My faithful commuter road bike, "Steely Dan", built by me starting from a high-quality 1980s touring bike frame
I received my
PhD in
physics from the
University of Maryland, where I
studied
nanotechnology, in 2010. I'm very passionate about riding,
building, and maintainingbicycles: I think
it's good for the environment, good for health, good for communities,
and an enjoyable hobby to boot. I'm also a
Free software guy, a big fan of
Linux, and an amateur hardware hacker and electronics designer.
One big interest of mine is in documenting computer hardware and software
standards, and in helping to describe interfaces which lack documentation, often because the manufacturers refuse to provide it without a
non-disclosure agreement and licensing fees. This information is vital to those who write free and open-source
operating systems, so that they can support new hardware devices and
file formats as thoroughly and as quickly as possible. It's also important in order to continue supporting devices and file formats which the manufacturers have
abandoned. To that end, I've tried to clean up and expand Wikipedia's information on how hardware works, and provided links to external documentation (which has often been obtained only through a painstaking process of
reverse-engineering). To that end, I've added information to
several articles.