Peter K. G. Williams

I'm a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the Astronomy Department. I do research relating to variability in the radio sky under the guidance of Geoff Bower. My scientific interests include accreting compact objects, highly-variable radio sources, and anything that pushes the limits of observational radio astronomy — especially if it involves building new software or hardware tools to do new science.

There's more than one Peter Williams in astronomy, not to speak of the many P. Williamses. To make myself feel a little bit more special (and to make it easier to search for my papers), I try to go by Peter K. G. Williams in published materials.

On this site you can find:

a list of my publications.
my full CV (also available in print-friendly PDF).
an irregularly-updated work log.
a very rarely-updated photo log including many embarassing pics from high school.

My presence elsewhere on the web includes:

a Twitter feed that is pretty frequently updated, for the time being, with both work and personal items.
an account on CiteULike (goofy name, nice webapp).
a token account on Facebook, which I barely ever use.

Contact

My Berkeley office is Hearst Field Annex C-265. My work email address is pwilliams@astro.berkeley.edu (though it just forwards to my personal address, peter@newton.cx). If you need my postal address or phone number, just ask me in an email.

Software

I like to code, and I'm a big user and supporter of Free Software. Here are a few of the things on my plate:

I’ve done a lot with the radio analysis package MIRIAD:

I’ve built a bridge between Python and MIRIAD, imaginatively named miriad-python. It's mature and a powerful tool for working with visibility data.
As a favor to my Mac-using friends, I've put together a “port” of MIRIAD for the MacPorts system, making it easy (if a bit time-consuming) to get MIRIAD built on your Mac. The MIRIAD macport has its own homepage too.
For those of us who like to use version control systems that aren't terrible, I've created mirrors of the ATNF MIRIAD source and CARMA MIRIAD source on GitHub that track upstream development.

I work on a Python plotting library called omegaplot. There are of course many, many plotting libraries out there, but none of them made me happy. It’s at “homebrew” level right now, but the repository and info are up there on GitHub if you want to check it out.
I’ve put together a BibTeX style file incorporating up-to-date ApJ styling with arxiv identifiers and a few other small improvements, then thrown it all on GitHub in the hopes that the files will fragment less. I explain the motivation and features a bit more in this blog post.
I've written a tiny WordPress plugin called the WYSIWYG Inline Code Command that lets you format inline text as code in the WordPress editor, like this example. (The stock editor can do code formatting, but only on a paragraph level.)