Chip's Homepage

Whether you were looking for it or not, you have found the homepage of Charles M. "Chip" Coldwell. Although I am an alumnus of the Physics Department at Harvard University, these days I'm trying to pass myself off as some sort of computer expert. I'm currently employed as a "Senior Software Engineer" (that's their high-falutin' way of saying "computer programmer") for Red Hat. They pay me to hack on the Linux kernel; mostly storage subsystems.

When I'm not messing around with a computer of some sort, I'm generally riding my bicycle, or hanging out with friends here in the Boston area.

Chip's links, in no particular order

Wedding

• Some photos (Paul Horowitz, photographer)
• Some more photos (Max Poletto, photographer)
• Still more photos (Andrew Howard, photographer)

Bicycling

• The famous bike diaries chronicling my trip from Boston to Seattle on ...
• ... the new touring bicycle; ain't she purty?
• The demise of Sturmey-Archer; some articles I collected describing an incident of capitalism at its very worst.
• In 2001, I was interviewed on the local WB affiliated television station about a protest held in Boston for Car-Free Day
• Max Poletto invited some friends (including myself) to join him on one of his famous Jobst-Brandt-inspired tours of the Alps in 2004.
  • Max's report
  • Thomer's report

Randonneuring

1. In 2003 I rode the Boston Brevet Series, a series of four events sanctioned by Randonneurs USA to qualify for the Paris-Brest-Paris.
   1. My friend Max Poletto and I rode the 200K in an ice storm on the day it was originally scheduled for. The organizers chose to postpone the event in light of the weather, but Max couldn't ride on the rescheduled date. Neither of us thought to write up a report, unfortunately.
   2. Max's 300K report
   3. My 400K report
   4. My 600K report
   5. My Paris-Brest-Paris report (85:18)
2. In 2004 Max and I rode the 200K and 300K events from the Berkshire Brevet Series, as well as the entire Boston Brevet Series and the Boston-Monreal-Boston 1200K. I abdicated all ride-report writing responsibilities to Max this year; neither of us bothered to write up our 600K.
   1. Berkshire 200K
   2. Boston 200K
   3. Berkshire 300K
   4. Boston 300K
   5. Boston 400K
   6. Boston-Montreal-Boston (71:43)
3. In 2005 I rode
   1. The complete Gainesville Cycling Club Brevet Series
   2. The Fleche New England with Team Cinque Terre (myself, Max Poletto and John Bayley and Pamela Blalock).
   3. The Berkshire 200K.
   Then I took the rest of the season off to nurse my damaged knees.
4. In 2006 I rode
   1. The Berkshire Populaire
   2. The 300K, 400K and 600K events in the Gainesville Cycling Club Brevet Series (airline SNAFUs prevented me from riding the 200K event).
   3. The complete Boston Brevet Series
   4. The Cascade 1200 (84:28)
   5. The Boston-Montreal-Boston (67:44)
   6. The Deerfield Dirt-Road Randonnee (a.k.a. D2-R2)

Computers

My Articles:

• A short article, mostly for my own reference, describing how to build a GNU/Linux i386-ARM cross-toolchain.
• An article about how to build diskless Linux boxen. This technique is especially useful for Beowulf cluster nodes and converting old PCs into X-terminals. I've used it for both with great success.
• Another article I'm working on, which is barely more than an outline now, about terminal concepts in Linux. I'll probably end up expanding this to include other flavors of Unix, since this is an area where BSD and System V diverge quite alot.
• How to use a Linux box as an answering machine.
• A very short article on how to configure teTeX (the TeX/LaTeX version distributed with Red Hat Linux) to use Type 1 (scalable) Computer Modern fonts. This is essential if you are planning to convert your PostScript file to PDF for viewing on video displays. It's also very easy, so why not do it?
• Cute little C++ template for picking apart IEEE 754 single- and double-precision floating point numbers.

Other people's articles

• ncursesIntroduction and Hacker's Guide

Software

• Xpdf for OpenVMS/Alpha
• SYMVEC for OpenVMS/Alpha

IOTA

I worked for the "Infrared and Optical Telescope Array" (IOTA) project at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for a number of years developing real-time data acquisition and control software on (believe it or not) 68000-class Macintosh computers. Later on I developed an avalanche photodiode detector system for them, this time with the data acquision done by a Linux box, using a device driver I wrote.

• Source code for IOTA APD programs and Keithley CTM-05/A device driver.
• Linux device driver for the Parker-Hannifin Compumotor AT6200/AT6400 bus-based stepper motor indexers.
• IOTA technical documentation: a small collection of papers I wrote while developing their data acquisition and control system. This stuff is largely out of date due to a recent upgrade to a VxWorks-based system that I had nothing to do with.

Miscellaneous

• My Red Hat page.
• Cos' baklava recipe: millions of Greeks can't be wrong.
• wire gauge paper: ever wonder what those AWG numbers really mean?
• "Read the manpage, Jono."
• My resume (I am not currently looking for a job.)
• More links.

Contact

Since I already get plenty of spam, I'm not going to put my real email address on a publicly accessible web page for the screen scrapers to harvest. Anyone with a little bit of computing experience could probably guess what my email address is from the form of the URL that brought you this page and the additional information that I get my email on the same computer that serves this page. Just to make sure nobody is left out, it's coldwell (at) frank (dot) harvard (dot) edu, where the words in parentheses should be replaced by the corresponding punctuation and the spaces left out.