About www.BrendanGregg.com
This homepage used to be on geocities in the 90's. Around 2001 I moved it to http://users.tpg.com.au/bdgcvb, which was an address provided by my ISP. All was well until I upgraded my ISP plan, at which point they changed my homepage to be http://users.tpg.com.au/adsln4yb and could not to provide a redirect. This broke hundreds of links on the Internet, and my business cards. Looking for a way to avoid this in the future, I registered my name as a DNS pointer: http://www.brendangregg.com. This will always work, wherever my actual homepage may be.
Email: brendan@joyent.com
I get a lot of emails, which build up into the hundreds when I've been travelling for a number of weeks. I do eventually read all the emails I'm sent, and I try to reply to them all. Due to the work that I do, I often travel both interstate and overseas, much of the time without regular Internet access. I sometimes spend time in hotel rooms writing software on my laptop (which I can do offline) however I'm unable to answer emails during these trips.
Software suggestions: I'm always grateful that people would find the time to email me about a program I've written; whether it is to report a bug, make a suggestion, or simply to say thanks. I make a note of useful suggestions and attempt to implement them (I'm not always successful, but I try).
Software code: Many people have emailed me code to include in my programs, which I've sometimes done (their name will appear in the code), but often I don't. I'm always grateful that they have taken the time to do this, however I must be extreamly careful about code that I use. Many of my programs are run on critical production servers, and I take the greatest care to consider all potential problems that a program could cause... I've recieved around a dozen emails containing code that finish with "and this is the first code I've ever written." Ok, that doesn't fill me with confidence! Again, I'm grateful they have emailed me, I'm grateful they are honest, but please don't expect I'll accept code if you are an inexperienced programmer.
checkcable: I have had numerous emails about this program, most of which are requests to enhance the output for various reasons, some include code. Whenever I think about this program I cringe. The code is fine, but the strategy is far from elegant - I should be using Sun::Solaris::Kstat, but (as the Kstat data wasn't reliable) instead wrapped ndd. bleh! If at some point in the future I find a better overall strategy I'll take this program more seriously.
Chaosreader: I've had more emails about this tool than any other I've written - thank you for your support, I still have plans for Chaosreader. It is due for a total rewrite. I want to make it more modular, so that others can easily write plugins to decode other protocols or to input other capture file formats. It was written to demonstrate that plaintext protocols are vulnerable, however it has been quite popular as a network forensics tool. When I have a week to spare I'll get this rewrite started.
DTraceToolkit: I am interested to hear if this toolkit has helped out in a particular way, please email away (or even share your experiences on the DTrace mailing list). If you have a code suggestion please test carefully first, both sparc and x86, for many different workloads; More time goes into testing these tools than actually writing them.
Photos: A number of people have emailed to ask for permission to use photos from my website; if you would like to and will acknowledge the photographer (me), you are very welcome to do so. I'm glad people enjoy them, and I'm happy to know they are useful somehow.