 actually used to pull commuter trains along the same route, and has been restored local by what is now called the Golden Gate Railroad Museum. It sat on display, rusting away, and the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds for several decades before the restoration.
A few more railroad links of interest to me (some of these are dead as of July 2005):
- The Western Railway Museum at the Rio Vista junction on Hwy 12.
- Northwestern Pacific RR and other North Coast site, including some good links.
- The California State RR Museum finally has it's own web page.
- About the Birth of California's Narrow Gauge Railroads
- Route and pictures of some of the South Pacific Coast Railroad Tunnels through the Santa Cruz mountains, from Ray Hosler's website.
- Niles Canyon Railway, an operating remnant along the old mainline through Niles Canyon (between Fremont and Sunol).
- A number of links to nice rail sites (Steam, more recent, Model RR, etc) around the world is on the NMRA (National Model RR Association)web site.
Mill Valley is the place I grew up, and still think of as my home town, although I've lived in Palo Alto, CA now for 20 years.
Here's a pointer to the web Page for Mill Valley, CA The place where I mostly grew up, including some history info on "The World's Crookedest RailRoad" (see some info on it at the Mt. Tamalpais Interpretive Assoc. and (including a scanned map)) which was constructed over 100 years ago.
Here are some old pictures of the town from the Mill Valley Historical Society, including the train depot (now a bookstore and cafe, unfortunately; the train is long gone, although I lived along the old route in Blithedale canyon, and used to find railroad spikes, 30-odd years after it was scrapped). Also go up a level and look at "Local Artists" to see some photographs of the area, and the like.

Contact info

My e-mail address is olson@unixfolk.com

US Mail:

Dave Olson

PO Box 624

Palo Alto, CA 94302

Phone (cell):

650.387.3618

Yep, I'm on facebook, too. I'm currently the only match in facebook search for

"Dave Olson" "Palo Alto"

My domain unixfolk.com is registered through Dotster

Work interests

I prefer to work for smaller companies, with highly competent employees (in all parts of the company). I've been very fortunate in the engineering organizations, but somewhat hit or miss in the business, sales, parts of the companies. Believable business plans are very important, I really want the products I work on to ship and get used by customers.
System Architecture, especially I/O (I was responsible for a portion of the OCTANE and Origin system designs, in particular parts of the xbow (XIO) and bridge (PCI), from the software perspective. In fact, I'm one of the folks on a pair of software patents (5909594), and (5991824), related to those chips. I'm listed on 6 patent applications for the QLogic InfiniBand chips, 4 have been granted: (7512721), (7500057), (7308535) , and (7561567).
Performance, particularly by initial design, and by stripping things out that aren't really needed, and slow things down.
Usability, in the general sense. That is, a product that actually solves problems for the end-user, in a way that is as simple to use and as clear as is consistent with the product. I'm not speaking of GUIs here, or at least, only peripherally; my opinions on those often don't match those of the experts.
Software practices, as an implementor, and user, that make it easier to "do the right thing", in terms of picking the right APIs, doing error checking (by hiding the details and where possible, doing error recovery inside the API).

Open source software, primarily as a user and adapter. I love the concept, and the general community, but have seen very few successful business plans that involve producing open source software, as opposed to using it, or producing it as a side effect of some other product. And of course, it's frustrating that it's almost always incomplete and poorly to barely adequately documented. And let's not even talk about usability...

Work history, in a nutshell

I'm now working at Cisco, in the Security product group. I started in June 2010
I worked at QLogic , (formerly PathScale) (originally Key Research) from 03/03/03, until June 2010. I worked on InfiniBand adapter chip architecture and software (product name was InfiniPath, now Truescale). InfiniBand is very high speed and very low latency networking, usually used to connect large numbers of computers (clusters) so that they can solve very large problems. I wrote the functional specification for the original chip, and have been the lead architect on all of the HCA chips (another group back east does InfiniBand switches). I'm on several of the patents for the chip, and have been team lead on the software for the chips (we've shipped 3 designs, and are getting ready to ship the 4th (QDR) version). I started very early (employee #8, if I remember right) when we were a startup. QLogic bought the company in 2006.
I worked at Tahoe Networks, from March 2001 until I laid off on 15 Jan 2003. They shut the doors for good in November 2003, although some of the employees went as a group to work for Nokia. It was an interesting project (digital cell phone data; GGSN, PDSN, etc., highly reliable, reasonably high capacity. A few units were sold, but only as lab eval units, apparently.	I worked at Geocast, (on a system that broadcast data over unused Digital TV bandwidth, to a deskside receiver connected to a PC) until it went out of business 28 Feb 2001. R.I.P. A lot of great people, some fairly complex (working!) software on both broadcast and receiver side, some good hardware, but in the end, no customers, large or small.
From May 1988 through Oct 1999, I worked at SGI. I started out writing SCSI drivers, eventually started working more on I/O architecture, and finally on systems architecture, and somewhere along the way became a Principal Engineer. The system I had the most influence on was the Octane, particularly the cross-bar I/O architecture, and the way it interacted with the system. I was also technical lead on the infamous "kernel threading" project, and was one of the folks who came up with and ramrodded through the IRIX 6.5 release and development model (still going after 6 years, amazingly enough).	Prior to SGI, I worked at Altos Computers (out of business, purchased by Acer) for several years. I "improved" (ported) RFS to work (yes, including ioctls) between the 68K (SVR3-based) and X86 (Xenix-based) systems, and also worked on the RS-422 multidrop terminal project.
Before Altos, I worked at Fortune Systems (even more out of business; I was the last OS person out the door at Fortune). Here's a picture of a Fortune 32:16 (link dead July 2005), And here's another Fortune site that still seems to be active Fortune 32:16 picture, along with some other information.	Way, way, way back (1979), I worked for USGS doing support work for the Marine Geology group in Palo Alto (even got to do some diving in Crater Lake!), and my very first programming outside school, on a PDP 11/23.
Before USGS, I worked for NOAA as part of the NOAA/California Division of Lands Tidal Boundary survey project, whose results were used to determine where the tide-based property boundaries lay (affects state ownership, and therefore public access), all over California, although mostly in the San Francisco Bay and Delta. Lots of fun, lots of outdoor work, but, of course, being the government and field work, low pay.	Before NOAA, I held a number of jobs, while going to college and shortly after, including working as a warehouseman and truck driver for InnerSpace Waterbeds, the company founded by the guy who "invented" the waterbed as his Master's Thesis. While in high school and college, I worked at bike shops, repairing and assembling bicycles. I bought my Schwinn Paramount while working in a bike shop; it lasted 30 years, until the frame cracked.

My hiker's list pages, pictures, hike descriptions. Description of hikes, bike rides and other outings with a varied group of friends (we have a mailing list; if you are interested, contact me by mail). Hiking links are here, at the bottom of the page.