Don Woods

In December 2003 I started work at Postini, which offers spam filtering, archiving, and related services for email and IM. In September 2007 Postini was acquired by Google. Unlike the PlaceWare acquisition (below), this time I chose to stick around.

Before Postini I was working at PlaceWare. PlaceWare offers Web Conferencing and other products for on-line collaboration. The company was acquired by Microsoft in April 2003, and they relocated the engineering department to Redmond, WA. (They also renamed the product to be Microsoft Office Live Meeting.) I chose to stay behind and see what new opportunities I could find in Silicon Valley, leading me eventually to Postini.

I went to PlaceWare in December 2000 from NaviLinks, a now-defunct spinoff from ClariNet Communications Corp., where I went at the end of 1996. ClariNet is mostly known for supplying the clari.* newsgroups; it was sold to YellowBrix in late 2003. NaviLinks was developing technology for automating the adding of links into high volumes of text (such as news) to related content on the web.

Before that, I was at General Magic for 2 1/2 years, where I developed a prototype Web browser for the Magic Cap platform, and worked on the Telescript-based HTML and Web support libraries that got released under the name Tabriz. I've also worked at Sun Microsystems (primarily on the NeWS window system and toolkit) and at Xerox (on Star, which subsequently evolved into GlobalView).

In my spare time, I enjoy playing a wide variety of games -- card games, board games, role-playing games, etc. Some of my favorites include Titan by Avalon Hill, and the Empire Builder series of games (sometimes called "crayon rail games") from Mayfair Games. (I've even created a program to generate new decks of cards for the latter.) I am perhaps best known, with Will Crowther, for having written the original Adventure game. I've also written several implementations of a double-deck solitaire game called "Spider". And some friends and I developed a play-by-Email space combat/diplomacy game called Phoenix; we licensed it for a while to a PBEM game company, but they eventually dropped it, and we haven't done much with the game in rather a while now.

Despite the Adventure game and other role-playing, I managed for some time to avoid getting sucked into any massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs). In late 2003, however, while between jobs, I briefly considered trying to design such a game, and to get an idea of what already existed I started playing EverQuest, certainly one of the more successful MMORPGs out there. My design venture never took off, but my addiction to EverQuest continues, and in October 2004 I took over maintenance of the FAQ for the alt.games.everquest newsgroup. My wife prefers City of Heroes and World of Warcraft over EverQuest, but we've compromised and spend one night a week playing together in Lord of the Rings Online.

My other claims to fame include being co-author of The Hacker's Dictionary, co-designer of the INTERCAL Programming Language, and author of a textbook titled Notes on Introductory Combinatorics.

I live in Los Altos, California, with my wife, two daughters, and two cats. Actually, my older daughter doesn't live here any more; she lives with her husband. They chose to follow the example set by my wife and me by getting married on April Fools Day.

Click here for a chart (formatted in PDF) showing the odds of getting various numbers of "hits" when rolling dice in Titan or similar games. (If for some reason you don't have a PDF reader (such as Adobe Acrobat), here's the same chart in PostScript format.)

Click here for a rather difficult logic puzzle I devised, called "Twenty Questions".

Click here to see the rules to a game I designed that you can play with pieces you probably have at home.

Click here to see the modifications my gaming group has come up with for Avalon Hill's game, Wizards.

Click here to see the rules to a pure strategy game called Psychological JuJitsu.