Metasyntax

Welcome to the Taylor Venable's website. This page serves as a link to get to everywhere else, a kind of table of contents to the whole thing.

Briefly about me and this site: I'm a computing scientist who works with a security company writing software for multi-factor authentication systems and web applications which use such authentication methods. Academically, my interests cover programming languages (especially functional languages) and operating systems (especially BSD systems). I'm also interested in certain fields of algorithms, notably in numeric processing, concurrency, and data structures. I do a lot of learning on my own which stems from a feeling of unfulfillment in the American University system, so you will likely run across my attempts at self-learning in the code here on this site.

Disclaimer: the only domain I own is metasyntax.net and its sub-domains. I have absolutely nothing to do with any other domain containing the name “metasyntax.”

Source Code

I use CVS for version control. In this modern era of a choice, one might wonder why I stick with the old CVS system. The reason is because it's simple. It's centralized, so I never have to worry about copying my changes around among my different systems, I just push and pull. It also uses a very cohesive text file format, so I can edit things like commit messages after I've made them, in case I make a mistake. It's also really easy to move things around: you just get on the server and do it!

You can access my CVS repository in two ways: one is via cvsweb in your browser, and the other is via anoncvs SSH access. To use the latter method:

$ cvs -d anoncvs@metasyntax.net:/cvs co -d metasyntax .

Contents

This site is split into sections based on topic. These are listed below, along with the pages that are to be found underneath them. There may be other pages on here as well, but these "undocumented features" are apt to be moved or removed.

Programming Languages

• Coda — My new Lisp dialect.
• Segno — An object-oriented / statically typed functional language combination.
• Survey — Survey of popular programming languages and why to use them.

Lisp

• Continuations — About continuations and call/cc.
• Gambit C-Interface — Calling C code from Gambit Scheme
• Namespaces — Different namespaces in CL, comparison with Scheme.

My Software

• Gambit Libraries — A system for loading libraries for Gambit.
• Tcl — Libraries for Tcl programs.
• Tensile — A tool for literate programming.
• Harken — Markup parser in Haskell.
• Macros — Collection of useful C pre-processor macros.

Unix Programs & Config

• Firefox — Mozilla Firefox, a free web browser.
• OpenSSL — A cookbook for OpenSSL commands.
• Packages — Ports of various software to Unix platforms (currently just OpenBSD).
• Terminus — My modifications to a wonderful programming font.
• Vim — The Editor!

Vim

• Tcl — Tcl syntax support in Vim.

Walkthroughs

• Emacs — GNU Emacs guide; includes my .emacs file in literate form.
• Unix — How to set up various Unix services on *BSD and Debian-like systems.
• LaTeX — Tips for using LaTeX to make beautiful documents.
• OpenBSD — How to do things in OpenBSD.

About

• Site — Information about the site itself.
• Resume — My resume and a small discourse on my approach to designing software.
• Organizations — Donation-funded groups that I support.

Links

• Astro — astronomy, space, earth
• BSD — BSD operating systems
• Comics — online comics
• Compsci — computing science
• Editors — Emacs, vi, others
• Games — Video game stuff
• Linux — Linux operating systems
• News — news
• TeX — TeX and LaTeX
• Web — web programming

Programming Languages

• Algol — so-called "Algol-like" languages: C, C++, D, Java
• Dynamic — dynamic / scripting languages: Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, Tcl
• Functional — functional languages: Lisp, Erlang, Haskell, OCaml, Scheme, SML
• Other — other programming languages not listed above

Copyright

The contents of this site are, unless otherwise indicated, copyright (c) 2008-2009 Taylor Venable. You may reproduce this site in whole or in part according to the rules of the Creative Commons Share-alike Attribution 3.0 license, viz:

• If you make a derivative work based upon the content of this site, you must allow others to make derivative works based upon the results of your efforts.
• You must attribute portions of this content used in a derivative work or reproduction to me, Taylor Venable, and indicate that I am the original author of any portions thus used.

Note that this does not apply to the software that I have written which is available on this site. For specific rights and responsibilities related to source code, see the license page.