User:Brighterorange

About
Hello, I am Tom. I just recently got my Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and now I am a professional software engineer. I consider myself an expert in type theory, programming languages (esp. Standard ML), and logic (esp. modal logic). I also know a lot about some other things, like indie rock, typography and type design, photography, software audio effects, computational biology, machine learning, Nintendo, and First-Person Shooters.

Please use my talk page to communicate with me about Wikipedia rather than e-mail; I more likely to read your communique if it goes there, and definitely more likely to respond.

My real home page is at tom7.org.

Opinions
I love Wikipedia and have a number of opinions about how it could be improved.

Wish list
I found out that if I put a wish list of articles on my user page, sometimes they just appear out of nowhere!


 * Nerd Stuff
 * typed assembly language (Typed Assembly Language) - machine languages that have type systems
 * proof-carrying code (proof carrying code, Proof-Carrying Code) - more generally, object code that comes with a proof of safety
 * Automath (AUTOMATH) - Computer-checked mathematics history
 * de Bruijn index - probably the most common (internal) representation for languages with binders, like the lambda calculus
 * POPL, LICS, etc. - noted PL conferences
 * BLOSUM - similarity matrices used in genome comparison, like PAM
 * Join calculus and JoCaml - calculus and programming language for distributed computing
 * defunctionalization - compilation technique
 * closure conversion (perhaps as section of closure (computer science))
 * geometry of interaction - Jean-Yves Girard's operational interpretation of cut elimination for linear logic
 * Richard Statman (Rick Statman) is a lambda calculus legend.
 * Rock Stuff
 * Scat Records - Record label that once was home to Guided by Voices and Nothing Painted Blue, etc.
 * canyon.mid - C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA
 * Miscellaneous
 * Hamden High School - My high school; wp now has guidelines for inclusions of secondary schools
 * Mike Katz - Former Mr. Universe, star of Pumping Iron, and my high school health teacher
 * Thomas Callister Hales - Pittsburgh mathematician who proved the Kepler conjecture
 * George Lowe - The talented voice actor responsible for the voice of Space Ghost in Space Ghost: Coast to Coast (among other characters)
 * Kleenexgirlwonder (Kleenex Girl Wonder) (Graham Smith (needs disamb)) - Recorded one of the best indie rock albums of all, "Ponyoak"
 * ICFP programming contest (ICFP Programming Contest) - long-running, free format programming competition

Here are some articles I'd like to extend.
 * Algebraic data type needs work (!)
 * Jitter could do a much better job of explaining the phenomenon. It currently reads as a list of disconnected bullet points
 * Dogfish Head Brewery is a great American brewery that deserves more than a stub
 * Rocketjumping needs cleanup since its merge
 * Name binding is totally wrong in many ways
 * Eli Whitney Museum is my alma mater, in a sense

Work on

 * List of state leaders in 1385 and all the related articles need auto en-dash fixing.
 * List of colonial governors in 1904 likewise.

Started
Here are some articles that I started. Here is a project I started.
 * Mark Leyner - One of my favorite authors
 * Sturmian word - Mathematical object of note
 * Fibonacci word - Famous example of the latter
 * Albright special - A bend (type of knot) used in angling
 * Racking bend - Another bend
 * Twelf - Popular logical framework implementation (plus metalogical tools) used for formalizing logics and programming languages. (I use it in my thesis research!) The article still needs to be fleshed out a bit.
 * Merton College library - Split from the main article on Merton in order to add more information and photos.
 * Intertec Superbrain - An old twin-Z80 machine; Kermit was first developed to run on these
 * Higher-order abstract syntax (HOAS) - another common way to represent binders if your meta language has binders, supported by Twelf
 * Marine Research - K twee indie with Cathy Rogers from Junkyard Wars
 * Helen DeWitt - Another excellent author
 * Furlough - vacation, especially from armed services or prison
 * International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) is a big programming languages conference
 * Pulsar is an old arcade game
 * Enteral formula is like total body nutrition in a tube
 * Manhunter 2: San Francisco was maybe the last classic Sierra On-Line adventure missing from Wikipedia!
 * Box is Guided By Voices's first box set of their first four albums
 * King Missile the album by King Missile
 * The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a movie I didn't see
 * The Amy Fisher Story I didn't see either
 * Stimpmeter - undeleted and rescued from copyvio hell a few times.
 * Solenostemon scutellarioides is a crazy purple plant
 * Adiantum peruvianum is an elegant green fern
 * Guglielmo de Sanctis is some Italian painter
 * LizaMoon is some dumb scareware virus that a lot of people fell for
 * Project Punctuation - Fix missing punctuation

PeriodBot
I've written some software in SML for mining Wikipedia off-line. One early application is PeriodBot, which searches for article paragraphs that don't end with punctuation (an incredibly common mistake). We manually apply these changes as part of WikiProject Punctuation. (Since this program doesn't automatically interact with the live wikipedia either to read nor write, it doesn't really qualify as a bot as per WP:B). You can get the source code here if you want.

Useful links for database dumps:
 * download.wikimedia.org
 * Database dump import problems
 * Database download

Since then I have been more interested in extending the Wikipedia interface using Javascript (ugh) to automate repetitive editing tasks, particularly as respects my superficial editing interests (punctuation and typography, image formats). These are not quite ready for prime time yet, but please ask if you're interested in beta-testing.

I also frequently run my autopunctuation script on featured article candidates and featured articles. If you're working on an article that you would like to have high quality punctuation (particularly en dashes), just leave a message on my talk page and I will run it on your article. (example)

Images
I like taking photographs, and I've uploaded some images to Wikipedia, too. I occasionally replace poor pictures with better high-resolution ones; when I do, my policy is to use a license at least as generous as the old one.

As an image quality stickler, I also spend a lot of time tagging and converting images to better formats, especially SVG. Unfortunately SVG thumbnail support is pretty unreliable so some of these don't even show up. Does anybody know if I can do anything to make this situation better?

To do

 * Mercury Villager (could take free image)
 * Pi Day (some pictures from CMU tradition)
 * sailor's hitch, other knots...
 * Hamden High School
 * Eli Whitney Museum (still need outside daytime shot)
 * four-in-hand knot
 * Taylor Allderdice High School
 * Shadyside (Pittsburgh)
 * Duquesne University
 * Pilaf
 * Farmington Canal
 * St. Stanislaus Kostka Church (Pittsburgh) (church in Strip)
 * Mensurstrich

Easily improved

 * CD-R
 * Spoon
 * Merritt Parkway
 * Cathedral of Learning
 * Matzo
 * lock picking

WP:IS a social networking site

 * User:Mikemurphy is my brother who lives with me in Pittsburgh
 * User:Agoode is a tall friend from school
 * User:BD2412 was responsible for my successful nomination for adminship
 * User:Alkivar nicely vandalized improved my user picture (see right) while voting was going on
 * User:William Lovas is my officemate, cohort, and ex-one-and-a-half academic brother
 * User:Cjoev is another one-and-a-half academic brother
 * User:Jcreed gets lunch with me several times a week, during which time we solve all problems
 * User:Sirmob is another fellow CMU PL student and Twelf party animal
 * User:Nbeckman is my Elite Beat Buddy
 * User:Kaustuv and I once scoured all of Oxford looking for an umbrella
 * User:Grammarnerd is a Twister rival and mojito compatriot
 * User:Greenerturtle is a blogventure original