Bio: Jim Kane

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Bio: Jim Kane
15-Oct-2002 -- Susan Pichotta
 
This week, the Icetips News Network is pleased to present a bio that many have requested. One of the most well-known and technically able programmers among us, he's actually a Harvard-educated dentist and retired Air Force officer (and too modest to mention either himself). He has a dry sense of humor I enjoy, which comes through in this interesting bio (even if listening to him talk about programming gives me an inferiority complex ;). And he has some great stories, too.
 
Who do you work for?
ProDoc, a legal software firm that caters to small legal offices typically with 1-3 attorneys. Our main product creates legal documents based on answers the attorney supplies. All the legal expertise that goes into the documents and questions is supplied by our staff attorneys. It's an interesting mix (as in oil and water) - attorneys and programmers working together. Surprisingly, it has worked out quite well. Some of what you hear about attorneys isn't true.
 
What do you like best about what you do now?
I work with 5 other talented programmers. I really like working with other programmers jointly rather than working off in a corner by myself. They let me come out of the corner and play pretty often so it's been fun. It's also been interesting learning about user interface and what works and what doesn't. It's easy to make a program work on your desktop but getting to work on the desktops of a few thousand of your closest friends is a challenge. The only thing you can count on is the manual/help will not be read.
 
What has been one of your biggest challenges in using Clarion?
Some time ago I got an email from an Australian programmer who was griping about how easy it was to use COM objects in VB and how impossible it was in Clarion. At that point in my study of Clarion I had used a lot of API calls so I was fairly cocky. I thought to myself how hard could it be? I took a bit of time but after reading a few books and kinda understanding it I wrote a very short piece of assembler code that allowed me to call an interface. While the code was trivial in its own right and looking back it sure has some problems but getting that working and understanding the mechanism for calling an interface was quite a mental leap and challenge for me. I also learned never to say to myself 'how hard could it be…'.
 
What has been one of your biggest challenges in business?
Every now and then I think about going out on my own and starting my own company but I keep coming back to the same basic fact; I like the technology and programming and not the management, marketing, sales, shipping, manual writing etc, so I'm quite happy leaving the business aspect to a bevy of lawyers who seem quite happy handling it.
 
When did you start programming?
Back when I was in dental school I was sent off to a hospital to do various medical rotations. The 1st rotation after basic physical exam I was assigned to just happened to be ob/gyn. For some strange reason I didn't see much need to study very hard at that end of the body.
 
On my way into the hospital I noticed a small computer store next to the hospital. One day I slipped out the back door of the hospital and went by the computer shop. The owner was very friendly and we got to talking. It seems he was buying unassembled memory boards, electronic components, and sending them off to be wave soldered. The problem was when the boards came back, over half of them didn't work. In high school I was into electronics and amateur radio. Not being a stranger to electronics I looked at the schematics and the defective boards and found I could repair some of them on the spot.
 
To make a long story short, we worked out a deal. Every Friday I came by the store and picked up a bushel basket of non-functional memory boards. Over the weekend I tried to repair each and tested them with a loaner North Star S-100 based computer. He paid me $20 per board I fixed. To a student $20 was a king's ransom so I was eager. He was happy because without the boards he lost his full investment and couldn't sell computer systems due to a lack of memory.
 
After a time I decided to take some of my profits in hardware and tried my hand at programming in North Star Basic. At the same time, I was working on a research project (required for graduation from dental school) that involved a lot of very long numeric calculations. The research lab had access to a time-share DEC PDP-11 with a whopping 300 baud connection. The problem was the time slice wasn't long enough to finish some of the calculations in a reasonable time so some of my programs ran 24 hours or longer only to end in a bug.
 
About that time a floating point processor became available for the North Star. With the North Star, Z-80 2MHZ, 24 K of static ram and that floating point board I could get my calculations done in about 20 minutes vs 20 hours on the time share. With that demonstration of the utility of micro computers I was hooked.
 
When it came time to write up my research I used an old word processor called Word Master. The only problem was the parallel port on the North Star computer didn't work with the only printer I could afford - an old dot - matrix. The only way I could get it working was modify the hardware slightly and then write my own print driver in Z80 assembler. I found a book on Z-80 assembler that I still have and use to this day to explain assembly language concepts and a mail order Z-80 assembler that only cost $25. With that done I could print my research and graduate! Let's just say I was motivated to learn assembler.
 
After graduating dental school I also tried my had at C and Turbo Pascal but neither was very good at managing data and at the time, and that is what I needed to do. Enter Clarion.
 

The ProDoc offices in Universal City, Texas

 
When did you start using Clarion?
About 6 years after graduating dental school in a weak moment I decided to go back to school for advanced dental training. One of the biggest challenges was to read dental journals and remember what you read. One day I was browsing in a computer store while waiting for my wife to come out of a dress store. The owner of that computer store was programming in Clarion for DOS to write a POS program to help him run the store. I could see looking over his shoulder that Clarion could do browses on data in a file. He took the time to show me how to generate a browse pretty quickly from a Clarion DAT file. I was sold. $300 later I left the store with a copy of Clarion. I think for old time's sake Soft Velocity should bring back those pricing levels for the release of 6.0. That day I couldn't complain about how much my wife spent in the dress store.
 
My first Clarion application was designed to list dental journal articles by keyword, author, etc. The only thing missing was the ability to quickly search the text in the memo field that held the description of the article.
 
What's the coolest project(s) you've worked on using Clarion?
Near the end of my Air Force dental career I was approached by the owner on the company that I now work for to build a package that allowed the design of forms that looked like paper forms, allowed the user to type in the data, and then print the form with or without data. About the same time C4 had come out and I was studying OOPS. I didn't know much about oops yet but is seemed like this project was a natural. Each form had many pages, each page many fields, each field has many properties. I figured if I could represent a form by one class, page by another, field by another, and a property collection for each field I'd be able to make new classes as the form was built and build this large project fairly modularly.
 
In addition, I had to write my own window designer to allow laying out the forms and a report engine to generate WMF files for printing. It took about 6 months but it worked in the end and I learned oops. There were lots of times where I ran into an obstacle and thought I was dead but Lee White helped me out with some code and facts about WMF files and I made it through. I don't know what was cooler, the project itself or the stress relief when it was done.
 
Have you done anything for a living other than software development?
Unfortunately I couldn't afford dental school but I found the Air Force offered dental scholarships. That turned out to be an adventure in its own right.
 
Toward the end of my Air Force dental career I was put into a job reviewing blueprints for dental clinics being built by the Air Force. I inherited the job when the fellow who had it before me was disabled in a horrible car crash. The only problem was I had never seen blueprints before and now I was the dental corps expert! Once again necessity was the mother of invention and I studied, and studied until I at least sounded like I knew what I was doing.
 
Naturally I found an excuse to write a program to manage all the data about equipment that goes into a dental clinic. For each piece of equipment there was a lot of utility data, safety data, and a description. Once again I needed to search text so I finally finished the project I had started 10 years earlier and wrote a nice fast text search in assembler for Clarion Dat file memos. I sold it for a year or two as a third party product but unfortunately by the time I got around to it, most clarion developers had switched to the TPS file format so there was very little interest in the project. A bit late, but eventually I got my fast search!
 
What are your hobbies/what do you like to do when you're not using Clarion?
Computer programming was my hobby for many years. Now they pay me to do it. Not bad. I really don't have any other hobbies at present as work and family keeps me busy but every now and then I take on an interesting programming project mostly to keep me amused and learn some cutting edge technology and again people pay me! Go figure? SOAP has been very good to me. I've been involved in 3 different SOAP projects already with 2 more on the horizon. I've never seen a technology gain such wide spread acceptance so very fast.
 
Married, children, grandchildren, other close family you want to mention?
It's hard to believe I've been married for almost 20 years now. When I met my wife she was working at the University of North Dakota teaching Speech Pathology in her dream job. But I took her away from all that as the Air Force moved us around and now she works as a Speech Pathologist in the San Antonio school district. Quite a sacrifice on her part. We've had two children, Amy, 16, and Thomas, 13. One time when my children were young someone warned me about teenagers. They said teenagers were like two year olds with a driver's license. Truer words were never spoken.
 
Where were you born?
Jamaica, New York which is located in Queens county. I lived in and around New York City through college and went off to Boston for dental school. After that I was assigned as a dental officer in many places. The most memorable were North Dakota (I had never seen a farm before moving there - culture shock!), the Azores, and San Antonio, TX where I decided to settle.
 
What's interesting about where you live?
The Air Force brought me San Antonio initially but I like it because it's just the right size. Big enough to have just about every thing you could want but not so big that traffic or crime are that bigger problems. I don't miss the North Dakota winters or New York congestion.
 
Which person, from past or present, do you most admire and why?
When I took freshman chemistry the professor was very impressive. His name was Dr. Ricci and he taught how to think and problem solve as much as he taught Chemistry. I'm quite sure had our paths not crossed my life would have been very different.
 
What is your favorite food?
I was brought up as the token Irish kid in a mostly Italian neighborhood and I must admit I was always a bit jealous of the food at the other kids' houses so now I over compensate. My idea of variety in dining out is northern Italian versus southern Italian..
 
What is your favorite type of music?
When I was exiled to North Dakota by the Air Force I discovered country music - like I had a choice. I ended up meeting my wife in a country western bar so I've been in love with both ever since.
 
What is your favorite book? Movie?
I can't say I really have a favorite but I love comedy. Some days I really need to laugh.
 
If Clarion never existed, what do you think you would be doing at this time?
I'd probably still be involved with dentistry or dental research.
 

Jim in his office, earlier today. Note that saying "I don't have any pictures" won't get you off the hook when you're only a few miles away and I have a digital camera! <g> (Actually, Jim was quite a good sport about it, and we all enjoyed a nice lunch after the "photo shoot".)