Willem de Bruijn | various

The Attic

This is an unsorted space with items that may help someone. All documents are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License , all code under the 2-clause BSD License. Clearly, don't hold me liable if anything breaks.

Gnuplot: Computer System Component Growth Curves

It seems as if every computer systems researcher has to dig up her own set of growthcurves. Feel free to reuse this set of gnuplot data, code and .eps output. URLs to the raw data sources are embedded in the documents.

Article: Computer System Growth Trends

Computer System Evolution (pdf) reviews microarchitectural trends in computer system development. This was originally published as an appendix to my PhD Thesis. Read the document in HTML online.

Article: Introduction to Search Algorithms

Automation Algorithms (pdf) is an introduction to the domain of computer search, especially as it applies to system automation. This was originally published as an appendix to my PhD Thesis. Read the document in HTML online.

Software: Wifi Histogram for Linux

The wifi histogram tool consists of two perl scripts: one that periodically reads the signal and noise levels from iwconfig and another that periodically pings a number of hosts. Combined with a gnuplot script this creates histograms. Demo EPS files are included. This is not rocket science: just a few tens of lines of code.

Software: Parse 'top -b' into Median, Upper and Lower Quartiles

parse_top.py runs the top command in batch mode (-b) for a preset number of seconds and calculates the median, upper and lower quartiles for the main system indicators: idle time, signals, system time, user time, etcetera. Note that there are different versions of top; this was written to work with Ubuntu 7.10. AFAIK it still works.

Web: Very Simple Template-driven Site for the Google App Engine

myexample for class is a very simple template-driven website for the Google App Engine. I developed this example for a class in Internet Programming that included students with no programming experience. You will find that the website is very short and very easy to pick up. All students have to change is youcode.py. Follow the slides on the class website for more information.

Blog: Quick Tips

If you've made it this far, you may be interested in the blog where I write coding and system administration tips and tricks for which I could not find a better source online: code monkey tips.