Dr. James "Wez" Weatherall's Home Page

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Remember - the best things come to those who wait. Except those who wait for this page to be complete.

An out-of-date picture of me with a Shiitake mushroom. It was a humbling experience.

I still look a lot like this. (The man, not the mushroom. That would be odd.)

Stuff I'm Doing At The Laboratory for Communications Engineering

Eucalyptus and Koala
Koala is an object-oriented RPC and event-based middleware architecture suitable for controlling ad hoc collections of PEN devices. The Koala protocols are designed with low-power, high-latency systems in mind. On top of Koala runs Eucalyptus, a very simple control architecture designed to support sensor/actuator interactions and ad hoc tetherless computing. In an office or home environment, the APIDgate system can be used to control remote devices through a home-area-network or the Internet.
I have one or two publications in the pipeline, which may be available here. It's probably worth checking out the LCE Publications page, too.

Stuff I've Done At The Laboratory for Communications Engineering

APIDgate and Predator
Wireless-through-wired routing for the PEN project (formerly the Piconet project). The aim here is to allow personal devices such as PDAs, watches or other doohickies to access long-term, reliable, robust, on-the-wire services.

Stuff I've Been Involved With At AT&T Labs Cambridge (formerly ORL)

The Virtual Network Computing project allows arbitrary graphical user interfaces to be transmitted over a network to "thin-client" machines. The interfaces might be your Windows desktop, an X session, or maybe just a clock or cdplayer controller. My part in all this fiendishness was to write the VNC Server for Win32, based on the original version for X.

The Pen project is a short-range, low-power wireless networking system. My work depends heavily on these cute, unassuming little devices. Other aspects in the project include low-powered routing algorithms, management of devices with low-power states and novel ways of using low-power wireless devices for stuff.

The CLAN project use super-fast interconnects to send lots of stuff between their PCs. Not exciting enough for you? Well, they also make LEDs flash a bit and have some "DANGER : High Voltage Test Area" stickers splattered liberally around. I don't do CLAN things, I just used to sit in the same office as them. The CLAN project has already produced one of the world's fastest network interconnects and they're promising still more goodies to come, so they deserve a link!

Stuff I've Done For Fun(!)

Some scanned images of things that seemed funny at the time.

A simple board game called Reactor.

There will soon be a lovely table of ex-Queens' College Computer Scientists. Fascinating.

A simple little program called Shutdown, for Windows NT. From any Windows NT box, a user with sufficient access rights can shut down any other Windows NT box (or the local one). Run without any command line params to get some help on usage.

Some downloadable projects, including implementations of the Logo and Armadillo programming languages.

I have a page containing some unfunny Haiku. And another containing unfunny Mary Had a Little Lamb.. genre rhymes.

If you like photos of Denmark, California, Cambridge, Lego or my family, you'll love this page (not a )guarantee), which is hosted indirectly from my own machine and therefore may be broken...

Stuff Other People Have Done For Fun...

I'm supposed to put all the links I find interesting in here but they go dead so quickly that I never do...

UAE for Windows/DirectX

The AmiWM window manager for Unix

The MindTerm Secure Shell and (more importantly), Secure VNC!

The chances of my interests matching yours, the reader's, in any way, are so slim that it's probably easier for you to just go here and type in a few choice words. If you find anything cool, tell people you found it here, so I'll look cool too.

Stuff Of Epics

Queens' College, Cambridge
Psion 5 vs Hamster - the comparative review
My C.V...

Stuff To Do With Teaching & the Cambridge University Computer Lab

You can email me if you are a Computer Science Part II or Diploma at Cambridge and haven't any ideas for what to do for a project. I have one or two. How cool is that? I'll post my ideas here before next year, hopefully...

Well, I failed to post my ideas here until it was too late. Serves me right. Here are some ideas, anyway:

Unified Address Book, Meeting-Room Booker, Appointment Database, Vacation Messager.
The VNC fish-tank... it teleports to any machines you're logged into and acts as a screen-saver!
A direct-to-VNC version of the V++ GUI toolkit.
Register-machine bytecodes. Build the smallest bytecode set & interpreter you can & build an optimising compiler for a simple language to use it.
Distributed web-proxy & cache. Run a copy of this small utility on your local machine & let it cache web data locally for you, instead of your web-browser's normal cache. If the page isn't found locally then try to find the nearest local copy in other people's caches. To avoid security problems, only cache insecure pages!!!
Username, Domain and Type mapper. People have different names depending on why you're asking, where you're asking, etc. Wouldn't it be great if, given that I am jnw22@cam.ac.uk, you could find out that I am also jnw@uk.research.att.com at AT&T Labs but in a secure, reliable manner?
A Distributed File System that can be integrated transparently with Linux and Win32... (bit of a long shot that one - I have a few ideas on how to fake the Win32 bit...;-)

People I've Met

It's all lies. I never met these people. They certainly never handed me any cash in brown envelopes. Get that camera out of here.

In descending order of proximity to my office:

Timothy "Gym-Bowen" Stevens, M.A.

David "Chuck Rock" Barnett, M.A.

If you thought that was fun, get help. Alternatively, try http://www.pantonia.co.uk/

Places I've Been (To)

I'm from Knaresborough - a picturesque little market-town very close to Harrogate, in North Yorkshire. Originally, I suppose I'm from Chelmsford in Essex. Before you ask, yes, I like Ford Capris.

Contact Information

I have a pigeon-hole at Queens' College, Cambridge.
You can email me at J.N.Weatherall.94@cantab.net or jnw22@cam.ac.uk, or jnw22@eng.cam.ac.uk.

Disclaimer/Claimer (depending on how you want to look at it)

This web page was produced by me. Please don't hold RealVNC responsible for it. That would be bad.