SNL@CS.CMU.EDU

Sean Levy

snl@hardbits.com

My Sad Tale of Woe

Until Aug, 1999, I worked at the Parallel Data Lab at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science as a research programmer. I left CMU for what I think is finally the last time to pursue my own projects at St. Alphonsos, a small techincal ISP/consultancy/skunkworks I founded in 1997. I toiled along in this vein until January, 2000, when I accepted a position at Direct Hit Technologies in Boston for what looked like a fun ride with a next-gen search engine. Instead, Direct Hit got bought by Ask Jeeves a scant 2 weeks after I joined, and I decided after some soul-searching that I didn't want to work for Jeeves, so I left. At the same time, an old collegaue of mine, Levent Gursoz, was getting his startup, Halosoft, Inc. off the ground and asked me to join as VP of Engineering. I worked there for a year, got disgusted for various reason that I won't go into here, and was gainfully unemployed for a couple months, doing odd bits of consulting and other stuff under the guise of hardbits.com, a domain I registered for just that purpose. In June, I joined the CERT/CC technical staff, where I currently work on various and sundry security-related R&D efforts.

What I've Worked On

I maintain my personal web pages at St.Alphonsos if you are interested. E-mail to me at CMU is forwarded to St. Alphonsos, so you can use either address.

I worked at CMU for almost 12 years on and off, with a yearlong stint at Lycos thrown in for good measure. Things I have worked on while here (both in SCS and at The Institute for Complex Engineered Systems, formerly called the Engineering Design Research Center) include:

  • Cheops - a network RAID implementation on top of NASD
  • General Linux Hacking, and even more general Unix hacking
  • Computer Security - incident detection, analysis, triage and prevention.
  • n-dim, a general purpose information modeling environment, which I helped to architect and implement.
  • User interface toolkits, specifically for DAG visualzation.
  • Distributed systems toolkits and implementations.
  • Complex document storage and retrieval systems and integration platforms for Design Support Systems.
  • Object-oriented languages, databases and environments.
  • A partial list of my publications can be found in my on-line resume at St. Alphonsos.

    Ongoing interests and areas of activity for me include:

  • Security
  • Distributed Systems
  • Scaleable Storage Systems
  • Amorphous "agent"-style computational environments
  • Web Applications
  • Reaching Me

    The best way to reach me is via e-mail at snl@hardbits.com. I have both an old-style PGP2 key and a new GPG/DSA key that you can use to send me signed and/or encrypted e-mail.