Brian L. Stuart

Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, University of Memphis
Research & Development Technical Architect, AutoZone

News

Since being laid off, I've started working on a Scheme interpreter for Inferno. The Google code page for it is: http://code.gogle.com/p/inferno-scheme
While cleaning out Dad's house, I ran across an old saxophone. After a bit of searching, I've identified it as a 1921 Buescher C-melody stencil, made for Wurlitzer. I'm taking a stab at documenting its restoration on my blog.

Research and Creative Results

Book

Course Technology has just published my text on operating systems. The title is Principles of Operating Systems: Design & Applications. In addition to the usual coverage of operating systems principles, this book includes a survey of nine existing OSs and in-depth examinations of Inferno and Linux. The ISBN is 1-4188-3769-5. You can order it on Amazon here as well as other on-line booksellers.
Here are some sample pages from the book that give some idea of the flavor of it and that illustrate some thoughts on using it in the classroom:
The publisher's page for the book is here. If you're interested in adopting the book for a course, you can order a desk copy and contact your sales rep there. The instructor's CD can be obtained from the sales rep.
SIGCSE went well. Here's a picture of me at the display. (The display was the centerpiece of the Course Technology booth... surreal.) I met a lot of people who are very interested in the book. We gave out quite a few copies. I neglected to get a count of how many we started with, but there were 9 left when I went to the last session Friday. And, yes, some people did want me to sign it.

Thesis and Dissertation

Papers

Fast Interpretation by Syntax Tree Traversal, Poster session, 6th Cumberland Conference on Graph Theory and Computing.
Connect 4 as a Problem in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol 26, No 2, June 1994, pp 41-46.
Computer-Assisted Education via the World-Wide Web, Proceedings of the 34th Southeast ACM Conference, 1996.
A Hyper-Text Tutorial Markup Language, Proceedings of the 35th Southeast ACM Conference, 1997.
Relative Localization from Image Sequences, Proceedings of the 43rd Southeast ACM Conference, 2005.

Software

C Programming Tutorial as described in "Computer-Assisted Education via the World-Wide Web"
Hyper-Text Tutorial Markup Language This is the source for the HTTML processor on UNIX-like systems. If you're really interested, I have a version for older Macs.
GMS - Gin Management System. This consulting project is available for those who want to use it as a software engineering case study. There's even a draft of a book on the subject. Contact me at stuartb@acm.org for more details.

Music

Warning: the MP3s here were recorded from a Kawai EP608 fed through an attenuator into the microphone input of a Dell laptop and minimally processed with rezound. In other words, they're not very good recordings, but they do give an idea of how the pieces sound.

Meditation-Piano solo sheet music (PDF) MP3
Hope-Piano solo sheet music (PDF) MP3

Miscellaneous

Brief Introduction to Electronic Analog Computers (HTML) (PostScript) (PDF)
Random Thoughts: a blog

Plan 9

Some resources related to the Plan 9 operating system

Patches to support booting with a local Plan 9 partition as root with 9vx

Inferno

Some resources related to the Inferno operating system

There is an issue when running Inferno hosted on FreeBSD and CPU frequency scaling is turned on. Under some circumstances, Inferno will lock up. While looking for a cause so that I could either fix Inferno or fix FreeBSD, I learned that FreeBSD has multiple CPU frequency scaling drivers which can work in combination. On my laptop, for example, there is the Intel Enhanced SpeedStep driver (est) and the Pentium 4 Thermal Control Circuitry driver (p4tcc). The est driver supports the speeds: 2001MHz, 2000MHz, 1600MHz, 1200MHz, and 800MHz. The p4tcc driver can modify these speeds by 100%, 75%, 62.5%, 50%, 37.5%, 25%, and 12.5%. The problem only seems to occur when the p4tcc driver is operating at something other than 100%. In other words, 1750MHz and 500MHz both lock up while 2001MHz and 800MHz don't appear to ever lock up. The work-around on my machine seems to be to force the clock to one of the frequencies supported by the est driver.
Instructions for building hosted Inferno with Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
Instructions for building a native Inferno kernel for the PC
Instructions for doing a full native Inferno install on a PC.

Education

B.S. Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
M.S. Electrical Engineering, Notre Dame University,
- A General Purpose Multi-Processor Computer Architecture
Ph.D. Computer Science, Purdue University,
- An Alternative Computational Model for Artificial Intelligence

Course Material

COMP4270/6270: Operating Systems
Presentations:
COMP4310/6310: Data Communications
Courses taught at Rhodes College from 1991 to 1997

AT&T 3B1/7300 (UNIX PC) Information

If you're looking for the 3B1 site I used to host at Rhodes College, Peter da Silva is now hosting it here.

Stuff That Doesn't Fit Anywhere Else

Went to Atlanta on vacation Fall '07. here are some pics.
I'm going to see how it goes to record a few Random Thoughts in the blog world. If you are beyond bored, have a look.

Affiliations

E-mail: stuartb@acm.org