A picture of me
Jens Thoms Törring
Hertzbergstr. 28
12055 Berlin
Germany
Email:    jt@toerring.de
Tel.:      +49 - (0)30 - 691 64 54

About me

While being a physicist by training (having mostly worked in Electron Spin Resonance (ESR)) I got a bit sidetracked into fiddling with computers. One of the results is my program for controlling spectrometers, fsc2, a number of Linux device drivers and other stuff (see below). At the moment I work for the Dept. of Education and Psychology of the Freie Universität Berlin in a group that tries to figure out how the brain works (or at least to understand a bit more about it;-), using a wide range of techniques like EEG, fMRI, NIRS (Near-InfraRed Spectroscopy, where they shine lasers into your skull and try to deduce what's going on in there from the light coming back) and several others. I'm involved there in writing programs to help visualize and analyze all the data recorded (and serving as a guinea pig from time to time;-).


Software and other stuff

* fsc2 is a program for controlling spectrometers. Its main features are: easy to adapt to different hardware; running an experiment is controlled by a simple interpreted language, so it can be used to do basically all kinds of experiments, i.e. it's not restricted to a certain built-in set.

* A project I'm very interested in tries to support teachers at primary schools and educators in kindergardens in doing science education via an inquiry-based learning method (i.e. the children figure out things by doing experiments themselves, not by having the teacher tell them how things are supposed to work). I'm one of the collaborators (mostly taking care of the technical side of things) of the German mirror-website of the French site La main à la pâte:

Sonnentaler – La main à la pâte

The website is supported by the Académie des sciences, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Freie Universität Berlin.

* I'm one of the maintainers of the XForms GUI toolkit for X which can be downloaded from

https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/xforms

The project homepage is at xforms-toolkit.org where you'll also find the HTML version of the documentation.

* I've had the good luck of getting asked to do a bit of technical reviewing for an amazingly good new book about system programming under Linux and UNIX by Michael Kerrisk (who's also the maintainer of the Linux man-pages project):

The Linux Programming Interface (TLPI)

If you're seriously interested in programming under Linux/UNIX I'd strongly recommend that you take a good look at it - I consider it to be the best and most comprehensive book on this rather broad range of topics available and a worthy successor to Stevens' famous Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment.

* sha_digest is a package that implements the SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512 hash digest algorithms as defined by the FIPS 180-3 standard (for both byte- and bit-oriented messages).

* Linux device driver and library for National Instruments GPIB cards (AT-GPIB/TNT and PCII(A), but also seems to work with some other cards based on the µPD 7210 chip) for kernels 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4 and 2.6:

GPIB-1.1.2.tar.gz

Also includes a Perl package for talking to the GPIB devices. Last update: November 4, 2008
Please note: for most cases I would recommend to use drivers from the Linux GPIB Package, which probably is more mature.

* Linux device driver and library for the National Instruments 6601 GPCT (General Purpose Counter and Timer) card for 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, allowing event counting, pulse generation and DIO:

ni6601.tar.gz

Last update: September 24, 2011

* Linux device driver and library for National Instruments PCI E-Series DAQ cards for 2.4 and 2.6 kernels (tested with PCI-MIO-16E-1 only):

ni_daq.tar.gz

Last update: September 24, 2011

* Linux device driver and library for the ISA DIO WITIO-48 card by Messcomp Datentechnik GmbH for 2.4 and 2.6 kernels:

witio_48.tar.gz

Last update: September 24, 2011

* Linux device driver and library for the RULBUS (Rijksuniversiteit Leiden BUS), including support for RB8509 (12-bit ADC), RB8510 (12-bit DAC), RB8514 (delay) and RB8515 (clock) cards for 2.4 and 2.6 kernels:

rulbus.tar.gz

Last update: September 24, 2011

* Linux device driver and library for the Meilhaus Electronic GmbH ME6000 and ME6100 DAC cards for 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. The driver is an adapted version of an older one (from 2002) supplied by Meilhaus (under GPL). Please see also the Meilhaus homepage, they supply much newer drivers and a library that rather likely is much superior.

me6x00.tar.gz

Last update: September 24, 2011

* Perl module for file locking using fcntl(): Perl's file locking function flock() usually is based on the flock() system call which has some known shortcomings and, in contrast to fcntl(), does not allow locks on parts of a file. Obviously, this module will only work on systems having a fcntl() system call. Download via CPAN:

http://search.cpan.org/~jtt/File-FcntlLock-0.14/

Last update: October 29, 2011

* A program (from the end of the last century) for the calculation of EPR G-tensors from the results of semi-empirical MO calculations (probably UNIX only):

g_rhf.tar.gz

See the README file for instructions on installation and command line options.

* My doctoral thesis in PDF and (compressed) Postscript format

jtt_thesis.pdf     jtt_thesis.ps    jtt_thesis.ps.gz

Sorry, it's rather old (from 1996) and in German only.

* xloa is a program for playing a strategic checkers-like game called LOA ("Lines of Action") a friend of mine, Christian Weninger, and I wrote together.

* mx.c is a program to demonstrate how to send a MX request to a DNS server and interprete what gets returned.
* Here you can download free ebooks (in German only).

Please note: The Linux device drivers you can download above seem to compile cleanly with all 2.6 kernels I tried (up to 2.6.37) but due to the rapid development of the kernel I can't guarantee that they compile on all kernel version in existence. And, since I don't have access to all the hardware under all kernel versions, I also couldn't do tests for all possible combinations. Please let me know if you encounter problems.


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