1994 - Present

  • Twenty four years of experience have improved my teaching performance. Here are example student responses from Fall 1998 course surveys.
    • ENGR 661 - Computer Networks II
      The instructor made me read all of that networking code (which I would not have done if left up to me). Gave me a lot of insights into networking and Unix fundamentals. Had fun and liked the course. Instructor was very approachable. Was provided with the conceptual tools to analyze networks from system and application perspectives, plus I had the opportunity to enhance my C language programming knowledge. The best course of my entire academic career -- THE BEST COURSE! The oral exams were great. His approach to the material is excellent and there is a lot of interaction between professor Maginnis and the students.
    • CSCI 524 - Distributed OS Design
      He is full of ideas. He expresses his ideas in a manner that is easily understood. The course inspires the student very much. Excellent professor. Covers many theoretical aspects of the subject. Eloquent, informative, and wide-ranging.
    • CSCI 323 - Systems Programming
      The course material is very applied to real-world work environments which makes it extremely useful. The instructor is enthusiastic and knowledgeable. Loved the course, very informative and interesting. The course is substantial, informative, and rich. The instructor knows his material and is well prepared.
  • Supervised four and graduated three Ph.D. candidates.
  • Supervised four network-related Master's projects.
  • Developed new course material for five courses.
  • Founded Sair Linux/GNU Certification which was subsequently sold in 2001.

1991 - 1994

Maginnis' teaching maxim: Make students work as hard as possible for the lowest possible grade.
My student's maxim: Work as little as possible for the highest possible grade.
Ipso facto: Lecturing a classroom of college kids is not that much different than a tag-team wrestling match except there is only one of you.

Nevertheless, University teaching surveys reveal that 40% of my students think I am an excellent teacher and another 38% believe I am a good teacher; 61% of the students find the courses average in difficulty while the remaining 39% find the courses difficult; and and in a separate question, 47% find the amount of effort required to be high compared to other instructor's courses. 


Supervised the development of various "electronic brochures"
(today's Web-based Flash presentations)
which were used in mass mail-outs, convention promotions,
and as notebook-based sales tools.


Supervised the design and development of an electronic brochure
architecture containing levels of abstraction including
screen, window, canvas, button, rectangle, and text display.
Unlike other authoring packages, the architecture offers no software
restrictions on graphic design and user-program interaction,
yet project development time has been reduced by a factor of four.


Designed and directed development of software tools used in the
development of electronic brochures including: font display routines,
a formatting library for graphics-based text,
conversion utilities to exchange font family formats,
two bit-map font editors, archiver and de-archiver utilities,
data compression and expansion utilities, and a generic "install" utility
that transfers the electronic brochure to the hard disk, runs the
program and deletes the program upon completion. 


Supervised the design and development of the computer science student
invitational electronic brochure.
Features small tour of Oxford and Campus, introduction of departmental
faculty and students, overview of the network, an overview of
campus student life, and description of courses in the curriculum.
Over 500 copies have been mailed out to high school students expressing
an interest in computer science.


Course coordinator for a new course in multimedia design and development.
1986 to 1991 - Associate Professor
University of Mississippi, School of Engineering, Department of Computer
and Information Science.


Primary research effort has been the development of a distributed operating
system (DOS).


Previous attempts at modifying XINU and MINIX proved unsuccessful and
now two Ph.D. students are working on FreeBSD.
Once completed, the new design should allow novel distributed topologies
which can be configured for maximizing performance, resource sharing,
or reliability.
Future research will deal with a global file manager, distributed security,
automatic user command distribution, and transparent user program
decomposition and distribution.


Most departmental service consists of systems administration and
supervision of systems personnel.
Directed seven masters theses.



1986 - 1991



From Spring semester 1989 to Spring 1991 10 of my courses were surveyed
using the Center for Faculty Evaluation and Development in Higher
Education "idea report."
An average of 10.4 students per class answered the survey.
For overall course evaluation, students gave my 10 courses an average ranking
of 81.8 percentile when compared to all courses in the idea report database.


Presented an invited three-lecture series on computer networks to the
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Albany State College
in May of 1990.


Supervised the construction of a SLIP driver for PCroute over the summer
of 1989.
Presently supervising the implementation of the Internet Simple Network
Management Protocol in PCroute.


Promoted PCroute to MISNET personnel as a least-cost Internet connection
and there are now approximately 100 PCroute nodes in the state-wide MISNET.


Developed an hierarchical flow-control model for basic and distributed
operating systems.


Code-level understanding of XINU and MINIX kernels as well as many UNIX
utilities.
Employed most UNIX services in various applications.



1979 to 1986



Using a University student survey, average student rating over ten
undergraduate courses (graduate courses were not surveyed): 26% Excellent,
47% Good, 21% Average, and 6% Below Average.


Co-developed a serial line networking package (ThriftNet) which ran on
the ADSS (PDP-9), CMS (IBM System/370), CP/M (Intel 8080), MS-DOS
(Intel 8088), OS/8 (PDP-8), RSTS/E (PDP-11), RSX-11M (PDP-11), RT-11
(PDP-11), TOPS (PDP-10), TRSDOS (Z-80), and UNIX V6 (PDP-11) environments.


Designed and supervised construction of several Q-bus hardware modules.


Code level understanding of the UNIX V6 kernel and various utilities.


Installed V7 CSNET (Phonenet with MMDF) on a our V6 UNIX system.


Developed proficiency in porting ThriftNet algorithms among operating
systems and architectures.


Formed a sole proprietorship, Maginnis Computer Consulting, which
performed hardware maintenance for the PDP-8, PDP-12, and PDP-11/34
computer systems within the School of Pharmacy and the School of Engineering.



1975 to 1979



Developed (in PDP-11 assembly language and cross compiled on PDP-10 TOPS)
a real-time process control kernel for laboratory experiments.