About

Hi, I'm Kevin Galligan! This place hosts my blog, an index of my projects, and some free web applications. On the blog, I like to write about programming, math, life experiences, and anything else that takes my fancy. In this life, I've been a software developer and a PhD student. My doctoral research was about error correction decoding algorithms.

Contact me at galligankevinp@gmail.com.

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Infrequently Asked Questions

Q: Does your stuff have a license?

All of the content on this site is under a CC BY-NC license. Basically, do what you want, but give me credit and don't try to sell it.

Q: Why doesn't your blog have comments?

It's easier to maintain a static site. All I have to do is upload the files to GitHub Pages and they're magically available to the world. I might eventually set up a server to host comments.

Q: What's the story with the icon?

I needed an icon and drew something vaguely inspired by the Game of Life. This is what happens when you plug it into the Game of Life.

Q: Where else do you exist on the internet?

• Mastodon for updates on what I'm doing.
• Goodreads for logging books.
• letterboxd for logging movies.
• Lichess for playing chess.

Q: Which software do you use?

Linux Mint, Python, C/C++, Common Lisp, vim, Emacs, tmux, Firefox, Thunderbird (email, calendar, RSS).

Q: What was your PhD about?

When data is sent over the Internet, it has to travel through noisy communication channels like cables. Along the way, it gets corrupted by physical phenomena like earthquakes, sharks, and more mundane things like faulty routers. To overcome this, the computer people use a technology called error correction codes, which adds redundancy to a message that can then be used by specialised algorithms to identify and fix the errors. I was working on those algorithms.

An emoji example! You take your data 📚, encode it using a repetition code 📚📚📚, send it through a communication channel 🌐, the channel introduces errors 📚❌📚, and the receiver uses a decoding algorithm to identify the errors and recover the original message 📚.

Q: What have people said about you?

You're a calming presence - a colleague.

The author is lacking in many respects - an insightful HackerNews commenter.

At least I won't be remembered as a coward - a brave internet user.