Neal Ziring's Professional Interests Page

Computing in general is an incredibly active field at this time. Listed here are some of my particular interests, with links to WWW resources about them.

Programming Languages

C++

A popular and most excellent object-oriented language originally invented by Bjorne Stroustroup. I've been using C++ since 1984.

 

Tcl and Tcl/Tk

A highly portable, embeddable interpreted language invented by John Ousterhout.

 

Java

The new hot language on the Internet. Surprisingly cool, albeit over-hyped, portable object-oriented language invented by James Gosling et.al. at Sun Microsystems. I also teach Java programming on occasion.

Visit my Java page for a couple of cool, free applets, Java links, and more.

I am a Sun Certified Java Programmer for Java 1.1. For more information about the Java certification program, click on the logo at right.

Perl

The Practical Extraction and Report Language, an efficient and concise interpreted language invented by Larry Wall.

 

Postscript

A compact and simple language used for describing documents, implemented by many printers and software products.

Programming and Network Standards

The X Window System

Portable, network-transparent windowing system for workstations. I've been programming with X11 since 1987, and teaching it since 1989.

CORBA

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture is the standard for distributed object systems. This is really a complex family of standards and products.

The Open Group

The Open Group is an Open Systems standards body and trade association, the result of the merger of OSF and X/Open.

The Internet Engineering Task Force

The IETF is the standards body responsible for protocol and networking standards for the world wide internet. Their web site has links to RFC and Internet-Draft archive sites.

I recently had a submission accepted as an Internet-Draft. If you enjoy reading about security extensions to obscure protocols: please read TFTP Compression and Security Options.
(Also available by ftp.)

Security and Cryptography

National Security Agency

Most government cryptography and security-related policy comes from here. (Their webspace is kinda lame, though)

The International Cryptography Experiment (ICE)

A DARPA-sponsored international cryptography discussion group, run partly by Trusted Information Systems.

RSA PKCS #11 Cryptoki

A cryptographic API standard to which I was a minor contributor.

The Open Group

The Open Group is an Open Systems standards body and trade association, the result of the merger of OSF and X/Open.

more later...

I use products from lots of computer hardware and software companies at work and at home. Here are links to a few of those companies.

Adobe Systems (and Frame)

Adobe's home page is a good source of information on their products and also technical specifications for PostScript and PDF. You can also get information about Framemaker products (since Adobe acquired Frame). You can also download the latest version of Adobe Acrobat.


more later...