bbengfort / bengfort.cs.umd.edu

My personal academic website at the University of Maryland

Bengfort CS Web Page

My personal academic website at the University of Maryland: http://cs.umd.edu/~bengfort/

Writing

I don't update this site very often, so it's useful for me to have some notes to both write and publish the site to the UMD servers. The site is a jekyll statically generated site. Make sure you have the jekyll command installed (OS upgrades tend to get rid of it):

$ gem install jekyll

To start writing, edit the the _config.yml file and swap the comments for the url as follows:

# url:              http://cs.umd.edu/~bengfort
url:              http://localhost:4000

This will allow you to serve the local website and be able to click around correctly. Speaking of, serve the website as follows:

$ jekyll serve

To create a new post, all you need to do is create a new file in the _posts directory. How you name files in this folder is important. Jekyll requires blog post files to be named according to the following format:

YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.md

Where YEAR is a four-digit number, MONTH and DAY are both two-digit numbers, and MARKUP is the file extension representing the format used in the file (by default I simply use Markdown).

Jekyll also has built-in support for syntax highlighting of code snippets using either Pygments, and including a code snippet in any post is easy. Just use the dedicated Liquid tag as follows:

{% highlight python %}
def fib(n):
    if n < 2:
        return n
    return fib(n-2) + fib(n-1)

print map(fib, range(0, 10))
#=> prints '[0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34]' to STDOUT.
{% endhighlight %}

Papers

On this site I also host academic papers that I've written in PDF format. Add papers to the papers directory and then include them in posts at the end by adding the paper tag in the YAML front matter of the post. A link to the PDF paper will automatically be included in the post.

Publishing

Edit the _config.yml to put back the UMD url as the domain:

url:              http://cs.umd.edu/~bengfort
# url:              http://localhost:4000

Then before you commit to Github create a build of the site:

$ jekyll build

This is important since you can't install Jekyll on Junkfood (the Unix cluster the site is hosted on). So the static files must be in the repository and cloned directly to Junkfood.

Next, SSH into junkfood - which is possible if you're not actually on campus as long as you're connected to the CS VPN. Then change to the www repo in your home directory. Pull the changes from Github (and hope that everything is configured correctly).

$ ssh junkfood
$ cd repos/www
$ git pull

Now, this directory is not where the site is hosted from. I use rsync to sync the _site directory in particular to the correct location. There is a script in the ~/bin directory to make this happen. Luckily, this is also on the $PATH so simply:

$ websync

That's it, you should be able to reload the page and have your new static site up and running!

bengfort.cs.umd.edu's Issues

2016-08-29 Reading List

This is the current scientific reading list, which will hopefully also lead to some quick blog posts.

• Bermbach, David et al. “Metastorage: A Federated Cloud Storage System to Manage Consistency-Latency Tradeoffs.” Cloud Computing (CLOUD), 2011 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2011. 452–459. Google Scholar. Web. 9 Aug. 2016.
• Bermbach, David, and Jörn Kuhlenkamp. “Consistency in Distributed Storage Systems.” Networked Systems. Springer, 2013. 175–189. Google Scholar. Web. 9 Aug. 2016.
• Al-Ekram, Raihan, and Ric Holt. “Multi-Consistency Data Replication.” Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), 2010 IEEE 16th International Conference on. IEEE, 2010. 568–577. Google Scholar. Web. 9 Aug. 2016.