| Russ Allbery > Personal Information |
Passions, once in motion, move themselves.
Unknown
Software development and writing (both fiction and nonfiction) are, of course, always ongoing projects and I generally have several dozen things I'm working on at any given time. For more details on what I've had a chance to make available, see my software, technical notes, writing, and stories pages.
To see what I'm currently working on, read my journal and the changes page for this site and look at git.eyrie.org to see which software repositories have been modified recently.
We used Kerberos extensively at Stanford, and I developed a wide variety of Kerberos-related software for Stanford while I was there. I still maintain most of it as free software, and plan on using it for future projects. I've also been meddling in various Kerberos discussions for years.
I am a Debian developer, which means that I maintain packages for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and have the right to vote in Debian elections and upload new packages. I am one of the Lintian co-maintainers (lintian is a Debian package checking tool), one of the Debian Policy delegates, and the member of several packaging teams, including the Shibboleth team, Perl module team, and the Kerberos and OpenAFS team, although I'm fairly inactive in most of them at the moment. I've made or helped make Debian packages for most of the software that I maintain as well as most software we used at Stanford while I worked there that wasn't already packaged.
I'm one of the co-maintainers of INN, one of the older and more widely used Usenet news packages. I was doing release management and a decent amount of major development for it, but have had to cut back due to lack of time. I now mostly maintain infrastructure and comment on the mailing lists and in news.software.nntp. INN is a fairly old and large software package that's grown organically, and it's been a fun and interesting challenge to try to slowly clean it up without breaking it in the process.
POD is Plain Old Documentation, the documentation format used by Perl. I find it extremely useful for writing man pages and other short documentation (it's used for all the new INN documentation, for instance), and some time back I took over maintenance of the pod2man and pod2text conversion utilities that are included with Perl.
While I've not done much with this recently, I'm still somewhat interested in gatewaying mail to news and vice versa and in developing software toolkits to make it easier to do this. I also use the same tools for the Usenet newsgroups I still moderate.
My friends and I have been using chatservers for over two decades now for free-form roleplaying and general discussion. I prefer chatservers to instant messaging because the default is to talk to everyone instead of only one person, and to IRC because the protocol is much simpler. I hope to release the chatserver and supporting software as free software.
Since August of 2003, I have been writing reviews of every book and short story magazine that I read. This has turned out to significantly increase the enjoyment I get from reading, help me determine what awards and sources of book recommendations are the most reliable for me, and let me provide more specific and detailed recommendations for friends. It's also served as a useful starting point for discussions with others about fiction.
Essentially all of my fiction writing these days (which is still something I put quite a lot of time into) is done as freeform, mostly dialog-based roleplaying on a private chatserver. I've found this to be the easiest way to let my characters express themselves, and the constant interaction with other characters written by different people has been good for them and brought out much more than I would have discovered just writing by myself.
I maintain an infrequently updated archive of rec.arts.comics.creative, an archive of the Superguy mailing list, and a mirror of the rec.arts.anime.creative archives. I also provide space for the alt.pub.dragons-inn archives.
I was a document editor for the IETF USEFOR working group for the effort to produce the next version of the Usenet article standard. I was formerly the chair of the IETF NNTP working group that produced the next version of the NNTP standard. I had plans to write up more formal descriptions of INN's various extensions and some of the other tidbits that I've picked up about how Usenet works over the years, and some more ambitious plans to write up an implementor's guide to NNTP. I'm not sure if those plans will ever bear fruit given my lack of time for NNTP work and other higher priorities.
I maintain the software that generates the ftp.isc.org archives of control messages, group lists, and news.announce.newgroups posts. In that role, I'm also a backup moderator of the news.lists.misc newsgroup and the current maintainer of the pgpverify control message verification software.
I used to be be heavily involved with Big Eight (the comp.*, humanities.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, and talk.* hierarchies) maintenance and politics, first as a news.groups regular, then as a member of group-advice, and then as one of the moderators of news.announce.newgroups. I have handed over the decision-making and political parts of that role over to others and now am purely in a technical support role.
I'm a (very) amateur photographer and have started posting some of the pictures I take to a gallery on these web pages. I don't have the time to get seriously into expensive cameras and lenses, but taking pictures helps me look at the world more closely and notice things I'd otherwise miss.
While I don't play them as much as I used to, I'm still a fan of the genre of Rogue-like dungeon exploration games. I am the current moderator of rec.games.roguelike.announce.
I'm a collector of quotations, and an occasional reader of alt.quotations. You'll notice that nearly all of my web pages begin with an appropriate quote, and so some of my software projects. In the words of Thomas Love Peacock, written in Crotchet Castle, "A book that furnishes no quotations is, me judice, no book — it is a plaything."
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