For some months now one of my “must read” web sites has been Electoral-Vote.COM. (Me and over half a million others every day!) I’ve watched the maps showing the aggregated results of recent opinion polls, I’ve read “the Votemaster’s” pained accounts of wrestling with different algorithms for aggregating, averaging, aging, and presenting the data. I’ve even contributed a few bucks to support the effort. Through all this, I had no idea who “the Votemaster” might be, until today. In the Votemaster FAQ , all is revealed: “My name is Andrew Tanenbaum. I am one of the 7 million U.S. citizens living abroad. I am a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. […] I can write fairly complex software. I wrote MINIX, the precursor to Linux, for example.”
Ah, that Andy Tanenbaum! “Mister Minix.” Now where did I put my battered copy of Operating Systems: Design and Implementation?