Val Henson
Val Henson |
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You can see some of my Linux work here . My main focus now is chunkfs, a new file system for Linux focusing on fast and reliable file system check and repair.
I don't speak to my parents or their spouses. In particular, I especially don't speak and won't attend the same conferences or social events as my biological father, Keith Henson, who is a child molester. Don't read any of these pages if you don't want your day ruined completely.
My tiny silver laptop, a Panasonic R5 I have an itsy bitsy 2.1 lb laptop with 6-8 hours of battery life. For some unfathomable reason, it is only sold in Japan, even though people swoon over it everywhere I go. I paid about $1700 for mine through one of the grey-market importers (see link).
The Stupid Linux Rater How important are you in Linux? While bored at a meeting, I wrote a dumb script to answer this question definitively.
Hang gliding movie I have taken exactly one hang gliding lesson and it was COOL! I FLEW in the AIR! Memorialized here forever with a video of my first flight.
The Xena School of Management Quiz Can you handle sticky corporate situations as well as Xena? Take this quiz and find out.
HOWTO Negotiate Your Salary and Benefits Did you know you're supposed to negotiate your job offers? If you didn't, you're losing a lot of money. This HOWTO is geared especially towards women.
Val vs. the Honeywell Kitchen Computer The Kitchen Computer is one of the stranger chapters in consumer electronics. I decided to dress up as a 1960's housewife and go take some ironic photos of myself with the Kitchen Computer.
Women Don't Ask This book changed my life. It describes how and why women (even ambitious aggressive women like me) ask for less than men - and get less. Click on the link for details on the Val Henson Women in Computing Book Scholarship.
My LASIK story On July 10th 2003, I voluntarily had my eyeballs burned with a laser. This is colloquially known as "LASIK." I'm pretty happy with the results, so far.
Hiking Mt. Whitney I joined the elite ranks of really dumb masochists by hiking Mt. Whitney in one day. More pictures added 11/02/02.
The TCP/IP Drinking Game Geeks, protocols, and beer. Send in a question and win fame, fortune, and free beer!
Experience Super Algidity With Crystal Coolers! Witness marketing in English using only a Chinese-English dictionary.
Fire walking at Cort's Halloween party.
The Puerco Saga I helped create the Puerco, a simulated microprocessor with 10 instructions.
Repair-driven File System Design by Val Henson. A more generic look at repair-driven file system design, with predictions for fsck times in 2013 and some more analysis of how modern file system design tends to make fsck time even worse.
Chunkfs: Using divide-and-conquer to improve file system reliability and repair by Val Henson, Arjan van de Ven, Amit Gud, and Zach Brown. Appeared in Hot Topics in Dependability 2006. This paper outlines a way to divide file systems up into individually checkable and repairable chunks, without putting restrictions on the name space or fragmenting free space.
Linux Weekly News articles I wrote a few articles for LWN on kernel-related topics. I ended up doing a sort of column called the Kernel Hacker's Bookshelf. There's no easy way to link to all of my articles as yet, but you can find my Kernel Hacker's Bookshelf series on the article index page
An Analysis of Compare-by-hash appeared in Hot Topics in Operating Systems 2003 Compare-by-hash is the practice of addressing data by a hash of its contents (using a good strong cryptographic hash like SHA-1 or MD5 - oh wait, just SHA-1) - and assuming that collisions never occur. I thought this was a bad idea, so I wrote this paper. My current position on the topic is somewhat less extreme than this paper might lead you to believe; I think that as long as your hash "address space" is not publicly accessible, or if it is publicly accessible and easily changed in response to attacks, then it's okay (though I still wouldn't use it). I wrote an article explicitly laying out criteria for using cryptographic hashes which finally answers most people's questions in one place. And it included the awesome cryptographic hash function lifetime graphs.
BitKeeper for (Linux) Kernel Developers appeared in Ottawa Linux Symposium 2002 I used BitKeeper to maintain a Linux kernel branch for a little over a year, and loved it so much that I wanted to tell all the other kernel developers about it. This is a somewhat updated version of the paper that appeared in the proceedings. You can also get the slides, the source, or the FAQ.
Kernel Hacking Lessons I added to the legion of Linux kernel development documentation with my very own introduction to Linux kernel development. My friend Lina Mårtensson updated them and added more material to make the registration-required version at IBM Developerworks - part 1 and part 2.
HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux This is a HOWTO aimed at men interested in helping women get and stay involved in Linux. It is based on the very successful LinuxChix BOF at OLS. Somewhat surprisingly, it's been published on the Linux Documentation Project web site. The XML/DocBook source is here. If you want to translate it, please go right ahead! The list of languages it has been translated into (that I know of) is Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, Ukrainian, Italian, German, and French.
Building and Maintaining an International Volunteer Linux Community A UseLinux '04 paper talking about how we get people to work for free on LinuxChix and be happy about it. With Jenn Vesperman, illustrious LinuxChix Coordinator. Non-registration copy.
Women and the Culture of Free Software: A Study A talk I did for SVLUG on the FLOSSPOLS study of women in free software in the EU. The slides are adapted from Hanna Wallach's original talk. You can get the recording of my talk as well. I would love for someone to edit the slides and the mp3 into a movie of sorts...
Choosing and tuning Linux file systems A talk I gave at OSCON 2006 and a few other places.
A talk on publishing for non-academics I wrote while at Sun. Some Sun-specific focus, but lots of broadly applicable information.
A (very) brief history of UNIX file systems for the average computer layperson. Includes the super cool file system feature chart showing which file systems have which features.
LinuxChix for LUGs A presentation I wrote for SVLUG about LinuxChix and why it is so great.
Building and Maintaining an International Volunteer Linux Community How we made LinuxChix so cool with no money and people working in timezones 8 hours apart (with Jenn Vesperman).
Women in Linux BOF at Ottawa Linux Symposium Here are the slides from the LinuxChix BOF (Birds of a Feather) at the 2003 OLS.
An Analysis of Compare-by-hash for internal presentation at Sun, along with review of other papers in the same conference. I don't have a compare-by-hash presentation I actually like at the moment, so I'll rewrite before I give it again.
BitKeeper for Kernel Developers Slides from the OLS 2002 presentation on BitKeeper. Sorry for the compression; the slides have several huge images.
Check out (and edit) the Linux file systems wiki for links to some of the file systems things I'm working on.
Linux basics I put together a web page for a class I had to teach that has enough useful info (especially on oprofile) that I refer back to it fairly often. It starts out REALLY basic, but by the end you're compiling kernel modules and profiling the kernel.
I wrote up some tips for working with User-mode Linux for your enjoyment and edification. This is super useful for doing file system development, among other things.
LinuxChix is a worldwide volunteer organization working to help women get and stay involved in Linux. I spent about 5 years volunteering for this worthy organization.
Arjan van de Ven does not sleep, judging by the amount of code he writes. If you see him drinking Sprite, "accidentally" knock it over and buy him a beer.
Lina Mårtensson is a Search Quality Engineer at Google. (This is like saying you are a kernel programmer in Linux.) She speaks at least 5 languages well enough to get a date. If you want to factor large numbers quickly, Lina is the person to talk to.
Erinn Clark is Debian developer and a co-founder of Debian Women. She makes incredibly funny and frequently multi-lingual puns and sets her locale to whatever language she's learning at the moment.
Hanna Wallach is a PhD post doc in machine learning, currently in Boston. She gives fabulous talks. Another Debian Women co-founder and a serial workshop organizer.
Jeff Bonwick was my tech lead on ZFS and the only person I've ever worked with who came to work later than I did. Hobbies include coffee roasting, dining at Osteria, and arguing the right-wing perspective with his more liberal co-workers (i.e., all of them).
Akkana Peck is a Mozilla hacker and all around open source jill-of-all-trades. She has a weakness for sports cars and PDAs. Check out her book on GIMP.
Larry McVoy is responsible for the best source control system extant, BitKeeper, and doesn't mind quoting himself. He now lives in what can only be described as a compound in the Santa Cruz mountains and owns four chainsaws (though he's trying to sell the fourth).
Armando Fox co-invented crash-only computing and can transpose keys on the fly whilst playing piano by ear. He won Ben Stein's Money and was one of Scientific American's Top 50 Scientists for 2003, bringing new meaning to the word "cross-disciplinary."
Kristal Pollack is a PhD student in storage systems, and plays amateur basketball in admirable conformance to the tall person stereotype. We met at a file systems conference when people kept mistaking her for me. If I ever did a start-up, she'd be employee #2 (or more likely, I'd be employee #2 at hers).
Kscott Rowe can juggle and unicycle. I learned about tab completion in bash while watching him type.
A collection of useful introvert-related links:
Lobsters A Hugo/Nebula nominated short story by Charles Stross, available for free on-line. A fast, hard-core near future cyberpunk-esque short story centered around Manfred Macx, a venture altruist distracted from his normal business of making other people rich by uploaded lobsters, slashdotting of his glasses, and his psychotic ex-girlfriend/dominatrix/IRS agent. You can read my Amazon review for a little more detail - as if you need more. Charles Stross is my favorite author on odd-numbered days (Vernor Vinge [see below] gets the even-numbered days).
Vernor Vinge's Singularity Paper Mind blowing thinking about the future. I recommend each and every one of his books, but especially A Fire Upon the Deep.
Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on the Purity of Language" This is a hysterical (ha ha) piece satirizing the defenders of sexist language. You'll love every sentence of it. If you're looking for advice on escaping awkward gender-related writing traps, I highly recommend The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing by Casey Miller and Kate Swift.
Olin Shivers has great advice for graduate students about defending your thesis and automatic weapons. I keep his Acknowledgments taped to my office door (when I have an office).
Rusty Russell's keynote speech for OLS 2003 has a lot of good advice for any programmer working on a project involving more than one person.
Almost nobody knows what the Busy Beaver function is. Perhaps it's because of its vaguely improper-sounding name? The Busy Beaver function is neat because it describes an easy-to-understand function which is nonetheless very uncomputable. Another way to think about it is that the Busy Beaver function grows faster than any computable function (any function whose output can be computed by a Turing machine, i.e., a computer). Closely related is the concept of Chaitin Elegance.
Donald Knuth finally sells out!
val dot henson at gmail dot com
I do make an effort to respond to all email, so if you don't get a reply, some accident probably befell your email and you should resend it.
