Hack on

I like to stay up late on the computer...and look for answers.

this is qemfd.net

This is the home server of Nick Black (aka dank), located at 33°77′N, 84°38′W in the heart of Midtown Atlanta, GA. This wiki is primarily for my personal use, but open to public viewing in case anything generally helpful emerges (and to fight the search engine presence of the hated nick black band, who're very much on the enemies list). I make no guarantees concerning correctness, relevance, or timeliness of the information contained herein. I've started this project only recently (February 2008), and while it is growing quickly, most articles are by necessity stub links. If you are stalking me, you'd do better consulting my blog at LiveJournal, or my MySpace / Facebook. Sometimes I edit Wikipedia articles, as well, and I love to review books on GoodReads. I was pondering a strictly technical blog, but this wiki and grad school have satisfied ye olde furor scribendi.

Track changes using the Recent changes page, RSS, or Google Reader. However you roll, blackwiki's rollin' wit' you.

QEMFD (wikipedia, wolfram) ■

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Seriously: I primarily write to force my own understanding, and remember things (a few entries are actually semi-authoritative). I'm just a disreputable Mariner on your way to the Wedding. If you derive use from this wiki, consider yourself lucky, and please get confirmation before relying on my writeups to perform surgery, design planes, determine whether a graph G is a scorpion, or feed your pet rhinoceros.

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• phpsysinfo, cacti, old main page (including directions + contact info)
• bugzilla for projects like libtorque (bug list, file a new bug) and libdank (bug list, file a new bug)

Projects?

• Hackery! The WORDHORDE. Some books I'd like to write.
• Grad school and CS GRE prep page. Matrix of i7 laptops.
• Elemental naming and good words. Atlanta.
• BlackBerry crap. F'n bookshelves. Other peoples' projects. Some notes on LaTeX.
• What does worldwide TaB® consumption have to do with nuclear weapons?

UNIX

• Power Management. Sound Software, Using Unicode. Keeping FreeBSD up-to-date. Hacking CUDA on Debian.
• Debian, Xorg hell, Consoles and Framebuffers. Recent insanity: DBus, HAL. Making graphs with dot.
• Notes on editing and running MediaWiki. Core files happen when one dances fandango on core. Notes on subversion.
• Linux on Dells, SMART and SATA, udev, various linux-related hardware detritus (mainly random personal crap).

Things I wish I'd never learned, and very cool things, in a stub-dense pile

Can you guess which are which (sometimes it changes)?

• Writing high-performance, scalable UNIX system applications is a passion of mine.
• Linux APIs, FreeBSD APIs, ELF (which is not, in itself, an API).
• glibc, other interesting libraries, working with libraries, some implementing interfaces like pthreads.
• X Macros, ISO C99, rpaths, gcc notes, gmake notes.
• The cpuid instruction, SMP on x86, Performance Counters, simulators.
  • Simulators ought not be confused with the 4,000 Linux VT Solutions!
• Getting into ARM. Getting into ACPI. Getting into Architecture. I want a (PIVT) MISD machine; until then, there's SIMD.
• Lamport's Hash, Lamport's Clock, Skip Lists, I will put thoughts about automata here, Dijkstran Method.
• Flash sucks. Need get a handle on Compiler Design by tomorrow's midterm.
  • Now it's Programming Language Theory by tomorrow's final, heh.
• Trees for smoking and computing. lock- and wait-free algorithms. Cache-oblivious algorithms. RCU.
• Allocators get us that free store, son (usually through a DRAM-backed VM)!
  • Said VM might implement transactional memory, and almost certainly works on pages.
• Via Grover's Algorithm, we might be able to discover the monster at the end of this quantum book.
• Jefferson's Time Warp algorithm, and while we're at it, timer wheels and even x86 timing.
• Let's get bipartite, bipartite...with bip buffers.
• Ling adders, Blum's axioms, and Rice's Theorem are all named after people smarter than me...
  • ...as are Chaitin's Constant and Kolmogorov complexity, and lots of other junk.
• Too many morphisms!
• Questions?

Networking

• SSHFP and LOC records. The Sender Policy Framework (SPF).
• VoIP and telephony, NAPTR records
• Some TCP notes. Syncookies.
• The Working Man's Guide to ICAP, ICAP page
• SNMP
• Mirror of the BIg-Internet list from ftp://munnari.oz.au
• Tunneling
• Van Jacobson Channels get everybody all hooting and hollaring every decade or so

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contents copyright © nick black 2008-2010. all rights reserved. quod erat demonstrandum!