operating system term paper

Projects: Anvil , Asbestos , Click , DCCP ( Service Code Calculator ), Featherstitch , Kudos , Masstree , SNACK, Suelo, Sympathy, Tamer , Tenet , XORP . Old: Eel , Prolac .

Software: Gifsicle , HotCRP , Ipsumdump , John Kimble , LCDF Typetools , Masstree , T1utils , Xbraitenberg , Xmahjongg , Portable Xshostakovich++ 98!! , Xwrits , Xzewd .

Contact information

• Left-leaning red-black trees considered harmful
• LaTeX usage notes

“I have learned—but again and again I forget—that abstraction is a bad thing, innumerable and infinitesimal and tiresome; worse than any amount of petty fact. … It is like a useless, fruitless vegetation, spreading and twining and fading and corrupting; even the ego disappears under it …” Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk

“One’s reasoning is a strange thing; is really not reason, is a mingling of resistances, unperceptiveness, un-coordination and helplessness.” Marianne Moore to Lloyd Frankenberg, December 26, 1943 ( Selected Letters )

“… I romantically swore a loyal oath in the other garden that until my own death I would eschew ambition for worldly success and avoid the wielders of influence and power, choosing my friends among the innocently uncompetitive. It is not a vow that I have always been able to keep.” Francis Wyndham, The Other Garden

“At the beginning of a new notebook I copy a quote from Simone Weil, which captures me completely: ‘Don’t insist on understanding new things, but try with your whole self, with patience, effort and method, to comprehend obvious truths.’ ¶ This quote conducts a polemic with the ceaseless, barbaric pursuit of novelty and disdain for obvious, primary truths. ¶ And so all my notes, all these snail’s traces, are the realization of Simone’s one thought. I won’t and can’t discover anything, I want only with my whole self to reach the heart of obvious truths.” Anna Kamienska, Industrious Amazement: A Notebook (translated by Clare Cavanagh)

“Our mass culture—and a good deal of our high, or serious, culture as well—is dominated by an emphasis on data and a corresponding lack of interest in theory, by a frank admiration of the factual and an uneasy contempt for imagination, sensibility, and speculation. We are obsessed with technique, hagridden by Facts, in love with information. … [O]ur scholars—or, more accurately, our research administrators—erect pyramids of data to cover the corpse of a stillborn idea…. ” Dwight Macdonald, “The Triumph of the Fact,” in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain

“[Psychologist Albert] Bregman … gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received. Trying to decide whether to major in psychology or art history, I had gone to his office to see what he thought. He squinted and lowered his head. ‘Is this a hard choice for you?’ he demanded. Yes! I cried. ‘Oh,’ he said, springing back up cheerfully. ‘In that case, it doesn’t matter. If it’s a hard decision, then there’s always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way. Hard choices are always unimportant.’” Adam Gopnik, “Music to your Ears”

→ Longer quotes

Projects and software

• The Click modular router . Widely used software for building anything that touches network packets. Free; BSD-like license.
• DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol) .
• Tenet , an architecture for tiered embedded networks. Sensor network software built around a simple, pluggable tasklet abstraction.
• XORP , the eXtensible Open Router Platform.
• HotCRP . Slick and powerful conference management software. Free; BSD-like license.
• Ipsumdump . Translates tcpdump files, or other packet sources, into a human- and program-readable ASCII format. Free; BSD-like license.
• Gifsicle . A command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations. Free; GPL-like license.
• LCDF Typetools . Nine programs for dealing with Type 1, multiple-master, and OpenType fonts. Includes cfftot1 , mmafm , mmpfb , otfinfo , otftotfm , t1dotlessj , t1lint , t1reencode , and t1testpage . Free; GPL.
• T1utils . Six programs for manipulating Adobe Type 1 fonts. Includes t1ascii , t1binary , t1asm , t1disasm , t1mac , and t1unmac . Free; BSD-like license.
• Xbraitenberg . X-based Braitenberg vehicle simulator, with “realistic” pseudophysics and collisions. Free; BSD-like license.
• Xmahjongg . X-based mah jongg solitaire game. Free; GPL.
• Portable Xshostakovich++ 98!! Silly X thing. Free; Open Profanity License.
• Xwrits . X-based wrist break reminder. Free; GPL.
• Asbestos , an operating system built around decentralized information flow.
• Eel, the Explicit Event Library . An event-driven programming library amenable to program analysis, and several analysis tools. Developed by Ryan Cunningham.
• Prolac . A language for writing readable network protocol implementations.
• Xzewd . An X11/Motif Zephyr interface, with perks . Free, but MIT-specific.

Non Academic

• A Letter From The Community
• Hosted by the John Cage Trust
• As a musical score (a gift box published by C. F. Peters, designed & edited by yours truly!)
• Some Words and Phrases from That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana
• This, Of Course, Is a Generalization
• His Name Was
• F*** the Bureaucracy
• Fire Poker (with “Murder, She Wrote”)
• The Anything-Goes Aesthetic
• Nico Muhly Tweets Through Einstein on the Beach
• Lady Nijō Is Sad
• What it felt like to bomb a Berkeley interview in 2000
• John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music : The Libretto
• From The Indian Jugglers , by William Hazlitt
• “Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight”
• “You Are Very Pensive—Hammering Out in Darkness What Will Not Bear the Light of Day”
• Everybody Do the Fu!
• “The Click Modular Router,” Kohler et al., TOCS , August 2000 (2.2 MB). Sample page
• “Topological Groundwater Hydrodynamics,” Garrison Sposito, Advances in Water Resources 24 (2001) 793-801 (716 KB). Thanks to Prof. Sposito.
• Yet Another Program To Enliven Academic Papers through the Application of Randomly-Placed Royalty-Free Old-Time Cat Imagery, Version 0.3191987265 . Includes 5 pieces of royalty-free old-time cat imagery. (More old-time cat imagery)
• Related: WILDCAT ON THE LOOSE!!!1!!
• Take One (MP4, 2.8MB; or 4.3MB AVI )
• Take Two (MP4, 1.2MB; or 2MB AVI )
• Nupur’s Google Tips
• Lesser Known Phoenixes
• Good Uses for Huge Red Blinky Font
• Higer Than The Moon
• Gonad, Cat from Hell
• Anne’s Awesome Threnody
• Anne Pays Homage to the Unix Shell
• Theodor Adorno On Writing
• I Love Mom, where according to the principles of Semantic Free Naming, “Mom” has been replaced with an MD5 hash of her contents
• Bored, Bored, Bored
• Linus Torvalds Is Sometimes Unable To Distinguish One Thing From Another
• Marc By Marc Jacobs Punk Anthem [explicit]
• New Years 2006 Songs
• SOSP 2005 Song [explicit]
• A Requiem for Chris’s Face
• Song In Honor of Chelle Gentemann’s Impending Wedding
• Colorado Sculpture Song
• The Neighbor Cat That Comes Into My Apartment Through the Cat Door Sings Along with Rufus Wainwright
• Song Written by Helen Cargill and I About a Liquor Store That Opened at the Corner of Mass Ave and Comm Ave in Boston in 1995 Or So, Sung to the Tune of the March from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker
• Song Based On a Lowbrow Ethnic-Humor Schoolyard Rhyme, Written Mostly by My Brother With Contributions by Gina and Myself on a Long Car Trip to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont
• Pants Song for a Berkeley Passerby, December 8, 2003
• Gina’s School-Cool Song, January 4, 2004
• Norman Borlaug’s Song, Sung to the Tune of Miss Susie Had a Steamboat
• The Little Giant Book of Jokes
• DreamWorks SKG: Meaningful Pages From a Dream Journal
• Trapper Keepers We Have Known
• The String Trio Will Not Shut Up (photography by Huan T. Tran)
• The Essence of Anime
• Texas Wedding
• Gilligan’s Apartment
• Form Is Content, Content, Form
• Memory Allocation in C, by Rebecca
• Arrrr! I am a kitty!
• Kierkegaardian Thoughts on Ethics and Morals
• Afartment 3-G
• Scott Bakula
• The Cast of InuYasha
• Jessica Walter (MP4)
• Jessica Walter again (MP4)
• How Your People Have Been Dying And Are About To Die Over Drug Money Owed To Me. , by Jennifer ‘Jenna’ Pincetl
• The Job Application
• Two Statements of Purpose for the University of Washington, 1995: One , Two
• An East Bay Saturday Afternoon with Rebecca and Chris, January 17, 2004
• A Failed Logo Design for the International Computer Science Institute
• Four Games of Bar Telephone (Only the Last is Offensive) Played By Me, Andrew, Katie, Tony, and Nick at the Albatross, Juneish 2003
• Vermont Wedding 2002: the story
• Proofreading The Literature of California, Volume 1
• The First Lessons
• Further Lessons from the Masters
• Yet Other Master Classes
• Noam Chomsky’s 9-11
• Mango’s jealous (1.2MB)
• International Views on Celeste Technology
• The Death of Collaborative Filtering, Demonstrated By Confusing And/Or Disastrously Inappropriate Amazon.com Results
• Writing For the First Time Through Ally Sheedy’s Yesterday I Saw The Sun
• Jenny Holzer’s Truisms , Typeset as Random Word Balloons
• Patterns Made for a Friend Who Wanted To Test His Ideas About the Synaesthetic Connections Between Music and the Visual Perceptual System While Under the Influence, May 1992: 1 , 2 , 3
• Captain Andrew Expounds on Princess Pirlipat (Saturday, December 20, 2003, 1:07:28pm)
• Chris (Saturday, December 20, 2003, 4:50:58pm)
• Gina and Clarke at Duke’s of Malibu (New Year’s Day 2004, 4:51:40pm)
• My old web page