As a part of my professional work, I am interested in parallel computing, and the development of high level languages (mainly C, Fortran and C++). Because of my work at Los Alamos (and previously at Saclay), I am quite familiar with optimizing codes on the CM series of parallel machines, and the SGI Origins. Our QCD codes written for the CM-5 were completely modular, and hand coded at the lowest levels to maintain the best compromise between efficiency and maintainaibility. Currently we have converted many of these codes to an MPI implementation for running on the SGI Origin 2000 machines.
I am interested in projects which provide free software and access to information. For the last few years, I have been interested in the following:
I was interested in the web server software and had contributed minor fixes to the NCSA server. I have been using the Apache server now, and haven't had time to look at the problems for a while.
My colleagues here (especially Paul Ginsparg) and I created a system for dvi files to maintain a lot of structural information (in particular, the cross-references) of the underlying document using embedded specials. This system, called hypertex has since become a major effor involving a lot of other people. Viewers for these hyperdvi files have been written, and converters to hyperlinked (with pdfmarks) postscript are also available. The postscript, when distilled, produce fully hyperlinked ps files.
I participate in (these days mainly listen in on) the pdftex mailing list.
I have been interested in the development of ghostscript, and have occassionally contributed patches and, once, a device driver to it.
I modified ghostview to view postscript files with embedded pdfmarks as well as the version of pdf that was current then. (You can download it from here. A previous version that works with the GNU ghostscript is also available, though that does not handle pdf.) Subsequently, with help from L. Peter Deutsch and discussions with the other members of the gs viewers' list, gs itself has been modified; to the extent that my patches do not work any more with the current versions of gs :-( Someday, I plan to update ghostview, and support the new pdf file structure.
I have been very interested in the e-print archive system, and contribute whatever efforts I can towards it. I am, in general, extremely interested in the emerging technology of on-line publishing; and the essentially uninhibited access to scientific data that it provides.
I am interested in the ongoing efforts at standardizing the dvi file structure.
And in my spare time, I hack other stuff ... emacs is my favourite shell, and I hack that the most. I also write small shell scripts (in sh, csh, perl, sed, awk, ... whatever) implementing useless things (like working around bugs and misfeatures of web clients and X-windows, simplifying life for people using s/key, etc.). I also maintain a bunch of sun computers around here.