I am currently the founder, proprietor and Chief Technology Officer/Vice President of Engineering of NdustriX, an organization that develops analytical software for business intelligence with applications to strategic marketing, optimization of business operations and business process modeling, (BPM).

Prior to NdustriX, I was an executive and member of the founding team of several high technology companies, including Vice President of Technology of Seiko-Epson Semiconductor in the Americas, which grew to an annual gross revenue of a hundred million dollars five years after its founding. I have been an executive in the high-technology industry for over a decade, and on the board of directors of several companies-including interfacing with the venture capital community. I have a BS in EE/CS.

Since the late 1980's, I have been involved in the open source software community, and have written and supported over 130 programs with over a hundred thousand lines of code-there have been over a quarter of a million downloads of the programs. I have used Linux for over a decade-including developing computer network security architectures. In addition, I have contributed many analog circuit designs to the community, (I'm a Fairchild Semiconductor IC design engineer alumni in Silicon Valley.)

When I'm not doing electronics engineering and technology, my hobbies include bicycling, skiing, in addition to hanging out with the folks in the Linux community.

You can contact me at john@email.johncon.com.

Site Map

• If you are interested in my Software For Programmed Trading Of Equities Over The Internet, you might visit my NtropiX, site which is frequented by day traders, economists, and financial engineers.

• If you are interested in my Software For Industrial Market Metrics, you might visit my NdustriX, site which is frequented by those involved in business intelligence, strategic, marketing, optimization of business operations, and business process modeling, (BPM).

• If you are interested in my Software For Full Text Information Retrieval Over The Internet, you might visit my NformatiX, site which is frequented by those doing competitive intelligence for business operations, or building corporate wide knowledge based systems.

• If you are interested in my command line utility for fast binary searching sorted flat file constant databases you might visit my NdeX, site which is frequented by day traders, economists, and financial engineers.

• If you are interested in my publications, you might visit the Recent Publications section of this page.

• If you are interested in an archive of my correspondence, you might visit the Assorted Correspondence section of this page.

• If you are interested in other software that I have written, you might visit the Software section of this page.

• If you are interested in what my wife Connie does, see her web page at http://www.johncon.com/connie/.

• If you are interested in the Software that is used to operate and maintain this site, you might visit my Thanks page.

Site History

This site has been on the Internet since January 7, 1989-it started as a UUNET site. Astonishingly, the first message sent from the site is still available in Google's comp.unix.questions' usenet archives. The domain, johncon.com, was registered with InterNIC on May 4, 1992, and went into service the next day.

Recent Publications

• fractal.ps.gz - 2MB gzip compressed Postscript, or, fractal.pdf - 6 MB PDF, version of "Notes on the Fractal Analysis of Various Market Segments in the North American Electronics Industry," and fractal.tar.gz - Latex sources for the 700+ page document, which also includes the C Sources to the programs used in the analysis, and has a web site at NdustriX.

• org.ps.gz - Postscript version of "Notes on the Application of Algorithmic Principles to Organizational Analysis."

• org.tex.gz - Latex sources to "Notes on the Application of Algorithmic Principles to Organizational Analysis."

• asme.ps.gz - Postscript notes for "Academia and Business: A Win-Win Opportunity." American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 10th Young Engineers Forum, Sheraton Palace Hotel, San Francisco.

• slide.ps.gz - Postscript slides for "Academia and Business: A Win-Win Opportunity." American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 10th Young Engineers Forum, Sheraton Palace Hotel, San Francisco.

• asme.tar.gz - Latex sources for "Academia and Business: A Win-Win Opportunity." American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 10th Young Engineers Forum, Sheraton Palace Hotel, San Francisco.

• Slide Presentation - "OHN and the Internet" on the California Occupational Health Nurses' site, CSAOHN 2003 Conference, Embassy Suites, Monterey, California.

• Web sites authored and maintained:

  • NtropiX
  • NdustriX
  • NformatiX
  • NdeX
  • California El Camino Real Association of Occupational Health Nurses, CECRAOHN

  • And, the personal sites:

    • Connie Conover
    • John Conover
    • Machu Pichu/Amazon Trip
    • Ya-Ya Sisterhood, (don't ask.)
    
    

• Mailing lists maintained and moderated:

  • NtropiX
  • NdustriX
  • NformatiX
  • California El Camino Real Association of Occupational Health Nurses, CECRAOHN

  • And, the personal mailing lists:

    • Machu Pichu/Amazon Trip
    • Ya-Ya Sisterhood, (don't ask.)
    
    

Assorted Correspondence

The correspondence spans the late 1970's through the present, (some of the dates are incorrect,) and are concerned, (for the most part,) with the integration of information technology, entropic economics, and management theory into a unified concept of corporate management.

The correspondence is listed chronologically in each category:

• Entropic Economics and Equity Markets. Most are in regard to a stochastic model of equity prices, and applications to the programmed trading of stocks, day trading, and exploiting market "bubbles". Many of the concepts are implemented in the program, tsinvest.tar.gz, which is the C sources for entropic analysis of equity prices, and have a web site at NtropiX.

• Entropic Economics and Industrial Markets, Marketing, and Business Operations. Most are in regard to a formalized methodology of business operations and models. (See also, fractal.ps.gz - 2MB gzip compressed Postscript, or, fractal.pdf - 6 MB PDF, version of "Notes on the Fractal Analysis of Various Market Segments in the North American Electronics Industry," and fractal.tar.gz - Latex sources for the 700+ page document, which also includes the C Sources to the programs used in the analysis, and has a web site at NdustriX.)

• Entropic Economics and Management. Most are in regard to the formalization of corporate management methodologies that were distributed by the System Dynamics conference, the Business Process Redesign conference, the Learning Organization conference, and the Deming conference.

• Entropic Economics, Game Theory, General Mathematics, and Fractal Science. Most are concerned with the relationship between economics, game theory, fractal science, and formal mathematics-explaining how the consequences of self-referential systems and Nash equilibrium result in a complex system with fractal dynamics.

• Information Technology. Most are in regard to managing the dynamics of human organizations with information technology, and the implications to the decision process.

• Semiconductor, Computer, Software, Technology, and Electronics Engineering. Most are concerning the development methodology of technology and engineering, viewing the activities as a complex process, which is stochastic and may not be scalable.

• History of Technology. Most are observations about the historical perspective of technology and its relationship to civilization and the way we organize.

• Civilization, Anthropology. Most are observations about the stochastic dynamics of the history of civilization.

• If you are interested in things like the US GDP, equity values, industrial markets, economic "bubbles", and recessions/depressions, you might want to visit my six short articles on entropic economics, Quantitative Analysis of Non-Linear High Entropy Economic Systems, at the NdustriX site.

Software

All software is freely available and distributed as source code, at no charge, and was developed to facilitate inter-operability and portability across the Internet. The software is provided under license.

• tsinvest.tar.gz - C sources for tsinvest, a suite of programs that use non-linear extensions to the random walk fractal model of equity prices for automated day-trading. The extensions are similar to the discreet time "logistic" (parabolic) function. The tsinvest program scans all stocks in a market deciding which should be invested in at any time by calculating the fractal statistics of all equities. The program uses statistical estimation techniques to estimate the accuracy of the fractal statistics. Different decision criteria are available as command line options which alter the statistical methodology and portfolio optimization. The tsinvest programs have their own site at NtropiX The NtropiX archive is at http://www.johncon.com/ntropix/archive/.

• fractal.ps.gz - 2MB gzip compressed Postscript, or, fractal.pdf - 6 MB PDF, version of "Notes on the Fractal Analysis of Various Market Segments in the North American Electronics Industry," and fractal.tar.gz - Latex sources for the 700+ page document, which also includes the C Sources to the programs used in the analysis of business models and optimization, and has a web site at NdustriX The NdustriX archive is at http://www.johncon.com/ndustrix/archive/.

• rel.tar.gz - C sources for rel, a suite of programs and tools for building wide area full text information retrieval systems over the Internet, (i.e., competitive intelligence, or corporate knowledge based systems.) The search mechanisms are capable of sorting documents by relevance to keyword search criteria. Boolean operations (and, or, not, and grouping operators,) on multiple keywords are fully supported and the programs are capable of phonetic keyword search. The rel programs have their own site at NformatiX. The NformatiX archive is at http://www.johncon.com/nformatix/archive/.

• ndex.tar.gz - C sources for ndex, a suite of command line utilities for fast binary searching sorted flat file constant databases. Partial key searches and files with tab delimited fields are supported in a multiuser environment. The ndex programs have their own site at NdeX. The NdeX archive is at http://www.johncon.com/ndex/archive/.

• fax.shar.gz - Shar file of Latex facsimile document style sources. (See: fax.txt for particulars.)

• faxmail.txt.gz - Text file description of using the Unix mail system to distribute facsimile received by the HylaFax fax server.

• qt.shar.gz - Shar file of sh script sources for the Query Text program, a full text information retrieval system. (See: qt.txt for particulars.)

• rolo.shar.gz - Shar file of sh script sources for the rolodex program, a general purpose Unix text file database manager. (See: rolo.txt for particulars.)

• sendmail.shar.gz - Shar file of sh script sources for a BSD sendmail work alike for SysV, rel. 4.2.

• info.shar.gz - Shar file of sh script sources for an information retrieval program for the Unix mail system.

• archive.shar.gz - Shar file of sh script sources for an electronic mail message archive program for the Unix mail system.

• retrieve.shar.gz - Shar file of sh script sources for an electronic mail message retrieval program for the Unix mail system.

• address.shar.gz - Shar file of sh script sources for an electronic mail message address archive and retrieval program for the Unix mail system.

• pdict.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for phonetic word lookup in the system dictionary. (See: pdict.txt for particulars.)

• tkbiff.shar.gz - Shar file of tk script sources for a Tk/Tcl implementation of a multi-folder biff for the X Window System. (See: tkbiff.txt for particulars.)

• btreeperl.shar.gz - Shar file of C sources for Btree operations for the Perl programming language. (See: btreeperl.txt for particulars.)

• ctreeperl.shar.gz - Shar file of C sources for FairCom Ctree operations for the Perl programming language.

• fquery.shar.gz - Shar file of C program sources for fquery, a file query/sort program. (See: fquery.txt for particulars.)

• optimize.shar.gz - Shar file of C sources for a linear programming optimization program.

• sigma.shar.gz - Shar file of C program sources for sigma (standard deviation) calculation program.

• strategy.shar.gz - Shar file of C sources for game theoretic optimal strategy program using linear programming techniques.

• dbappend.shar.gz - Shar file of C sources for a database data file manager. (See: dbappend.txt for particulars.)

• allocobj.shar.gz - Shar file of C library sources for a simple object oriented core memory manager.

• hash.shar.gz - Shar file of C library sources for hash table functions.

• strsort.shar.gz - Shar file of C library sources for binary sort and search routines.

• vm.shar.gz - Shar file for C library sources for general purpose virtual memory routines.

• xfigutilities.tar.gz - Tar C sources for programs that make bar graphs and pie charts in xfig(1) file format.

• tscount.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for counting the number of like records in a file. (See: tscount.txt for particulars.)

• mboxstats.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for counting the messages in a Unix mboxfile. (See: mboxstats.txt for particulars.)

• dwatch.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for programs that remote monitor log files and directories with local filters. (See: dwatch.txt, and, logwatch.txt for particulars; Note: these programs use the Linux F_NOTIFY operations for fcntl(2) and may not be portable to other operating systems.)

• rw.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for the template/skeleton used to handle file I/O in daemon process that use Unix pipes.

• sine_sound.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for generating calibrated sine waves by a PC sound card via stdin for testing audio equipment.

• sunrise-set.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for calculating sunrise and sunset based on location and timezone. (See: sunrise-set.txt for particulars.)

• ucspi-daemon.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for interoperability, transaction processing, and concurrency control for the tcpserver and tcpclient programs at cr.yp.to/ucspi-tcp.html. (See: ucspi-daemon.txt for particulars.)

• cumulativesigma.tar.gz - Tar file of C program sources for cumulative normal distribution calculation.

• poll.tar.gz - Tar file of C program sources for prediction of election outcomes based on polling data.

• chime.tar.gz - Tar file of C program sources for sounding tubular chime bells over a PC sound card.

• random_int.tar.gz - Tar file of C program sources for generating a uniform deviate random positive integer in shell scripts.

• tsunique.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for removing duplicate records from a time series file. (See: tsunique.txt for particulars.)

• tsbinary.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for generating a series of binary numbers. (See: tsbinary.txt for particulars.)

• tssequence.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for generating a random and descending integer for reordering the records in a text file. (See: tssequence.txt for particulars.

• cmd.tar.gz - Tar file of Procmail/Smartlist scripts for a Confirmed Mail Delivery agent that is very effective at protecting children's e-mail addresses from commercial e-mail. See, also, the Confirmed Mail Delivery web page.

• securingemail.txt - Procmail(1) script which is very effective at securing corporate e-mail systems. See, also, the Securing E-Mail page.

• ipchains.gateway.txt, ipchains.terminal.txt - firewall rules and security for a SOHO LAN. See, also, the IpchainsRules page. (See, also: Knoppix and Coyote Cookbook, for additional information, and a firewall script, using iptables, for a SOHO router/firewall.)

• quarantine.outlook.attachments.txt - Procmail(1) script to filter potentially malicious Microsoft Outlook® attachments. See, also, the Quarantine Attachments page.

• receivedIP.tar.gz - Tar file for C library sources of programs for auditing e-mail "Received: " IP addresses. See, also, the ReceivedIP web page.

• stochastic.UCE.detection.txt - Procmail(1) script which is very effective at reducing the amount of commercial e-mail received by users. See, also, the Stochastic UCE Detection page, which has a Theory section for those initiated in information theory, (sometimes called, informatics).

• Knoppix and Coyote Cookbook - Applications of Knoppix and Coyote Linux for information appliances-SOHO gateways, routers, firewalls, network address translation, personal work stations, remastering distributions, etc.

Archive

The sources to all programs are available in the archive, http://www.johncon.com/john/archive/.

Hardware

All hardware documentation is freely available and distributed at no charge. The hardware documentation is provided under license.

• Spatial Distortion Reduction Headphone Amplifier - reduces the the "super stereo" effect when stereo music is played through headphones. There is a Addendum on the Spatial Distortion Reduction Headphone Amplifier site that describes software that implements the spatial distortion reduction scheme outlined on the site-it allows a RIFF/WAVE format selection from a music CD to be "digitally re-mastered" for use with headphones. It works especially well with portable high capacity CD/MP3 players, Additionally, there is a note on The Case For Stereo Headphones.

• Direct Coupled Stereo Headphone Amplifier - is about the design of a high quality direct coupled headphone amplifier that eliminates output coupling capacitors-and their related problems.

• Terminated Tilted Folded Dipole Shortwave Antenna - for international shortwave broadcast news reception.

• EWE Shortwave Antenna - for international shortwave broadcast news reception.

• Linux System Gamma Calibration - for calibrating colors and brightness of the printed output from digital cameras.

• Linux Sound System Calibration - for calibrating sound cards for maximum dynamic range.

• Modem Telephone Dialing and CID Acquisition - uses a modem and computer to record telephone Caller Identification Data, (CID,) and dial personal phone numbers from a database.

• Control Program for the X10 CM17A and MR26A - a program to control the X10 CM17A Computer Interface and MR26A RF Receiver for building a home automation autonomous information robot, (e.g., 'bot,) that controls devices around the house and implements a security surveillance system.

• r8.tar.gz - Tar file of C sources for controlling the R. L. Drake R8 Communications Receiver via an RS232C serial port. (See: r8.txt for particulars.)

• Using the Panasonic WM61A as a Measurement Microphone - for acoustic analysis of sound systems using a Linux PC.

• Subwoofer Speaker Design - for designing subwoofer speaker systems to tailor the acoustic characteristics of a listening environment.