User talk:24.145.133.16

Welcome to Wikipedia! As you noticed, some people here including me have doubts about the Qualculus article. This should be rather easy to resolve, since you are apparently familiar with the term. Could you please give some verifiable information, like precise references to the white papers or the participants of the Wisconsin project and any reports they wrote? Thank you. -- Jitse Niesen 20:28, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

A draft of the white paper can be be found at: http://www.angelfire.com/movies/heme/Math/Nadair.htm

David Baka was the lead of the project.

The discussion on "Wheels for the Mind" is incorrect, It was started well before 1986. I have hard copies of it. Of course that was before the internet.

The methods described are methods I use. I did not add to this article because I thought it was a joke. I was trying to add to the stub.

Whether this is pulled or not does not matter to me. I will still use these methods in my work.

Thank you for your answer. I verified that the magazine was indeed around in 1986. However, I'm still looking for more verifiable information, like answers to any of these questions. Do you know the title and/or author of the article in "Wheels for the Mind" in which the Wisconsin project was described, or perhaps the page number? Where did you get the magazine (separate editions are published in different countries). Is this design methology described in other professional or scholarly journals? In which department and context did the Wisconsin project take place? What is the current occupation of David Baka, and what was his position in Wisconsin? Thanks again, and sorry about giving you such a hard time. -- Jitse Niesen 15:28, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for you polite reply.

Here is what I know:

David Baka is currently a Software Engineer at OCLC. The project that he works on is involved in Order Processing and Customer Relations software. He is responsible for the middleware that loads orders from legacy systems into the RMS system. The main engine of this system is Siebel.

He was also involved in integration between RMS and Peoplesoft but I do not know to what extent.

He was recently involved in the integration with Websphere. Although the web front end of this project is now up - I do not know the domain name. It also requires a user name and password. You can probaly find out more information on oclc.org by searching for EAI. Mr. Baka's involvement with this was strictly on the back end.

He also teaches some classes at OCLC but only once in a while. His classes include object oriented concepts and program design. I have attended some of these classes. He was also involved in the Emerging Techologies special interest group.

Prior to working at OCLC he was a consultant to Lucent Technologies. I know that he was involved in the System Management Subdivision of the 7RE Switch. His work seemed to involve building software interfaces to hardware devices such as tape drives and interface boards.

I know that he was also a consulant to IBM. He had mentioned working with the Corepoint SA project. SA stands for Software Artistry. I remember hearing about IBM buying SA out some years ago. I do not really remember any details on what he had done there.

At this point just about everyone at OCLC is on vacation, including myself. I will not be back until mid January. I can ask Mr. Baka if he would like to talk to you but I will not see him anytime soon.

I am sorry that I can not find the issues of Wheels for the Mind. I know that each issue had a section called "Current Projects" or something like that. It listed projects that people at universities were working on from all over the world.

The issue I am referring to was published in the U.S. I believe it was publishe through Boston College. It was quite common to see this publication in the 1980s. This was when the big Macintosh boom was on. Sometimes there were free copies lying around the CS building. Many universities offered discounts on Macs so there were usually a large number of Mac users. I have also seen copies of this publication at conventions.

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