Circular

I was catching up on old magazines and I read this:

Professor [Richard] Taylor's paper "A Classification and Comparison Framework for Software Architecture Description Languages" has been identified by Information and Software Technology as the most cited article in software engineering articles for the year 2000. Over the last 20 years, the paper ranks fourth as most cited. The paper was co-authored by Nenad Medvidovic.

in "Innovate ICS", a newsletter from the Department of Information and Computer Science (now promoted to the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences - since you probably can't find the magazine, you can check out the ICS news feed).

Professor Taylor was my thesis advisor and I was the first student of his to get a Ph.D. It was a great pleasure working with him at UCI.

Anyway, late congratulations to Professor Taylor!

Here's an overhead shot from Live Maps of the UC Irvine campus. Notice the circular shape. I always thought that the design of UCI was similar to the design envisioned for EPCOT at Walt Disney World. Ray Watson was the president of the Irvine Company back in the day and was also on the board of Walt Disney Productions, so I imagine there might have been some information transfer between Walt Disney Productions, The Irvine Company, and the Regents of the University of California. He lived near me in Eastbluff, Newport Beach, CA, and I interviewed him once for a class assignment when I was in high school. He was a great guy and an inspiration to me on how calm an executive can be even with a lot of responsibility.

Here's a picture of the original layout for various part of Walt Disney World (aka "The Florida Project"). Of course, Disneyland has the same circular shape. Some games I've worked on have a hub-and-spoke layout as well (see page 6/7 of the Azurik manual - that's actually a 3D hub because there's an Air Realm and above that the Life Realm and below it all is the Death Realm with the town at the center of the hub).

UCI has changed enormously in the 22 years since I graduated. I need to visit! And to congratulate Professor Taylor in person.

(Note: also check out this view of the ICS building: when I was going to school there this building was the entirety of the ICS department. Notice the square hole in the middle! I once proposed turning the middle area into a giant aquarium! I wonder why that idea never went anywhere ...)

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