John Quigley

Introduction

Who I Am

Life's Pursuits

Adventurer: merchant marine, mountaineer, hiker, scuba diver, pilot, lover.
Entrepreneur: I love early-stage startups, and working on very tough problems with smart people.
Traveler: Norway, Italy, Australia, England, Ireland among many, many others. I want to travel everywhere.
Musician: violin and guitar. I particularly enjoy flemenco, jazz, acid rock, rococo.
Athelete: lacrosse, bicycling, ice hockey, tennis, chess, go.
Linguist: English, Latin, Korean, Lisp. I am a voracious reader.
Cooking: structure and intepretation of gourmet food.

Technical Interests

In no particular order, and with no deference given to other, more precise taxonomies of computer science.

Operating system kernels
- Memory management
- File systems and block devices
- Threading and synchronization
Programming languages
- Language design
- Semantics and formalisms
- Compilers and virtual machines
Distributed systems
- Ambient Intelligence
- Concurrency and actors
- Distributed hash tables
Information theory
- Channel coding theory
- Cryptography and cryptanalysis
- Compression, entropy and fractals

New Artifacts

Talk: Combined Object-Lambda Architectures [ pdf ]
How to make COLAs with Pepsi and Coke.

Talk: Lguest Hypervisor [ pdf ]
Design of the Lguest paravirtualized hypervisor.

Software: Toil [ svn ]
A minimalist WSGI/FastCGI application server.

Talk: Computational Continuations [ pdf ]
An intro to continuations for programmers.

Software: chump-search [ svn ]
A partial-text XML search engine for the web.

Software: iolisp [ svn ]
A prototype Lisp interpreter witten in Io.

Talk: Anatomy of Lisp [ pdf ]
On the beauty and expressiveness of Lisp.

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Current Work

Cleversafe, Inc.
- dsNet: The Disperesed Storage Network project uses information dispersal algorithms to separate data into unrecognizable data slices and distribute them to distributed storage nodes. Transmission and storage of data is inherently private and secure, as no single entire copy of the data is in one location, and only some configurable subset of nodes need to be available in order to perfectly retrieve the data.
- dsNet Accesser: An RFC3720-compliant iSCSI and SAM-2/SBC-3/SPC-3 SCSI device driver that operates on the dsNet. The Cleversafe Dispersed Storage Accessor allows a dispersed storage grid to appear as a block device on any machine that has an iSCSI initiator. The Accesser project enables a dispersed storage grid to appear as an ultra-reliable, durable hard drive to any number of platforms.
Independent Projects
- White: White is a programming language for mobile networks. The White language proposes a set of language primitives and tools for explicitly handling the network and concurrent computations. This robust set of primitive functionality will abstract away the complexity inherent in the core machinations of concurrent software.

Employer

Cleversafe, Inc.
- Position: "Senior Developer," as an initial employee, I've worked on the core dispersal system, and currently lead development of the iSCSI and SCSI drivers. Additionally, as development team leader, I oversee the SMB/CIFS and WebDAV file object interface implementation.
- Company: Cleversafe Dispersed Storage software uses information dispersal algorithms to store small slices of data in multiple, disparate locations. Each slice contains too little information to be usable which ensures that all data stored or transmitted to the grid is secure and private. Although each slice is individually unusable, any majority of the slices can perfectly recreate all of the original data. As a result the grid remains fully operational even in the face of fully byzantine grid failure.

Further Info