Hack on

this is qemfd.net (and the real nick black)!

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

This is the home server of Nick Black (aka dank), located at 33°46′44.4"N, 84°23'2.4"W (33.779, 85.384) 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. However you roll, dankwiki's rollin' wit' you. I make no guarantees concerning correctness, relevance, or timeliness of the information contained herein. Track changes using the Recent changes page. 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...

RECRUITERS: my résumé is available here. No, I do not have a "Microsoft Word" aka "doc" or "docx" version, nor do I have any way to create one. As opposed to directly calling me, I request that your initial contact come via email to nickblack@linux.com, or via LinkedIn. I am always available to discuss new opportunities, though I am fairly unwilling to leave Atlanta anytime soon. I am generally uninterested in (and poorly suited for) software development outside the UNIX environment, sorry. Open Source-friendly employers are strongly preferred. Thanks!

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. Still have any questions? ■

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

Freedom means a hardline anti-Apple stance. Fight the Disneyfication of computing!

• bugzilla for projects like
  • omphalos (file a new bug)
  • libtorque (file a new bug)
  • libdank (file a new bug)
• Hudson for autobuilding the same!
• Still growing! The world's largest collection of computer science eponyms. ■

Projects?

Faster hands → less whipping.

• I'll (most likely) be teaching CS4803UWS, "UNIX Weapons School", Summer 2013 at Georgia Tech
• Hackery! (projects and open source work). The machines. Matrix of large cases.
• The WORDHORDE. Some books I'd like to write.
• Grad school and CS GRE prep page. Some notes on LaTeX. Too many morphisms!
• Elemental naming and good words. Atlanta.
• BlackBerry/Android crap. F'n bookshelves.
• What does worldwide TaB® consumption have to do with nuclear weapons?
• My grad school presentations tended to run slightly, just a little, unorthodox...Yep, still weird.
• Other people's projects. Other people's programming quotes. ■

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). ■

A few remarks regarding computers etc.

That shit Cray!

• 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 or Tilera'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, middle-endian, 27-bit word) 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. ■

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. Online tools for Internet analytics.
• 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. 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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"I have never known a greater monster nor miracle than myself." - Michel de Montaigne

• quod erat demonstrandum!