My son and I were walking to the playground and we saw one of those Neighborhood Watch signs with a picture of sinister looking person with a red line through it. He asked who that person was and I told him it was a burgler. He asked me what burglers did. I told him they stole things. He didn't really understand why people would steal things, at least not as a profession. To get a better picture of who these people were he asked me where they slept. In houses and apartments like other people, I said. He couldn't reconcile that with these people being so different to us, so to double-check my argument as he always does, he asked me again. Where do buglars sleep? In houses I repeated but I was less sure this time, feeling my argument crumbling. If people live in houses then why do they need to steal things?
Without time to look it up on the web I could not come up with a good answer. Even up looking it up, what I found seemed reasonable for an adult discussion but not straightforward enough for five year olds.
He appears to be alive because I just found a website of his that has been updated recently.
Behind every successful organisation stands one person who knows the secretof how to keep the managers away from anything truly important. - Ian Kemmish's email tagline in the 1990s
Always call them "lusers" and then you'll never forget that you're the one who's making their life more unpleasant than it needs to be. - Quoted by Ian Kemmish in Technology Evangelist
When I used Ian's PostScript "clone" Jaws in the 1990s I thought he was the smartest software developer whose software I had ever used. In retrospect I think he was one of the wisest. His choices were great. He got at the core of a problem and produced just the software needed to solve it without adding fluff.
10 years later, most of them spent working as a manager, I am beginning to understand his comment about keeping managers away from important things. Google's flat engineering management structure gets at the same issue, as does the Toyota Production System edict Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others. Being a manager has its own rewards and it is difficult for an entire engineering management team to keep itself grounded in the rigors of the day to day engineering that drive technology companies. Successful companies like Google and Toyota appear to recognize this natural human tendency and deal with it.
However management was only one of the areas where I find myself appreciating Ian's wisdom today. Ian had a genius for looking past the programming fashions of the day and getting at the fundamentals of the area he was working on. His designs and code has a timeless quality that thankfully were mostly expressed in C and PostScript, two relatively straightforward computer languages.
Further Reading
My father was an Australian soldier (VX19184) who fought in the Kokoda Trail campaign in the Owen Stanley Ranges in Papua New Gineau in WWII. He told me about it as I grew up. Some time after he died I read official histories of the campaign which differed from his account. Since then many people have written about the campaign on the web. There is a selection of web pages below and mostly confirm my father's accounts over the official record.
A closer look at the web pages shows that most of them were written by children of privates and NCOs, people who would have received the same stories as me growing up. Therefore it is possible that the consensus in the links below reflects the time where children of the soldiers are reaching their 50s and 60s and their opinions dominate discusssions
Re-examining the original sources should shed some light on this. I will do this in a later post.
9th Platoon A Company 2/14th Battalion
Group photo 16th August 1942
Battle of Isurava (26th-30th August 1942) in the Kokoda Campaign
Teddy Bear gets surprisingly little credit in the following links.
http://www.jahitchcock.com/kokoda.html Matches my father's account
http://www.kokodaspirit.com/writing-history/kokoda-campaign-trail-world-war-2.htm from the 39th Battalion's perspective
http://www.kokodahistorical.com/battle_isurava.html
http://www.jahitchcock.com%2Fkokoda.html
Brigade Hill to Mission Ridge
http://www.kokodahistorical.com/bruce_kingsbury.html
http://www.kokodatreks.com/history/thekokodacampaign.cfm
http://www.users.bigpond.com/battleforAustralia/battaust/KokodaCampaign/KokodaOverview4.html
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Bruce_Steel_Kingsbury
http://www.awm.gov.au/units/event_342.asp
http://www.kokodahistorical.com/battle_isurava.html
http://www.kokodahistorical.com/bruce_kingsbury.html
http://www.users.bigpond.com/battleforaustralia/battaust/KokodaCampaign/Isurava/JapAttack.html
Johnny Metson
After the battle for Isurava a group of wounded returned to Port Morseby. John Metson whose ankle had been smashed by a bullet dragged himself along on his hands and knees so that the party would not be slowed by carried wounded in stretches. Eventually this crawling proved too slow and the stretcher cases including Metson were left at Sangai while the main party were led by Ben Buckler to Port Moresby. The stretcher cases were all killed by the Japanese when they took Sangai
http://niusleta.kokodatreks.com/documents/CorporalJohnMetson.doc
Australia in the War of 1939–1945. Series 1 – Army - Volume V
Isurava: The Last Parade has this piece
The next four days at Isurava are best described by Bill Russell in his history of the 2/14th Battalion. He wrote: “mortar bombs and mountain gun shells burst in the tree tops showering the troops with shrapnel which crashed through to burst on the ground where the noise was de-doubled by the confined space of the jungle. Heavy machine guns cut their own lanes of fire as they chopped through small trees and ricocheted off large trees. Easily concealed snipers fired on our men as they desperately tried to scratch out shallow body holes with tin hats and bayonets.Second World War Diaries - AWM52, 2/14 Infantry Battalion
