Projects

I really need to get some of these running again and put them online…

Transportation

A/B Street is my current main focus. I’ve written plenty about it elsewhere, but maybe you’re particularly looking for its backstory…

AORTA was my undergrad thesis at UT Austin. Using the Approximately Orchestrated Routing & Transportation Analyzer, I once asked, what if vehicles could bid in auctions to turn a traffic light green faster…

Games

I originally started programming to try to make games. Using a roguelike engine I built in Perl over many years, the most polished game from high school was called MnemonicRL. When I get the code running again, I’ll put up more pictures, but in the meantime, here’s the trailer.

The summer between college and work, I started Hotel Solipcyst, a game based on an old poem. The concept was that disasters stack – even if the hotel catches fire and all guests are poisoned, you (the butler) forge on through the time-looping day, slowly manipulating people’s schedules… The project is in Scala, and when I get it running again, I’ll put it online.

The only game that I’ve ever actually finished in any real sense is 15-minute Santa – so go play it!

Mapping

First semester of college, I hand-mapped UT Austin’s campus and threw together a Perl script and web UI to find optimal routes between classes. There’s at least a screenshot here.

Possibly my first winter in Seattle, I learned OpenGL by making a 3D OpenStreetMap renderer in Scala, complete with falling snow. The project’s name is entirely inappropriate. When I get the code running again… I’ll scrub all references to that lewd nomenclature.

My origin story

The first real program I wrote was the Jigstar Music Daemon, or JMD, and I still use it to this day. When I’m playing all of my music on shuffle, sometimes I’m reminded of a particular band I haven’t heard in a while. I want to go listen to their stuff, but not lose my place in the original shuffle. So I want a stack of queues as my playlist. Somehow in ~2004, I couldn’t find anything to do this on Linux, so I put all those computer books from the library to good use and started learning enough Perl to get this working. I think it probably took a while (and so many questions on the #perl and #perlcafe channels from Freenode!), and the first version didn’t have NCurses or SQLite support, but I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.