By now you may have noticed that these pages are full of quotes, rants, analysis, observations and other spewings from my muse. However, I decided it'd be useful to have a separate page devoted to articles and other writings I've done that are of a more substantial or formal nature. Some are papers from college, others are handouts from seminars I've taught. Most of them are a little out of date and very few have links back to here, but they should still be valuable. Enjoy.
Many of these pages assume some things about this web page which are no longer true. In particular, you'll find some images missing and a broken link here and there. The content is still intact, though.
Wanting to help out with Ogg Vorbis, but not really being able to write API documentation (which is what they need most), I posted an offer of my services to the Vorbis mailing list. Here's what was suggested:
Hanging around #vorbis, I can tell you that a lot of people show up with misconceptions about compressed (especially lossy) audio. An introduction to the area which uses Vorbis as the specific example would be a nice thing. Most people learned about lossy audio from MP3 and some have assigned attributes of MP3 to Vorbis incorrectly. Such a document would also have some tutorial aspects as well.
An introduction to compressed audio with Vorbis is the result, written in February 2002.
Here's The Internet in a Nutshell, which first appeared as the packet for a seminar I taught for Glorieta Student Week in 1996 called Christianity and the Internet. This was a very good introduction to the basics of the internet, including some tips about how to get online (so you can print it and give it to someone else). It's fairly less useful now, but still worth a read.
Check out my introduction to newsgroups. It provides a little information about the structure and history of newsgroups, as well as how to create your own, and how to use them effectively (i.e. what to avoid). This is circa 1995, and discusses an aspect of the Internet people don't do much anymore.
In 1997, I did some research into the increasingly problematic unsolicited commercial email (junk email). This lengthy report looks at some of the major arguments pro and con, and also covers legal issues. Also visit JunkBusters if you'd like to have some tips about how to stop it.
Back in the spring of 1995, I wrote a report about my views on spanking. Then, about a year later, someone I've never met randomly sent me email about the topic. I've included my comments to the unknown questioner and later added some second thoughts.
For my final project in Network Protocols and Implementation, I gave a lecture on the Harvest Cache httpd accelerator. The report that accompanied that lecture is fairly interesting, especially if you know anything about HTTP and how traditional web servers work. 1996 or so.
During the 1997-98 school year, the Absence of Motive Cooperative sponsored Haiku week at Leander High School. Participation was big, and the students wrote over three thousand haiku. Even I was motivated, and wrote some haiku myself. They're not bad, for a computer scientist.
On the off chance that I come up with any quotes that don't fit on any of the other pages, I'll put them here.
