Data Compression

This project is just starting (Sept. 2005). It is a project required for graduation, however I thought I would keep some interesting info here. The project premise is simple. Take Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and compress it with nth order Huffman. What makes it interesting is trying to determine the optimal 'n' to use, and how well this will work if applied to another English work, or even programming code. A website with more information will be available shortly.

Minions4.net

As with all websites, Minions4.net is a work in progress. I am constantly updating it and making changes. It is a never ending struggle to help people relax and enjoy themselves.

Extreme Programming and Open Source

This is a bit of a theoretical project on my part. It has the aim of applying the extreme programming development approach to the open source model. Possible things this could be applied to are:

• Operating System development

  Modules of operating systems are each designed to fulfill a specific purpose. The final module code can be quite large. By breaking the OS down into modules, and then developping each of those modules with an extreme programming methodology, in theory the entire OS could be created considerably faster. This holds true for all major software projects.

• Graphics Engines

  Like Operating Systems, Graphics Engines are big, complex things that simply cannot be created quickly. Most of the creation time for games involves the creation or modification of a graphics engine (the art notwithstanding). Speeding this process up is similar to speeding up the programming of an operating system.

Microshaft Pain.t

This was actually a first year programming project that the Emperor and I worked on together. The specifications were to create a program which would allow the user to draw a circle, a rectangle, a line or some text. The user had to be able to specify where and how big, and in what colour. The two of us went a little beyond that, and made a very basic imitation of Microsoft Paint. It was written in Java and with first-year Java programming skills. A link to the code will be posted soon.

Java-based blog program

This program is similar to programs like Moveable Type or Greymatter, with one crucial difference. There is no graphical user interface. It was written mostly as a proof-of-concept program. I had never written a program like it before, and I wanted to see if I could. Basically, it allows me to post to a weblog through a text interface. It could be run from either secure shell mode or on a local system, whose file could then be uploaded to the server.

C-based blog program

This is the same as the java program above, only it was written in C, which allows to run faster, and compile faster. It is platform-specific to Linux, though there should not be any reason the source code can't be recompiled to run on a Windows system. Code will be coming soon.