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Relationships

I recently described two file systems (QMDS and GFS) that attempted to capture additional context for files to improve their usability. At Eurosys, I argued (somewhat successfully) that a distinguishing characteristic of my proposed work is to capture relationships between files, something that goes beyond mere isolated analysis of such files. Index servers, which are […]

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The Ubiquitous Digital File: A Review of File Management Research

The Ubiquitous Digital File: A Review of File Management Research Jesse David Dinneen and Charles-Antoine Julien, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, April 12, 2019. I recently stumbled across this recent paper, which I found to be very useful and timely for my current project. As I mentioned in my recent post […]

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Of file handles and implicit offsets (Follow-up)

My post about file handles elicited some interesting feedback, so I wanted to capture it because I thought it provided some insight. Shared libraries were not a standard part of UNIX systems in the 1980s (though they had certainly been described in prior work) and thus one interesting observation here is that putting code in […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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What a long strange trip it’s been!

This is my first post in over a month.  The past five weeks have been eventful – a period upon which I suspect I will look back in the future and remark about how so much change can be packed into such a small amount of time. My former employer and I parted the ways […]

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