Welcome to phfactor.net

Highway 38 outside of DeKalb, IL, February 2001
Highway 38 outside of DeKalb, IL, February 2001

News

Current news can be found on the Wordpress blog. Note that, as of March 26 08, the blog is now at fnord.phfactor.net! Old URLs should redirect automatically.

I've moved the old news and updates to their own page. Why, no one knows.

Contents

  • My weblog, Fnord. This is where the majority of new content is going, so please take a look and check it out.
  • Chris's area. Math, databases, her resume, all sorts of cool stuff going on here! Her CSS is much nicer than the rest of the site.
  • Annalog, a weblog for our life with our new daughter Anna. Lots of baby pictures.
  • The photography section This is the bulk of the current content. Life, scenery, hardware, etc, etc. Otherwise known as a life more ordinary.
  • Gift registry Local (passworded) PHP gift registry for family and friends.
    •

    Recommendations

    I do realize that these are a common conceit among geeks, but I put together some I-like-em pages for your enjoyment.
    1. Gigabit ethernet.
      Fast, good and cheap, all possible. You do have to be careful about which equipment you buy, and you also need to patch scp to make it fly. You can get wired for well under 200 bucks now; amazing.
    2. Macintosh software, hardware and accessories At the request of a friend with a new powerbook, I threw together a page of my favorite OSX programs and tips, which might be useful to some of you out there. As time has gone by, I've also added info on bags, accessories and such.

    Obsololete (stale) recommends pages

    These have gone stale since I moved away from the devices, but I've left 'em up for now.
    1. Palm software page
      As with the Mac page, this is a page of my personal favorites for the Palm platform. Still very sparse, more content as time permits.
    2. Blackberry
      Blackberry software, hardware, data services, the works. Plus a small blog of random stuff.

    Project pages

    Some of these will be migrating to Google Code or maybe Sourceforge FYI. A mixed bag of code, math and random geekery.
    1. Good ABC triples database. Chris and I are working on the ABC conjecture, and she has built a dataase and PHP front end for the computed ABC triples. The code (C++ w/STL and pthreads) isn't ready for release just yet. It's interesting stuff - 32 threads, a lock-free shared dictionary, 64-bit integer math, STL for pthreads results, precomputed dictionaries for speed boosting, all written around a test suite and STL data structures. Fun project.

    2. Wavelet-domain convolution.

      The idea of this is to provide localized audio for games and VR, using less computations than the standard FFT-based methods. The method I'm researching uses convolution in the wavelet domain; results are preliminary but IMHO quite interesting. This dates from about 1999, so the code that once beat a Linux box for 2 hours now runs in less than a minute. Gotta love progress.

    3. Using a network ring buffer for science and outreach. This is a paper we submitted to SC05 that got rejected. Rather than waste the effort, or shop it to another venue, I've posted it here for your enjoyment.

    4. Super-cheap Beowulf parallel processing - the clusterfsck project.

      A couple of us built a very early cluster using surplus equipment and spare time. This was 1998 or so, so its amusing but dated.

    5. Beowulf Revisted 2002 - ClusterFsck2, built from Pentium IIs this time.

      There's just something about five dollar boxes that says "Make me into a cluster!"

    6. Code snippets - bits of code that might be useful but are too small to release as a project.

      Perl, Awk, and C - if they're useful, enjoy!

    7. Get a random poem from the archive.

      This uses PHP to pull a poem from the fortune file. See the project page for details, enjoy.

    8. Vanity and other failings - resume, publications, etc.

      A bit out of date, but then again I'm lucky enough to be employed.

    9. The FibreChannel At Home project, along with introductory and background materiel.

      Why you should use Fibre Channel for your next computer, how much it costs, and what kind of performance you can expect. Links to vendors, how-tos, and lots of pictures.

      As of October 2004, I've given away the last of my FC gear. It was a lot of fun, but I've more toys at work and less time at home, so please consider this historical information.

    Other content

  • Our 404 page

    A perennial favorite that I plagiarized from scintilla.nl

  • Server and network information

    For the curious, information about what's running the local site. Also has contact information. Yeah, in this day and age its not wise to make webmaster contact information obvious.

    • Fnord, indeed

    The following two links are for silicon-based lifeforms intent on gathering addresses of the electronic mail sort. Neither is intended for us sapient folk, and will just confuse you. Thus, the headline.
    1. Internal pages or something like that.
    2. Another approach

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