Where my time goes and other things.

A snowman with balls

I pass a bit of time playing with these new fangled computer things. I used to look after the image archive here at maths, but now I burn my time looking after out undergrad computers. Its not just me mind you, Ian, Eoin, Ian, Marc and Conall look after our children. You can meet the family if you like

Just so I don't get withdrawal symptoms when I go home, I have an Amiga 4000 running AmiTCP and a http daemon. If you try this you will get

  1. My home home page.
  2. Nothing - the slip line is inactive.
  3. A rather confused slip user - possibly Simon Boyle.

Actually the Amiga has a bit of a personality problem. I've got it running Amiga Dos, MacOS, Linux and more recently NetBSD. I'll have to get myself a bridge board some day. I've also got myself a PC think to run unix on. Its running FreeBSD which I rather like (being used to SunOS 'n all). It also has Linux and Windows installed.

I also wrote a couple of articles about Free Unix. One was for TCD Interface - the college's computer newsletter. The other was for the Irish Times which even made it to Slashdot! The pre-edited versions of both these articles are also available: Interface one, ITimes one. Someone also interviewed me for an Irish language article on SPAM, though they asked the questions in English.

So can I do anything useful/trendy/whatever with these computer yokes ? Well, one pretty thing I've done is for a course in ray tracing is the snowman at the top of the page. We had to write a basic ray tracer, with recursion, shadows and transparency. If you're interested in that sort of thing, you can get the source and documentation in tar'ed gzip'ed format.

I've also written an Openmath to LaTeX converter - you can try it out if you feel like. This was work funded by the EU, for the Openmath project.

I've made various small contributions to FreeBSD which have been accepted. Alot of these things Ian and myself diagnosed. More recently I've begun as a FreeBSD committer.

I've also submitted a few fixes for FreeBSD documentation and man pages too, and have had small fixes accepted into OpenBSD, SAINT and INN.

We also have some silly CGI scripts:

David Malone dwmalone=wp@maths.tcd.ie