Research & Work

I'm currently working with Aaron Brown in Professor David Patterson's Recovery Oriented Computing group. We seek to improve computer system availability by reducing human error and minimizing its effects. Aaron and I are working to create an E-mail Availability Benchmark to capture and quantize the human component of failure to spur development of software that is more tolerant of operator error.

At Scale Eight, a large scale storage provider, I worked with GIMP co-author Peter Mattis and wrote the Windows side of Scale Eight's portable runtime library, along with helping to add additional functionality to their internal quality assurance software.

I spent a semester interning with ACM Turing Award Winner Jim Gray at Microsoft Research's Bay Area Research Center (BARC), studying the behavior of hard disk and network input/output performance under Microsoft Windows 2000. We created a website for our work at http://research.microsoft.com/barc/sequential_io. I also spent some time working with Jim Gemmell, studying disk input/output bandwidth and (especially!) latency for media (video/audio) applications.

At SETI@home, I helped in the search for little green men by helping to manage their computer systems and writing code for the SETI@home client which allows the software to work through corporate firewalls (SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 proxies for the geeky people out there).

In my pre-college days, I spent time working at Cello Development and doing independent consulting. I've done volunteer computer work at  Wonderfest, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and America Online. Amazingly, even though the last time I was a consistent volunteer at the EFF was 1998, my e-mail address there (leonard@DELETECAPSeff.org) still works correctly!