Jeff R. Allen

This is Jeff R. Allen's home page.

About me

After working 10 years as a sysadmin (see below), I "retired" in September 2004. I am now a Logistician/Administrator with MSF, and I do IT gigs between postings to pay the bills. To get here, I had to retrain myself by doing fun things like sailing from Spain to Africa, living in Guatemala for four months (studying Spanish and working for Planeta en Línea), getting training from the American Red Cross and from RedR, and living in Lausanne Switzerland and learning French from Ecole-club Migros.

You can read about these adventures on my blog (such as it is). If you want to hire me (or place me as a volunteer) for humanitarian aid work, check out my resume.

Here are some of the things that made me me, before I started this latest adventure:

• Professional
  • I am a system administrator with 10 years experience. I find myself drawn to running large distributed systems made of small parts. Both large systems I've worked on (the WebTV Service and the Tellme Voice Application Network) were used by people who really didn't want to know that they are using computers. Therein lies the challenge.
  • Publications
  • I did various little jobs to help with the LISA conference sponsored by Usenix and Sage.
• Free Software I've written
  • Cricket is a high performance, extremely flexible system for monitoring trends in time-series data. Cricket was expressly developed to help network managers visualize and understand the traffic on their networks, but it can be used for all kinds of other jobs, as well.
  • Verdad is a system for centralizing configuration information for all the hosts at a large site. It provides tools like inheritance and versioning to let you build a central configuration database.
  • I am currently contributing code and documentation to the DTN Research Group.
• Personal
  • English country dances and contras
  • Irish dancing at the Starry Plough
  • Connecting Through Dance
  • The Game
    • Game control for Justice Unlimited, Fobik, HLOTF. Helped with 8-ball.
    • Played about six others.
  • Various geek pursuits

Contacting me

Spam is not welcome. Happily bogofilter and Gmail can tell the difference between the trash my friends send me and the trash you spammers are planning on sending. So, seriously, don't bother.

My ham radio call sign is KI6BNK. When I am monitoring the radio, it is almost always on the repeater N6NFI. I sometimes check in to the 9 AM Talk Net. I'm planning to get in the habit of checking in to the local ARES/RACES net, too. When I am in Redwood City, that will be SCARES.

My PGP key is here or here.

Why the "R"?

It stands for Richard, my father's name. I don't use it in daily life, but I always use "Jeff R. Allen" for publications to make it easier for you, the viewing audience, to keep track of which Jeff Allen I am. My username has been jra for a good long while now.

Old Pages

I have lived at various places on the net in the past, including:

• Harvey Mudd College CS Department
• Bunyip, Inc.
• Munitions.com