Paul A.S. Ward Associate Professor Shoshin Distributed Systems Research Group Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty of Engineering University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. N2L 3G1

Office: DC 2643
Phone: (519) 888-4567 Ext. 33127
Fax: (519) 746-3077
E-mail: pasward@ccng.uwaterloo.ca
Home Page:  http://ccng.uwaterloo.ca/~pasward/

My professional life is divided into research, teaching, and service, in spite of my best efforts to try to integrate the three in a meaningful way. If you are a student in one of my classes, it is likely you want to click on teaching. If you want to collaborate with me in research, you should probably try clicking research.

Graduate students seem to fall into both teaching and research, so if you think you might like to become one of my graduate students, please read both of those, as well the material for current and prospective graduate students. There is a random code buried in that material. If you e-mail me and have not included that code in the subject line, I will probably ignore your e-mail. I apologize that I have to do this, but I receive, on average, an e-mail every day from some prospective student; if s/he has not bothered to determine what I do, or how graduate studies work at Waterloo, then I can see no reason why I should bother to spend the time to read the e-mail.

Undergraduate students seem to fall into eight basic types: combined Bachelor's/Master's program, ECE 499 project, intern/exchange, co-op, fourth-year design project, URA, USRA, volunteer (If you can think of another, please drop me a note.). If you are in one of these categories, and wish to work with me, please first read that material. It may answer your questions. If after reading that you still wish to work with me, send me an e-mail and arrange a meeting. As with potential graduate students, there is a code, and if you do not include the code in your subject line, I will probably ignore your e-mail.

If you just want jump straight to my publications, they are here. There are not always kept up-to-date, so I suggest just looking on DBLP or Google Scholar. Most of my research is in some form experimental. Raw data, detailed experimental information, code, etc. is kept here, though you may wish to jump quickly to network data or distributed-system management data.

If you want to know more about my professional life, here are my bio and CV.

Some personal stuff, which you may or may not care about. I have a family which is why I am not always in the office working. Having taught courses a few times, and been intimately involved in grading courses for well over a decade, I have a few tips for doing badly (based on personal experience!). I have a more general category of opinions. If you are likely to be offended, then don't read them. Don't, however, read them and then complain that you don't like them!

Finally here is my brief foray into the wonderful world of cracking. I have put here a small Perl script that allows you to fake a Microsoft Outlook e-mail correctly (there is some random magic in the Outlook program that includes a magic number in the target's e-mail client that must be replicated correctly). You need a copy of an e-mail from the target so as to get the various parameters correct. Detailed instructions will be forthcoming. (And why do I do this? Because there are some people running around saying that it is hard to do, and I wish to demonstrate how trivial it is. Anyone foolish enough to believe a hacked machine cannot trivially be used to forward e-mail that appears to be from the user of that machine will, hopefully, be duly chastised.)

A note about the colours on these web pages: it is very hard to achieve a good set of web page colours, unless you are willing to settle for boring black on white. It's dependable, if dull. I use it for course web pages, and anything that must project a dull but professional image. I personally would rather have some character in pages, and this is my attempt at it. If you believe you could do better, please show me what you would do differently. It is easy to complain, but hard to do better. One point to keep in mind if you wish to take up this challenge: the black background is pretty much essential, since the Shoshin Logo in the upper right corner has a black background.