Kaz Kylheku's home page!

I'm a professional software developer who also writes free software. If this is what you came here for, follow these links:

• Kylheku CGIT: my self-hosted git repositries.
• TXR a programming language run-time featuring two languages: a novel pattern-based text extraction language, and a powerful, innovative Lisp dialect.
• Kazlib is a package of high quality reusable data structure modules written in ANSI C.
• Tankan, a commercial program for Microsoft Windows for learning Japanese Characters.
• Meta-CVS is a version control system implemented in Common Lisp. It uses CVS to provide versioned storage, and network transport. Unlike CVS, Meta-CVS versions the directory structure, not only the file contents. Meta-CVS requires no software to be installed on the CVS server, interfacing with CVS by invoking its client-side command line interface.
• Cygnal (Cygwin Native Application Library) is a fork of the cygwin1.dll which changes some of the Cygwin behaviors to Windows conventions, making it suitable as a run-time library for native Windows applications.
• Pipe Watch, a unique interactive utility for inspecting streaming textual data in real time in a terminal window/console.
• cppawk is a script which combines the GNU C Preprocessor with Awk, and provides some header file libraries, including an multi-clause iteration macro supporting parallel and cross-product iteration, with user-definable clauses.
• Austin is a library whose interface is based on the dictionary module in Kazlib. What makes Austin special is that it allows algorithm selection at run time. It's even possible to change a dictionary's representation after it is created.
• LMC is a small C module that implements POSIX-style mutexes and condition variables for Linux kernel programming.
• I wrote a Linux network driver for Mobitex radio modems.
• Phantom is the result of my foray into cryptography. It is a C implementation of a cipher that I designed.
• Another foray into crypto, here is an implementation of the Rijndael cipher.
• I hacked Karl Fogel's cvs2cl Perl script to support a --lisp option for Lisp output. This script generates ChangeLog files by analyzing information gathered from CVS. This is my modified version based on version 2.44, and a diff against the original.
• I wrote a new implementation of the backquote syntax for the CLISP implementaton of Common Lisp.
• In 1999 and 2000, I did a lot of work on the LinuxThreads library, which provided a nearly-POSIX threads implementation for GNU/Linux systems. It was also used on FreeBSD. At that time I also wrote a number of GNU Libc functions: timer_create and friends, pthread_barrier_wait, pthread_mutex_timedlock and others. LinuxThreads has long been superseded by NPTL, but some vestiges of my work remain. For instance the timer implementation is still there for use on targets which don't have POSIX timer kernel support. Also, I came up with a mutex type which has an adaptive spinlock. This has survived into NPTL: look for the handling of the PTHREAD_MUTEX_ADAPTIVE_NP in this source file. This logic is taken almost verbatim from the original LinuxThreads, including my arbitrarily chosen magic constants and smoothing algorithm.

• My Japanese translation of "Jabberwocky". There are numerous existing translations of this poem into Japanese, from both native speakers and non-natives like myself. Unfortunately, they are all importunely verbose that it's hard to call them translations at all. They tend to be overly focused with preserving every detail, and fail to take advantage of the available devices in Japanese for economic expression. In contrast, my version preserves the rhytmical structure: all of the translated poem's four-line stanzas have 4/4/4/3 metric feet. It's conceivable that someone who doesn't understand a word of Japanese could nevertheless guess, upon hearing a competent recitation, that what is being recited is a Japanese version of Jabberwocky.
• In the same vein, here is my Slovak translation of "Jabberwocky".