I have been a big fan of the Mercurial version control system since migrating the Chord project from CVS almost two years ago. Mercurial offers a comfortable command-line experience, good performance and a module based architecture for expansion. Since graduating, I have had to interface with Subversion and Perforce servers at work and [...]
Sometimes, simple shell scripts can save a lot of time. Recently, I noticed myself waiting for various unit tests to complete by surfing the web: a surefire way to be distracted for more than the time it takes for the tests to complete (or fail). Enter the following script, which I call notify:
#!/bin/sh “$@” status=$? xmessage [...]
In his interview with Jim Gray, Werner Vogels talks about how Amazon.com structures and builds its internal systems. While many others have noted his comments on web technologies and development methods, I am more interested in a few points he raised at the end about building and testing distributed systems and what those of us in academic systems research can [...]
Tim Daly, one of the developers of Axiom, has a vision for solving the following problem:
Computational science seems to be in a state where people work independently. They develop whole systems from scratch just to support their research work. Many make an effort to distribute their system but fail [...]
In the course of my research, I tend to do a fair amount of data analysis and reduction. This ranges from simple statistics to in-depth examination of traces. While working on the camera-ready for our NSDI paper, I found myself thinking about Vern Paxson’s IMC paper on Strategies for Sound Internet Measurement (PDF. The paper is filled with [...]
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