About Richard Tibbetts

For the most up to date information you will want to peruse my weblog at innocuous.org.

Contents

Life

I'm back living in Massachusetts full time. I live in Arlington, Massachusetts, with my wife Aletta. We live with a cat named Reason.

Projects

I have a number of ongoing projects, most of which are computer related. Here is a partial list:

Typo
Typo is the software that runs my blog at innocuous.org. It is built using the Ruby on Rails framework, and I hack on it a bit.
innocuous.org
My web server, hosted by Linode, which is mostly just my blog. I recommend Linode for anyone who needs a low-end server with good network connectivity. I am using their $20 per month plan and am very pleased with it.
Streaming audio
I do occasional work with streaming audio using Icecast and the ill-documented Shoutcast protocol. In particular I build a repeater using the Twisted programming framework in Python.
Jifty
After playing a bit with Ruby on Rails and not really getting attached to it, I've started working more with Jifty. Jifty is a framework built in Perl, leveraging existing tools like HTML::Mason, and liberally stealing ideas from Ruby on Rails and other Web 2.0 applications. It is under active development. You get get it from their website, or from CPAN.
MythTV
MythTV is like TiVo, but free software. As a result it can be a bit of a challenge to get up and running, but it is much more flexible and extensible than any of the set-top boxes.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu is the Linux distribution du jour. It is based on Debian, and is basically Debian with different defaults. However, much like Knoppix (another Debian based distribution), Ubuntu goes to show that good defaults can be worth a lot. I run Ubuntu on my laptop, web server, and home server.
Debian
I am a Debian developer. However, I do very little work for the project.

Work

StreamBase

I am a co-founder, architect, and team lead at StreamBase, where we are developing a Complex Event Processing (CEP) Platform, a new generation of enterprise software, which is sometimes known as Event Stream Processing. I work primarily on the StreamBase Server component. For the moment you won't hear me saying much about that here. Check out our website for more information. If you are interested in develop high performance enterprise software and new programming paradigms, we are probably hiring.

Graduate Student

Before founding StreamBase I was a graduate student with Hari Balakrishnan and Mike Stonebraker in the Network and Mobile Systems (NMS) group at MIT. I was a contributor to the Aurora Project, a collaboration between MIT, Brown, and Brandeis to develop a Stream Processing Engine. Most of NMS was focused on applying Stream Processing to sensor networks as part of the SLAM project, and worked on Medusa, the massively scalable and distributable version of Aurora. However, my research, working primarily with Mike Stonebraker at MIT and Mitch Cherniack at Brandeis, was on benchmarking of Stream Processing Engines. Our big contribution (and my Master's thesis) was the Linear Road Benchmark. I've since passed it off to Mitch Cherniack and his students to maintain. As a benchmark, at least academically, it is actually starting to catch on.

In addition to my research at MIT, I was also a Teaching Assistant for MIT's 6.170, Laboratory in Software Engineering in the Fall of 2002