Bill Cheswick's Home Page
I am interested in visualization, user interfaces, security
and security
usability, typography, tinkering, and science,
medicine, and technology in general.
Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causus. - Virgil;
(“Happy is he who knows the cause of things.”)
I love living in the future!
Biographia
CV, includes patents and stuff;
Publications;
Talks;
Bio and short bio;
A nice movie about me;
If you'd like me to speak at your conference,
speaker information;
My blog and (RSS feed).
Current Projects
- How long does it take to win the lottery? A new app cominging to the iTunes store soon,
for the cost of a lottery ticket.
- Time lapse of some USGS webcam views of the
current lava flows near Pahoa, Hawaii.
- A weather radar display for the Tesla S console.
- 105:
My experimental authentication app I discuss in my password talks. Would you rather remember one
">
hard password you use almost daily, and never have to change, or deal with the big pile you
have right now?
I look forward to feedback.
- iTeX:,
high quality document formatting for the iPad and
similar devices. This is a document format and a free app on
to be in itunes. The project includes
- An attempt to make a PDF reader especially suited to reading
techincal documents,
- access to arXiv and Project Gutenberg
documents formatted for the iPad and other tablets,
- semi-automated creation of LaTeX versions of Project Gutenberg
texts.
- Better passwords, a problem that is likely to plague
us for a long time. I would like to make authentication easier,
stronger, and more fun. Current approach: trying to convince users
to memorize one passphrase to rule them all, protecting a smartphone
wallet. Also, trying to convince authentication providers to ease
up on the world: the eye-of-newt password rules aren't helping
anybody.
- Can redaction (especially bad redaction) be used as
a typographic tool to
enhance interest in a document?
- ,
a very wide panorama I made with Carlos Scheidegger. The technique
uses orthographic projection, but the film industry calls it
slitscan. There are a number of terrific examples
here.
There are even some air travel-based images though none, I think,
capture the distance across the continental US.
Recovering a stolen iPhone
. There are at least four
ways to locate a stolen iPhone.
Movie visualizations:
I've developed a
new way to see movies, and I
am looking for movie owners interested in seeing their movies
visualized this way.
Web page redesign:
Some of the web pages on this site
have not been updated since 1995. It was time to explore
style sheets
and some typographic options.
Passwords:
Have ten insults from
Ron Hardin,
and a hundred bits of
fresh entropy, using words that are iPhone
spell checker friendly.
Medical:
The Open Source Hearing Aid Project.
Rimonabant - the first in
a new class of anti-obesity drugs, and maybe the last.
Hacking eyewear for aging folks.
Movies and Visualizations:
Time lapse movies.
Internet layout algorithm visualizations.
Hacks:
MythTV HDTV notes.
Emergency power for the home heater during a power outage.
(1995-).
Building the house of the future, one Saturday project at a time.
- :
A cool effect and an interactive science exhibit.
Tech:
Electric commuting bike.
Fiction:
How to Trisect an Angle With a Chainsaw,
by Arjen Lenstra.
Bug, a very short story.
Science Museum Exhibits
.
I have worked on several science museum exhibits
over the years, starting with the original Digital Darkroom
at the Liberty Science Center,
something I developed with Gerard
Holzmann in the early 1990s at Bell Labs.
There are several new exhibits
now, mostly debugged, and available for the asking, including
What Does Sound Look Like?,
How Long Does it Take to Win the Lottery?,
an upgrade for the Chattanooga Children's Discovery Museum,
and a color blindness simulator.
Others:
Many other projects over the years,
including some favorite projects
from early in my computing career.
The Second Edition is available in several languages.
Details available at
http://www.wilyhacker.com/
It is more fun to have written than to write.
Hal Burch and
I ran the Internet mapping project while at Bell Labs and
Lumeta Corp.
The thumbnail reveals more information, data, and a gallery
of some interesting visualizations of the Internet.
These Internet maps have appeared in dozens of books, magazines,
posters, and papers worldwide. Our technology remains at Lumeta,
so you should contact Lumeta if
you wish to use the images. I am
always willing to discuss them with interested parties.
Recently, AT&T put up
Internet maps at
the Washington airports for the 2009 inauguration. These
versions are not available outside of AT&T.
I am still interested in the visualization challenges these kinds of data pose,
but am not working on it much.
Miscellany
- Some useful notes to myself on
how to do things, that might be of interest to others. I use
these things rarely enough that I forget the details.
- An and an even
.
- ,
family time lapse and
animation experiments.
- various
old project queries for which I invited specific feedback.
-
-
-
-
is eager to hear solutions to
these five problems,
and is eagerly offering a
reward of $1000 for positive or negative solutions to them.
This list was updated as of 10 October 2014 to get the wording exactly right,
and I will make it available at the
OEIS
and elsewhere.
I spent a modest portion of my youth diverted by his games of Life and Sprouts.
-
-
Misc
This lock is your assurance of security.
Brian Clapper is a boofhead. Arden is a
boofhead as well.
I've developed a
new way to see movies, and I
am looking for movie owners interested in seeing their movies
visualized this way.
A cool effect and an interactive science exhibit.
I have worked on several science museum exhibits
over the years, starting with the original Digital Darkroom
at the Liberty Science Center,
something I developed with Gerard
Holzmann in the early 1990s at Bell Labs.
The Second Edition is available in several languages.
Details available at
http://www.wilyhacker.com/
It is more fun to have written than to write.