This is a home for random old stuff. It probably gets updated no more frequently than once every six months. Much of this stuff may be outdated or broken. For newer stuff, see my blog and my photo galleries. I changed my PGP public key in 2016.
I work for the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Infrastructure Group as the Lab's network administrator. I used to be a member of the FreeBSD Core Team, and am still a committer, but my time for participation has been severely limited over the past two years. In the unlikely event that you want to learn a bit more about my personal life, see What's this about? at the top level of bimajority.org. (This link is mainly here to make sure that the other page gets crawled and indexed.)
I played around with some number theory some years ago. Here's some information about factoring including a few programs I wrote while learning about the subject.
I've find myself recommending the same books over and over again. That either means that I need to read more books (tell that to the bank!) or that some of these books are really, really worth reading and everybody should go out and buy a copy of all of them. To save myself some effort, here's a list of those books with purchasing info and in some cases capsule summaries. (The complete contents of my library are listed in a separate file, but the presense of a book there should not be taken as an endorsement. (That file is updated fairly infrequently; I probably have more than what it shows.)
I wrote a small package for building Web photo galleries; you can see the results at gallery.bostonradio.org, which is part of my main Web site project, The Archives @ BostonRadio.org.
The gallery package uses indexes written in XML (big mistake!),
and most of the code is written in XSLT (bigger mistake!). It
also includes a Perl script for copying the images off of my
digital camera's flash media, which should be adaptable to other
sorts of cameras with a little bit of effort. The package is
distributed as a gzipped
tar file under the BSD license; a substantial amount of Unix
knowledge is required to install. The current version is 1.5,
which defers generation of decimated images to the gallery
Makefile, rather than requiring that it be done ahead of time;
this requires changes to copyphotos to record in the
index.xml the precise steps needed to generate the
downsized images. As a side benefit, these images are now
anti-aliased. Version 1.4 made a minor tweak of the RDF output.
Version 1.3 added the ability to automatically extract metadata
from a gallery index file and write the result in RDF/XML format.
(Version 1.2 was my first buggy attempt at this enhancement; it
generates invalid RDF and should not be used.) I do not
anticipate making any further releases of this software, as I am
currently trying to build something better to replace it (while
still meeting my requirements for static HTML and metadata
representation).
For reasons known not even to me, I wasted the better part of one Sunday evening figuring out what would have happened to 100 shares of AT&T stock purchased in 1970. Astonishingly, this has actually turned out to be useful to some number of people, so I'm updating it a few times a year, as I find out about relevant transactions. Just don't ask me for advice; I'm not a financial adviser, okay?
If you are interested in the sort of food I make, see Recipes and notes. I also put my playlist online for no particularly good reason. In 2015, I got back into cycling in a serious way, and I've started making pages about my local rides.