Handyman's Home

I currently work at Google as a Software Engineer. I work on storage related projects, and of course I am not at liberty to discuss any details beyond that.

Until September of 2010 I worked at Aia Software, a company that specializes in automating customized correspondence. I was involved in the development of their ITP product line.

BRE4all/Pronto Until the end of January 2007, I worked at Centric on a product that goes under various names depending on the part you're looking at and the time you ask. The fashionable name is probably BRE4all at the moment, but the part that I worked on is called Pronto. Products like WOCAS4all are built on BRE4all technology.

Laptop Mode I am involved in the development of the Linux 2.6 version of laptop mode. Laptop mode allows you to improve the battery life on your laptop, by spinning up the disk less often than would normally be the case. I am currently the maintainer of the accompanying userland scripts in a package called laptop mode tools, which also performs some other power management policy tasks.

Smart Spindown A project related to laptop mode is smart spindown, a script to spin down your hard disk when it is idle. It improves on the regular behaviour you get when you use laptop mode with hdparm -S [NNN] to spin down your drive, by actively spinning down the drive, and by syncing only just before the spindown.

Earlier projects / activities

Master's degree On April 27, 2007, I have received my MSc degree (cum laude) at Leiden University's computer science institute LIACS. If you want, you can take a look at my grades spreadsheet.

USB storage I've spent quite a lot of time getting USB-storage device (pen drive and camera) working on my Debian machines. I've written down how I've accomplished to automatically mount and unmount the things at the moment I plug/unplug them.

D-Link DWL-510 (Quite) some time ago I've acquired a D-Link DWL-510 wireless network PCI card. Here is how I got it to work with Linux 2.6.

The Open Kernel Environment (OKE) opens up the Linux kernel to untrusted modules written in Cyclone, a safe C-derived language that compiles to C. Basically, it's a compile-time sandboxing solution, that uses trust management to guarantee that only code that has been properly sandboxed can be executed. Of course, this was a research project, and the actual execution of the idea could have been much better -- basically, what I'm saying is that the implementation was never going to be suitable for production use. In the end, it was the idea that counted, and I've had a lot of fun thinking this stuff up and implementing it.

OKE CORRAL The OKE CORRAL (or in full: OKE Code Organisation and Reconfiguration at Runtime using Active Linking) implemented a Click Modular Router-like model in the Linux kernel. It was used to prove that OKE kernel modules could be used to implement elements in such a modular router, with reasonable overhead.

I was involved with the IST SCAMPI project from August of 2002 until July of 2003. After I found out that network monitoring was not really something that could inspire me (especially in the context of an European Union research programme), I left the project.

The GNU Publically Licensed Three Letter Abbreviation Frequently Asked Questions list (GPL TLA FAQ or simply GTF) was conceived on a night where the GTF's maintainer Jeroen Vermeulen and yours truly got absolutely wasted and got talking about our shared disgust of the amount of needless TLAs that exist in this world. The main reason for the conception of the GTF is that we wanted to prove that the abundance in TLAs can only lead to ambiguity. The GTF currently contains more than 18,000 TLAs, which if they were all unique would cover the complete TLA space of 17,576 (= 26 ^ 3). However, they are not distributed uniformly over the TLA space: there are only about 8,000 distinct TLAs, which makes the average number of meanings for any registered three letter combination about 2, proving the point. An actual use for the GTF was recently found by Wichert Akkerman (select the "TLA expansion" style).

Intergraph GeoMedia PublicWorks Manager From 1997 through 2000 I have worked at Intergraph on various occasions. I have worked on a product that was called GeoMedia Relation Modeler, and from their website I have guessed that this is now called GeoMedia PublicWorks Manager. I have also worked on a project called KPN SCAN, which aimed to convert a paper archive of 300,000 detailed maps of The Netherlands to a digital, geographically searchable archive. For this very large project (more than 100 people were involved, and the number of users was way higher than that), I (re)wrote the graphical processing software, parts of the web interface and the printing infrastructure, and various other components.