Mark Probst's Homepage

Mostly Software

My blog.

Projects

The MathMap GIMP Plug-In

The Gimp is a very powerful free-software image manipulation program, which allows for the creation of plug-ins to extend its functionality. MathMap is a very generic plug-in, in that it allows a large class of manipulations to be specified through a built-in language. These specifications are often mathematical in nature and often specify a mapping between the original and the new image, hence the name.

Metapixel - A Photomosaic Generator

Metapixel is a program for generating photomosaics. It can generate classical photomosaics, in which the source image is viewed as a matrix of equally sized rectangles for each of which a matching image is substitued, as well as collage-style photomosaics, in which rectangular parts of the source image at arbitrary positions (i.e. not aligned to a matrix) are substituted by matching images.

The lispreader Library

lispreader is a small library for reading expressions in Lisp syntax. It has originally been written to facilitate simple exchange of structured data between processes but its main purpose is now to provide a framework for reading configuration files. To simplify interpretation of the read data, lispreader also provides functions for simple matching of expressions against patterns.

The bintrans Dynamic Binary Translator

bintrans is a dynamic binary translator. That means it runs programs on architectures they were not compiled for. It does this by dynamically translating the machine code of the programs to be run to machine code for the native architecture. Currently, bintrans features translators from i386 to PowerPC and from PowerPC to Alpha.

The Chakotay Preprocessor

Chakotay is a macro preprocessor which can probably be best described as a mixture of cpp, M4, Perl and Scheme. I did this together with Heinz Deinhart.

Minor Hacks

Clickr - Common Lisp bindings for the Flickr API

Clickr is a library providing high-level bindings to the Flickr API for Common Lisp. It also includes "Automatr", an application for automating a bunch of Flickr-related tasks. I've written about it on my blog. You can download Clickr 0.2 here.

StarField - A Star Trek type starfield generator

StarField generates a field of stars through which the viewer moves, reminiscent of the Star Trek TV series. It can generate a series of PNG images or a QuickTime movie (on MacOS X). Its stars are antialiased white circles which move with subpixel accuracy. Watch an example movie (encoded to MPEG-1) or download the source of StarField 0.1.

Old/Abandoned Software

This is a (constantly growing) collection of stuff I wrote a long time ago and/or never bothered to release because it was either too trivial, too useless, or because I was just too lazy to wrap it up into a reasonably nice package. I put up all this stuff here because I hope that some of it might be useful or interesting to somebody.

Publications

Monitors and Exceptions: How to implement Java efficiently

Appeared at ACM 1998 Workshop on Java for High-Performance Network Computing, abstract and article (a4) (156061 bytes) or article (letter) (156120 bytes) or compressed article (a4) (63449 bytes) or compressed article (letter) (63472 bytes). Full version appeared in Concurrency: Practice and Experience 10(8), 1998.

Proper Tail Recursion in C (Diploma Thesis)

Fast Machine-Adaptable Dynamic Binary Translation

Proceedings of the Workshop on Binary Translation 2001, compressed article (a4) (77130 bytes).

Dynamic Binary Translation

UKUUG Linux Developer's Conference 2002, compressed article (a4) (115193 bytes).

Register Liveness Analysis for Optimizing Binary Translation

Proc. of Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE'02), pp. 35-44, IEEE Press, Richmond, Virginia, USA, October/November 2002, compressed article (a4) (60824 bytes).

Photography

Lately I have been taking up photography as a hobby. The results of my labours can be seen on my Flickr page.

Juggling Videos

Juggling is my favorite pastime and I like to believe that I do it reasonably well. Hence I decided to put together videos of a few not so usual tricks. Enjoy!

SuperMag Page

SuperMag is a magnetic construction kit, the building blocks of which are metallic spheres and magnetic bars of two different lengths. On this page, I've put together some of the things I have constructed with it, some words of wisdom about using SuperMag, and a few videos of me juggling my works of art.

Mark Probst