This directory contains various papers that I have written in the course of time. Some are not very up to date; check the date at the top of each document. If you find that a specific paper is painfully out of date, please let me know and I may do something about it.

Most of these documents are in PDF format. You'll need acroread or xpdf to read them.

• Debugging kernel problems: tutorial and slides.
• “Two years in the trenches”: experience with a free software project. I published the slides at the time, but the only link was in my diary entry.
• “Free as in Free Beer”: using computers to brew better beer
• “Why I hate OpenOffice”: paper and slides.
• Using Internet Mail (HTML)
• The Return of BSD, published in SunWorld (now defunct) in January 1999.
• Explaining BSD: HTML and slides (PDF).
• “Why BSD is better than Linux”, presentation at the 2002 Linux.conf.au, and the reaction to it.
• Configuring X
• The Fine Offset WH-1080 weather station (PDF)
• The Vinum paper presented at USENIX 1999
• Understanding UNIX files and the shell
• A software ABC
• “The Internet in 2034”: an essay.
• “The world after the COVID-19 pandemic”: an essay.

“Porting UNIX Software”

Well, it's not exactly a paper, it's a book, originally published by O'Reilly and Associates in 1995. In the meantime it's somewhat out of date, but with O'Reilly's blessing, I've released it under the Creative Commons license.

The FreeBSD SMPNg implementation

I was involved in the early stages of the kernel restructuring which became FreeBSD release 5. At that time I wrote a number of papers and did some presentations. They're still available, but be warned: they're out of date. They should be of historical interest only, but unfortunately there's little more up-to-date documentation. In any case, read the following documentation at your peril.

• The initial meeting at Yahoo!, June 2000: plain text. There are also two sets of slides here and here.
• Presentation at Second Australian Open Source Symposium, Adelaide, November 2000: paper and slides.
• Presentation at USENIX ATC in Boston, June 2001: paper and slides.
• Presentation at AUUG 2001, Sydney, September 2001: slides.
• Presentation in Singapore, October 2003: paper and slides.