Most of my work ends up being one-offs, specific to a particular client's particular project. Every once in a while something ends up being bigger than that, though, and I try to keep this page up to date as things become ready for public consumption.

Current work

• Choropleth Maps. For generating choropleth maps without using heavy-duty GIS software, I've put together a script that reads data from text files and tweaks the palette of an indexed-color image accordingly.
• Latent Semantic Analysis. I'm studying LSA as a tool for automated essay grading and document categorization, and will be comparing it's effectiveness with Bayesian networks. Right now I've just got a demo of using LSA for searching two different groups of documents, with a variable degrees applied from the singular value decomposition. The results aren't great because the stemming, stop list, and vocabulary size all need tweaking.
• Leeber. Leeber is a "semantic web portal". It's a platform for building portals that are powered by RDF and RDF Schema. It lets you catalog resources in a machine-understandable way, and aims to make searching the catalog more efficient than traditional keyword queries. Leeber powers the Education Reform Portals. It's written in Java using JSP, Taglibs, and the Jena RDF API. The prototype for Leeber, Liber, was written in Ruby using Amrita and a custom RDF module.

Old projects

These are projects that I worked on between 1997 and 2000.

• ClassWorks
  The humble beginnings of an online learning environment. Created in a day as a demo for some clients, I keep it around because it has some nice features that never made it into the final product. This version is a sample (fake) class, "Learning Python".
• SearchBrowse
  I had a lot of fun building the search interface for the Davis Art Slides database of images. The application was a sort of accidental discovery of a very cool way of searching large datasets by combining traditional directory-like browsing with traditional search phrases to build complex queries easily. Check out the tutorial on their site.
• Flashmap
  While discussing issues surrounding dynamic map generation with Michael Knapp, I put together this prototype that generates maps from data in an Oracle database, and presents them using the Macromedia Flash plugin.
• Intranet Modules
  If you've got any interest in intranet components written in server-side Javascript for Netscape Enterprise Server, let me know. I developed a bunch of them while at Core Information Technology.
• Multiple Polynomial Quadratic Sieve
  When I was a student at Marlboro College, I did my Plan of Concentration on factoring large integers. It seemed like the Internet made an ideal computing platform, but most projects involved volunteers and special software. My goal was to see what someone with the right combination of ethics and technical skill could get away with by "borrowing" compute time on unsuspecting user's computers using Java applets.
• Tweaked Ant
  I rewrote the "ant" screensaver from the xscreensaver collection to give the ants richer behavior. I'll dig up the code soon and post it here.
• Gemtool
  Back in the early days of the Empeg, the only GUI interface was for Windows. So, I undertook building a GNOME front end to the linux command-line tool for the Empeg.
• Yapalm
  Like many before me, I started working on a Palm Desktop for Linux. Since I never used the desktop software on Windows, though, I never miss it and have a hard time coming up with a reason to finish this. But the name and graphics were cool, so...

Ancient projects

These are projects that I worked on between 1990 and 1997.

• TRICK
  I wrote my own block cipher so I could analyze it using linear cryptanalysis and differential cryptanalysis.
• N-body simulation
  Simulating galactic structure using a fast fourier transform.
• Raytracing
  I used to do a lot of raytracing using Persistence of Vision (and hand-coded scene descriptions- none of those gui modelling tools for me!)
• SurfWarz
  SurfWarz was a game I wrote in Pascal, with graphics by Jim Lenon. It actually became quite popular in our school's computer lab for a while. In the game you played a surfer, who shot and maced attacking starfish.
• CyberGuy
  I worked on a game several games with Jim. CyberGuy was on it's way to being the best of them, until Jim graduated and we stopped work on the game.
• Ultimate Tron
  A 2D Tron lightcycle game I wrote, which was distinguished by a very competitive AI.