Conventions

This page details the arbitrary conventions I’ve chosen to follow in these notes.

General

1. Use American English.

2. Write bullet points in sentence case and end them with a period:

   • Handles multiplexing and demultiplexing of multiple packet sources.
   • Handles error control and retransmission.

   Unless the list contains only nouns:

   • Coaxial cable
   • Twisted pair cable

3. Place references at the end of a paragraph, before the terminating punctuation mark:

   BGP4 supports CIDR and subnetting [1, P. 101].

4. No comma after i.e. and e.g.:

   Each component is separated by a dot (e.g. eng.cisco.com.).

5. Always use an Oxford comma:

   Streams go through multiple states: idle, open, half-closed, and closed.

6. End side notes with a period:

   Note: this approach can be improved further by storing results in two single variables.

7. Use em dashes without a space on either side:

   Linux is a monolithic kernel—it runs as a single process in a single address space.

8. Capitalize figures and tables when referencing them in the text:

   For more information, see Figure 1.

9. Create the plural form of initialisms that end in s by appending es:

   The last mainstream cooperative OSes were Mac OS 9 and Windows 3.1.

   Single-homed ASes connect to another AS via a single exit.

10. Use ID, IDs, UID, and UIDs:

    The next step is to allocate a new UID.

11. Define the full form of initialisms in parentheses when used for the first time:

    UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is a connectionless transport protocol.

12. Use key-value and client-server instead of key/value and client/server.

DHCP uses a client-server model.

Math

1. Use MathJax for formulas, variables, and functions:

   BFS runs in $O(n + m)$ time on a graph of $n$ vertices and $m$ edges.

2. Use angle brackets ("<>") for tuples written in text:

   ARP maps a <protocol, address> pair to a link layer address.

Code

1. Use parentheses for functions, methods, function-like macros, and system calls:

   Blink is initialized with BlinkInitializer::Initialize().

   To statically create a tasklet you can use the macros DECLARE_TASKLET() and DECLARE_TASKLET_DISABLED().

   It’s created in response to the open() system call, and is destroyed in response to the close() system call.

2. Reference C structs by their name:

   The superblock is represented by the super_block struct.

3. Format flags as code:

   Corresponds to VM_READ.

Protocols

1. Italicize header field names:

   The Data field contains the payload that is being sent.

2. Write header field names in title case:

   The Originate Timestamp field is the time the sender touched the message before sending it.

3. Format field values as code:

   Type is the type of frame (e.g. DATA, HEADERS).

4. Use an HTTP request instead of a HTTP request:

   An HTTP/2 header field (a header) is a name with an associated value.

5. Write bits per second as b/s and bytes per second as B/s, with the metric prefix in uppercase:

   100MB/s is 800Mb/s