A number of people have complained about the picture of me that formerly adorned this page on grounds that it's hostile and unflattering. It has therefore been replaced with a friendlier snapshot (click for a larger version):
Acknowledgements: These pages would not be possible without the extraordinary support provided to ordinary users like me by Princeton's Department of Computer Science. I'd especially like to thank Jim Roberts and Michael Brantley for helping me to master cgi-bin scripts, server-side includes, and other mysteries of the Web.
tpkelly at host eecs.umich.edu.
sniffle
sniffle is a "Simple Networked Interface to the Full
Functionality of Lab Equipment". It makes possible the remote
control of a variety of laboratory instruments via the World Wide Web.
A complete project report is available in a variety of formats
(including, of course, HTML) here. The report
includes complete source code listings as well as pointers to a wide
variety of Web resources related to Internet remote control.
I've mostly retired to the role of occassional consultant, but work on
the sniffle project continues in the lab of Dr. Michael
Littman of Princeton's Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Department. A number of undergraduates, notably Jacinta Warnie and
Matt Hobbs '96, have built projects on top of sniffle.
pstamp
pstamp file1 file2" file1 is copied to
file2 with magic strings like "MODDATE_STAMP"
replaced with the modification time (in this example) of file1.
Finally, the access time and mod time of file2 are set to be
identical to that of file1. I use pstamp with
make to ensure that all of my TeX documents contain
their own names & last modification times. pstamp
is "pstealthy" because it re-sets the atime
of the source file to what it was before pstamp was
run.