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Author Archives: Tony Mason
Of file handles and implicit offsets
My current research direction (which is wandering a bit, as is common with research) has forced me to look as some of the vagaries of the POSIX interface. One of these is this intriguing decision to incorporate a piece of file descriptor specific state for the “file pointer” (note that in Windows there is an […]
Shanghai Bound!
I’m on my way to the the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, which is a well-known operating systems conference. This time it is in Shanghai, China so I’m making my way there. I do not have the privilege of presenting anything there this trip, but hopefully I will be able to do so in the […]
For those problems that are nails, I have a sledgehammer
I’ve been involved in a project that requires I learn more about blockchain than I ever really wanted to know. I had a basic appreciation of it from reading the Nakamoto paper many years ago. It provides an insightful solution to a challenging problem – the problem of distributed consensus in an untrusted network. There […]
The advisory shuffle
Friday, October 13, was my adviser’s last day. He remains as an adjunct professor, but as such he cannot directly advise or supervise graduate students. Thus, just a few weeks into my official life as a PhD student I find myself adrift. While I started adrift, over the past 10 months I stopped drifting and began […]
“So why are you doing this?”
One of the questions that I’m often asked is “why would you want to get a PhD?” or “why do you want to do research?” Everyone that even considers pursuing a PhD will no doubt be asked this question at some point. I’ve been asked it a number of times recently, no doubt due to the various […]
Windows and “reserved names”
I’ve fallen into the habit of answering some questions on Quora and those which involve answering questions about Windows file systems seem to garner the most interest and the most disagreement. Yesterday I answered a question entitled Why can’t I save a folder name “con” in Windows? I decided to respond to this because the other […]
Where does search functionality live?
In mulling over the depths of semantic knowledge and file systems, it occurs to me that one thing which differs between the world of Unix/Linux file systems and Windows file systems is that in Unix/Linux environments, search of a directory’s contents are done in the shell (or application) while in Windows they are a service of the file […]
HotOS 17
This week I had the opportunity to attend ACM SIGOPS HotOS ’17. This is a workshop that focuses on discussing work in some stage of progress. The papers are not as polished as one would find at a full conference and in some cases they are more about being provocative – encouraging the reader to […]
Decision Made
The decision deadline was last weekend and I confirmed my decision, accepting one of the offers and declining the other. I’m excited that I’ll be starting my new program officially near the end of summer. I’m already starting to think about the fact that this journey is really about to begin. I’d be lying if […]
PhD offers
So I’ve now been offered admission to two of the three PhD programs to which I have applied. The third I knew was unlikely as they require a thesis Master’s degree, but I don’t have a thesis. I was hoping that the fact I’ve co-authored two books might count for something (because frankly, writing a […]
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