Tim Mann's Home Page

Work Curriculum vitae Chess Retrocomputing Music Photos Christmas letters Faith

This is my personal home page. It's mostly for fun stuff. You can find additional information about me in my curriculum vitae. To reach me, send email to tim@tim-mann.org. If you'd like to send me encrypted mail, use my PGP key.

Work

Since September 4, 2001, I've been a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware in Palo Alto, California. I'm formally attached to the ESX Server project, in the VMkernel group, but my work has crossed over through all three of our virtual machine products (ESX Server, GSX Server, and Workstation) and through several layers of the system. I've worked mostly on time-related issues, including a redesign of the virtual timer devices that guest operating systems see when running in a virtual machine, and a redesign of the physical timer service in the ESX VMkernel.

Before that, I spent over 14 years as a computer scientist at the Compaq Systems Research Center (SRC) in Palo Alto, California. My main projects over the years included Vesta, a software configuration management system that has been released as free software under the LGPL, persistent filesystem support for the handheld computer Itsy, the distributed filesystem Frangipani, and the replicated filesystem Echo. I've also dabbled in clock synchronization. Finally, check out a still from my project in SRC's 1993 Algorithm Animation Festival. It illustrates the Burrows-Wheeler compression algorithm (used in bzip2), with an animated diagram based loosely on the way Mike Burrows used to draw it up for us on his whiteboard.

My PhD work at Stanford was on naming in distributed operating systems, with David Cheriton as my advisor. Along the way I got to hack on most parts of the V operating system as well as learning lots of other things.

Bibliography

The most up-to-date bibliography for me is the one in my curriculum vitae.

Chess

See my chess pages for information on GNU Chess, XBoard, WinBoard, Crafty, Internet Chess Servers, Zippy, Chess Web Sites, Chess FTP Sites, and more!

Retrocomputing

In a previous life I was an operating system programmer for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I and Model III. More recently, in a fit of nostalgia, I've gotten interested in TRS-80 Model I/III/4 emulators. I've made some major extensions to xtrs, an emulator that runs under Unix with the X Window System. I've also gotten back in touch with some old colleagues, and have gained permission from Roy Soltoff of Misosys to put his TRS-80 software up for downloading. See my TRS-80 pages for information and software.

Music

I've moved my various musical endeavors to their own small page. My patch to the Linux ALSA sound drivers to support the Midiator MS-124W and MS-124T serial port MIDI adaptors is now part of the official ALSA sources, but you might still want to read about it on this page. The images and sound files of me singing and playing my guitar are probably of interest only to my friends.

Photos

Many people seem to start out their web sites as a place for personal photos. Now that my site has been around for several years as a home for my free software, I'm finally putting up a small number of photos. Like my music, they're probably of interest only to my family and friends.

Christmas letters

Here's another addition for my family and friends: an archive of all my annual Christmas letters. They run from 1987 to the present. I enjoyed looking back over them, but I won't be hurt if no one else wants to!

 Faith

Note: If you were redirected here from the old research.compaq.com or research.digital.com URL, please change your bookmarks and links to use http://www.tim-mann.org/ instead. I have left Compaq, and the old URLs may stop working at any time.