Hack on

this is qemfd.net (and the real nick black)! my résumé is available here.

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 (see exciting recent news!). This wiki is primarily for my personal use, but open to public viewing in case anything generally helpful emerges. I make no guarantees concerning correctness, relevance, or timeliness of the information contained herein. Track changes using the Recent changes page, RSS, or Google Reader. However you roll, blackwiki's rollin' wit' you. I was pondering a strictly technical blog, but this wiki and grad school have satisfied ye olde furor scribendi. Until then, don't mistake my kindness for weakness: rien n'est simple, mais tout est facile...

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I like to stay up late on the computer, looking for answers.

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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QEMFD! (wikipedia, wolfram) also provides...

• bugzilla for projects like
  • omphalos (bug list, file a new bug)
  • libtorque (bug list, file a new bug)
  • libdank (bug list, file a new bug)
• Hudson for autobuilding the same!
• phpSysInfo / AWStats / Cacti
• old main page (including directions + contact info) ■

Projects?

Faster hands → less whipping.

• Hackery! (projects and open source work). The machines.
• 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/Android crap. F'n bookshelves. Some notes on LaTeX.
• What does worldwide TaB® consumption have to do with nuclear weapons?
• My grad school presentations tended to run slightly, just a little, unorthodox...
• Other peoples' projects.

UNIX

Debian Linux: Would you like fries with that elitism?

• Writing high-performance, scalable UNIX system applications is my primary passion.
• Linux APIs, FreeBSD APIs, ELF (which is not, in itself, an API).
• 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 mix

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

• glibc, other interesting libraries, working with libraries, some implementing interfaces like pthreads.
• X Macros, ISO C99, rpaths, gcc notes, gmake notes.
• There's Buses and Ports, of course, of course.
• Intel's Sandy Bridge and Nehalem x86 microarchitectures.
  • or, if you'd prefer, Transmeta's processors.
• 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. I don't much care for writing Gecko Addons (aka FireFox plugins).
• 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! Still have any questions?

Networking

• Please adhere to the various standards (even where mutually contradictory)
  • "As one judge said to another, 'Be just, and when you can't be just, be arbitrary.' "
• Topology Discovery
• SSHFP and LOC records. DNSSEC.
• The Sender Policy Framework (SPF).
• VoIP and telephony, NAPTR records.
• Some TCP notes. Syncookies. ARP is no longer used in IPv6, which more fully embraces zero-configuration networking.
• The Working Man's Guide to ICAP, ICAP page
• Mirror of the BIg-Internet list from ftp://munnari.oz.au
• Tunneling, SNMP, NFS...
• Van Jacobson Channels get everybody all hooting and hollaring every decade or so

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quod erat demonstrandum!