Richard E. Silverman <res@qoxp.net>

web: qoxp.net / spacetime: New York City / crypto: GnuPG / LinkedIn

Professional

I make my living doing “computer stuff:” systems administration & engineering, software development, networking, security, etc., mostly with various flavors of Unix. I am also a writer, and have published a few books through O’Reilly:

• 

  SSH: The Secure Shell

• 

  Linux Security Cookbook

• 

  Git Pocket Guide

Background

• BA Computer Science / MA Mathematics: Wesleyan University
• Network Security Research: BBN (now part of RTX)
• Systems Engineer: D. E. Shaw & Co., L.P.
• Systems Engineer: Arcesium, LLC (current)

Music

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I kept myself sane by creating a series of videos of me performing music alone at home via multitrack recording, mostly polyphonic sacred choral music of the Western Baroque and earlier, with some later and instrumental music as well. It’s on YouTube as Voices of Quarantine. Here’s one, a humorous COVID-themed riff on a Bach chorale:

And another, an exploration of one of the canons in Bach’s Musical Offering:

Why “QOXP”?

One night as an undergrad, I was hacking away at a VT-220 terminal on the 6th floor of the Science Center. I had just written a program (on a DEC-20), and couldn’t decide what to name it. My friend Lisa Greenstein was sitting nearby, and she whipped up a quick program that started printing out four-letter random words. qoxp popped out at me, and the program was named. Years later when I decided to get a personal domain name, it was the natural choice.