Mini Interview - Rudolf Cornelissen

Written by Karl vom Dorff Thursday, 08 October 2009 09:21

Rudolf recently won our October Thank You Award. Like all winners, we asked him a few questions with regards to his activity in the Haiku community:

Q1: How old are you and what do you do to pay the bills?

I'm 43 years old and I work as an electronics and software engineer in a research and development department of a company here. We design and maintain measuring and control equipment (gas chromatographs, laser-photo-acoustic measuring devices, and control electronics for greenhouses. The electronics and firmware in these systems are mostly designed by me.)

Q2: In your nomination, it said you: "worked hard to bring Haiku a great Nvidia driver" How difficult (or easy) was it to accomplish these tasks?

Creating the driver cost me a few years of hard full-time work. I know, that seems a lot for such a simple thing. Anyhow, people said it was (near) impossible a task at the time, and that was for a good reason I think.

Q3: What would you love to have that would make working on Haiku easier?

I'd love to see the I/O scheduler and drivers (physical/virtual memory interfacing stuff) completed to such a point that transfer speeds go up to a decent level. Currently both harddisks and usb sticks are performing not so good compared to what the hardware can actually do. What I'd really like a lot is being able to work with haiku to develop on from a USB stick instead of from a harddisk. That makes it possible for me to plug in in any system and tweak for instance the nvidia driver in my own working environment on the stick, saving me lots of time and efforts..

Other wishes: Java (finally!) and Open Office!

Q4: What interesting book, band, TV show etc. would you like to recommend?

I love science fiction, especially movies where the time-paradox is used. my favorite series has been StarGate for a long time, and before that, StarTrek the Next Generation. Music I like a lot too, especially women singing. I'd like to recommend Dido for instance. She also made a very good live DVD (live at brixton academy). And the Corrs. Love them (unplugged, DVD). The blue men group is fantastic as well though :-)