Pepper's Home Page

Some bits about me:

Macworld December 2009: I wrote an explanation of Google Voice for Macworld
December 2008: I now work in the Computational Biology Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Macworld, October 2008 October 2008: Rich and I co-wrote an article on Mac firewalls for Macworld; I also wrote a review of NetBarrier X5 to support it.
February 2008: I now work at Goldman Sachs as a System Administrator.
PS 321 November 2007: Julia is in kindergarten at PS 321, and I volunteered to be their webmaster. We signed on with eChalk to host the site in their CMS, and are now busily uploading content.
iPhone September 2007: I got an iPhone -- at $399 it was an easy decision. I posted some notes on the eval, and collected some iPhone bookmarks.
TidBITS June 2007: I wrote a long article for TidBITS about SSL/TLS, attempting to explain it to a lay audience. I wrote another piece for admins on how to use CA.pl, which TidBITS didn't pick up, and a third piece on a couple shell scripts I wrote to help run a Certificate Authority, called cert.command & sign.command. I hope you find them (and my other articles) interesting and useful.
  1. TidBITS: Securing Communications with SSL/TLS: A High-Level Overview
  2. Full Series (3 parts, with scripts): Securing Communications with SSL/TLS
OpenSSH April 2007: I am writing a book about ssh, which I would like to call Take Control of SSH (if I can get the Take Control people to publish it). I have posted a couple sections, covering Public Key Authentication and Reverse Tunnels. If you'd like more, please vote for the book!
Update: It is unlikely Take Control of SSH will ever happen, but we're working on an alternative plan.
MacFUSE January 2007: Amit Singh released MacFUSE at Macworld Expo earlier this month, and I wrote about it for TidBITS (MacFUSE Explodes Options for Mac File Systems).
WordPress December 2006: Blog moved. Mac OS X (Tiger) Server's Blojsom and Mailman installations are unstable (and Blojsom is less capable than the non-Apple mainstream version), so I've moved my blog to www.extrapepperoni.com; lists are moving to DreamHost as well.
September 2006: We moved, within Park Slope. The new place is much larger.
January 2006: Blog. I wanted a place to post stuff that wasn't even tangentially Julia-related, so I started putting it at http://www.reppep.com/weblog/pepper/ (now defunct). Blojsom is quite good, but Apple's screwed up the security. I will have to get lock it down properly at some point, but it's up now. So far it's been a good place to record computer esoterica that might be useful to others (or to myself in the future).
48 Maple Lane October 2005: My parents moved to Kendal on Hudson recently, and sold their house -- they actually sold half the property, and then sold the house itself with the other half. The fellow who bought the house rebuilds houses for a living, and is doing a major job (apparently larger than he originally expected). There's an old photo and a gallery of the work in progress. It looks like the siding Dad put on the house (which lowered heating costs and may have made it easier to sell) isn't a net benefit for the buyer after all...
XO Wave January 2004: Our friend Björn is getting ready to publish his XO Wave audio software -- we've been discussing his work and plans for over a year (and I host his sites), so it's exciting that he's coming out of stealth mode...
FreeBSD Updated May 2003: I've been running FreeBSD on www.reppep.com for about a year, and I'm very impressed with it. I've posted a streamlined install process for FreeBSD and the ports used on reppep.
Mac OS X Power Tools Updated April 2003: I wrote the Darwin/UNIX (command line) chapter of the just-released Mac OS X Power Tools.
Julia November 8, 2002: Julia Lauren Pepper arrived, at 8 pounds 1 ounce. We're recovering nicely, thank you.
Interarchy logo October 2002: I wrote the Interarchy manuals (from about version 3.8 through 6.2).
Movies! October 2002: I wrote movie review snippets from 1995-1997, and then trailed off. I'm trying to restart; now that I see fewer movies (especially post-Julia), hopefully I can keep up.
Julia models for TidBITS February 2002: I've written articles about the UNIX aspects of Mac OS X and firewalls for TidBITS.
Mastering Mac OS X July 2001: I wrote the command line (Darwin/UNIX) chapter of Mastering Mac OS X, 1st Edition.
Rockefeller University logo January 2001: I work in Information Technology at Rockefeller University.
Analog logo I like and use Analog, a web log analysis tool. My Analog page contains a small script I wrote to make using Analog with multiple sites very easy, and a compiled version of Analog for Mac OS X / Darwin.
I was the volunteer webmaster for the Info-Mac Network, which has been retired.
Apache I'm an occasional committer (though currently pretty inactive) on the Apache httpd documentation project.
I used to maintain a small site on Mac OS X and software for it.
Check out the Pepper website!
Loot: I have ThinkGeek and Amazon gift registries, if you want to give me toys. Thanks! Note that I prefer to read (wait for) small-format paperbacks, and rip & then store CDs, so used CDs are just fine. No need to give the RIAA more money than necessary.
Chris Pepper

My resume


chris-pepper-great-friend-evil-genius.jpeg

"Chris Pepper

Evil Genius

Great Friend"

-- James Gerber


Pepper Home contact: pepper@reppep.com