Andrew Schran

Work

Frantically completed the most dreaded (but, in retrospect, appreciated) of Princeton traditions: the senior thesis. Mine was entitled, Namecast: A Reliable, Flexible, Scalable DNS Hosting System.

I learned about information security from the nefarious Ed Felten, of recent electronic voting fame.
For my final project in Human-Computer Interface Technology, I worked on a sweet chair called the AssMaster 3000™ User-aware Compu-chair. It has several revolutionary features: when you lean back, it automatically zooms in the screen so you can still read everything; when you get up, it automatically locks your computer; and it has convenient armrest-mounted buttons for scrolling and desktop switching. It also all works wirelessly over a Bluetooth connection.
I discovered in David Walker's class on Programming Languages how to design a language that is provably invulnerable to the effects of radioactive bat droppings.

As a summer intern at Google, I worked on two awesome open source projects: gPXE, a network bootloader, and prettyprint, a suite of libraries and tools to describe and manipulate hardware registers and fields.

For my final project in the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, I wrote an interactive piece of electronic music called Sol, heavily inspired by the classic computer game Star Control II. You can watch a video or download the code for the piece here.
For my compilers class, I wrote a compiler extension to translate the Fun programming language (a functional teaching language) to C.
For my independent work with Perry Cook, I designed and implemented the file I/O API for the ChucK audio programming language. (Yes, the language is so new that it actually had no file I/O.)

For my operating systems class, I wrote a complete and functioning (though horribly inefficient) file system from scratch.
I learned about Practical Ethics from the notorious Peter Singer, and financial markets from Burton Malkiel (who literally wrote the book on investing).
For my independent work with Ed Felten, I researched the effects of distributed hash tables on the anonymity of the BitTorrent protocol and exploited the openness of DHTs to gather some statistics about what kinds of files are available via BitTorrent.