Software

Resources

• The awk tutorial.
• Yet another Using CVS article, this one written for the students taking CS 161, the undergraduate OS class.

Opportunities

Want to make a name for yourself as a coder? Here are some things that need doing:

• I want a mail reader that supports sorting and classification (perhaps like Evolution), but also either distributed all-in-one access to all my shell accounts from any of them (subject to trust relationships) or a text-mode user interface to allow sane remote operation.
• GNU binutils needs serious code cleanup or needs to be replaced. It should not be so hard to work with.
• The ELF binary format, which almost everyone uses, is fundamentally flawed in several ways. Design, build, and deploy a replacement.
• I (and probably other people) would like to see some free games that are akin to (1) Railroad Tycoon, (2) Dune II, and (3) Master of Orion. There seems to be a Warcraft clone out there, but it needs serious work on its UI.
• And we need a Lemmings clone that supports 2-player mode over the network.
• It would be really nice if someone could patch GNU make to understand the vastly more powerful BSD make syntax. (Or if someone could convince the non-BSD world to adopt BSD make and drop GNU make entirely.)
• Fix syslogd so it's not quite so grossly vulnerable to simple attacks.
• Stop sending terminal control operations as in-band data. In-band data can be spoofed, and so-called VT bombs can be a serious security hazard. Terminal control operations should be ioctls or equivalent on the tty. Note that this would also save the trouble of having to parse terminal control codes in xterm and in the kernel console driver. (In the increasingly rare case that you have a genuine VT100, you can interpose a program that generates the control codes.)

Publications

• Jonathan Ledlie, Chaki Ng, David A. Holland, Kiran-Kumar Muniswamy-Reddy, Uri Braun, and Margo Seltzer: Provenance-Aware Sensor Data Storage, NetDB 2005, Tokyo, Japan, April 2005.
• David A. Holland, Ada T. Lim, and Margo I. Seltzer: An Architecture A Day Keeps The Hacker Away, 2004 Workshop on Architectural Support for Security and Anti-Virus, Boston, MA, October 2004.
• Daniel Ellard, David A. Holland, Nicholas Murphy, and Margo Seltzer: On the Design of a New CPU Architecture for Pedagogical Purposes, 2002 Workshop on Computer Architecture Education, May 2002.
• David A. Holland, Ada T. Lim, and Margo I. Seltzer: A New Instructional Operating System, 2002 ACM SIGCSE Conference on Computer Science Education, 2002.
• David A. Holland, William Josephson, Kostas Magoutis, Margo I. Seltzer, Christopher A. Stein, and Ada Lim: Research Issues in No-Futz Computing, Ninth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, Schoss Elmau, Germany, May 2001.