While cleaning up I found this manual for Illustrate, which was implemented by Dawn Clarke and Dinarte Morais on Lisp machines, and modeled on the Xerox Alto draw program.   The user interface was nice compared to most modern tools.  One could do many operations with the keyboard or if you did need the mouse, you didn't need many clicks, so you could draw things very quickly.

Dawn M. Clarke and Dinarte R. Morais.  Illustrate Reference Manual, Tanglewood Design Note 12, 10 January 1985.  MIT Lab for Computer Science.

Trying to build gcc cilk from sources following the instructions at https://www.cilkplus.org/download. This step repeatedly fails since the gnu.org git server is slow or something:

git clone http://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git cilkplus-gcc 

Here's how to incrementally do a giant git clone from a slow server.

git init

git add .
git remote add cilkplus-gcc http://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git
git pull http://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git

It's painful, but with enough git pull operations, I seem to be able to get everything. Thanks to http://superuser.com/questions/154647/how-to-continue-cloning-a-git-repository-that-the-download-was-stopped

Note: the git add . gave an error, but I don't know if that meant it was a no-op.

I am general chair for Charles E. Leiserson's 60th-Birthday Symposium and Party. It's a symposium (for the techs) and it's a party (for everyone). Hope to see you there.

XLDB Tutorial

Michael Bender and I presented a tutorial on Data Structures and Algorithms for Big Databases at XLDB 2012.

How to digitally sign a pdf file using free software in GNU/Linux

I recently needed to sign a pdf document for legal purposes. The other party was willing to accept a digital signature. That does not mean copying an picture onto a pdf document. It's using public key crypto to sign the pdf document. Acrobat can do it, but I use free software, so, after about 30 minutes I figured out how to do it.

1. I extracted my csail certificate from my browser. In firefox
   • edit->preferences->advanced->encryption->view certificates
   • select the certificate
   • then hit backup
   • save it as a pkcs12 file
   • you'll be asked for a password for the backup. You'll use this later.
2. I got jsignpdf-1.3.0 and installed it
   • $ unzip JSignPdf-1.3.0.zip
   • $ cd jsignpdf-1.3.0
3. I ran it: $ java -jar JSignPdf.jar
   • A simple window popped up with some forms to fill in.
     • keystore type: PKCS12
     • keystore file: choose the backup made of the certificate
     • keystore password: the password you used
     • input file: the pdf file to sign
     • output file: I chose another name to avoid overwriting something useful
     • I clicked the checkbox on "visible signature"
     • Went to the "settings" box next to 'visible signature"
     • I chose the page where the signature needed to be placed, and I chose coordinates. I found the coordinates by running gv input.pdf since ghostview shows the coordinates in the upper left corner. For example, I put my signature on page 7 and put signature at coordinates
       • 147
       • 482
       • 369
       • 519
     • I chose Display: "Signature name and decsription"
     • Hit "close"
   • Then "sign it" on the original jpdfsign window.

my webpages are mostly back

After being down for nearly a year my web content at bradley.csail.mit.edu is mostly back up at http://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/.

There remain a few things missing...

MIT Academic Calendar

I created a google calendar for the MIT Academic Calendar. The calendar ID is gtfme9paltu2dfdac81f0p73us@group.calendar.google.com.

If you would like to volunteer to help maintain this calendar, please contact bradley@mit.edu. Originally I was using obpoblff7vffces4ot4g73b02g@group.calendar.google.com, but it's not being maintained, and I don't know how to contact the maintainers.