Projects and Papers

Current

Blog

my online journal. An experiment in self-indulgence.

hebcal.com: Jewish Calendar Tools

a collection of 4 web tools lets you generate a list of Jewish holidays for any year. Candle lighting times are calculated from your latitude and longitude (which can be determined by your zip code or closest city). Also includes a Yahrzeit, Birthday, and Anniversary Calendar and a Hebrew Date Converter.

Awalt High School Alumni Internet Directory

Mountain View High School Alumni Internet Directory

email address and web page listing of alumni, students, faculty and staff. I'm a proud alumnus of Mountain View High School in Mountain View, California. Started in 1995 as a project to teach myself perl, it's turned into a part time job.

2002

Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo!

a talk I gave at PHPCon2002 in Milbrae, CA on October 25, 2002

press coverage: slashdot - CNET News.com - MSNBC - internetnews.com - TechWEB

2001

simple DBM command line utilities

Usage: db_look file.db [key]
Usage: db_add file.db key val
Usage: db_remove file.db key [key2 .. keyN]

2000

UTF-8 and Unicode Standards page

a small set of documentation and resources for Unicode Transformation Format-8.

1999

Mozilla Public License diffs

the Mozilla Public License (http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/) states that I need to post diffs if I modify any code. So keepin' legal, my diffs are here.

1998

Personality plug-in for Eudora

adds 3 stereotypical "personalities" to Eudora 3.x and 4.x for Windows. It translates English messages into either mock Swedish (like the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show), mock Jive (a black dialect of the 70s), or B1FF-speak (a fictitious person who is "new" on the 'Net who spells poorly and uses all capital letters).

CompareURLContent

a self-serializing Java class that compares a hashed version of the content stream associated with a URL with the current version.

stubgen

a member function stub generator for C++. Began in 1995 as a hacked up perl script, it's become a full-blown lex/yacc/C implementation.
Latest version: 2.05, released 1998/09/23.

1997

The Java Network File System

my Honors Thesis project at Brown University and second place winner for the 1997 ACM Quest for Java student programming contest. The Java Network File System (JNFS) is a network file system for Network Computers (NCs). JNFS works on all NC-compliant NC devices, provides authentication and authorization support, works with other file systems such as NFS and NTFS, and offers reasonable performance.

Nearest-Neighbor Machine Learning Bakeoff

results from my final project for Topics in Machine Learning, a "bakeoff" for machine learning algorithms.

webster

perl script that queries Merriam-Webster's online dictionary from the command-line to look up a word. Uses lynx. Co-authored with Stephanie Schaaf.

1996

wristsavr

saves your wrists: periodically zwrites & xlocks your screen to remind you to take a 2 minute break.

WhatsForDinner

perl script that prints out today's University Food Services lunch and dinner menus. Makes use of lynx and the BDH's daily menu.

The Ashim Theme

my final project for Music 40, compsed and performed with Mike Cafarella. This MIDI file is a song of pain, woe, revenge, and most importantly, Taco Bell. Mike and I performed a Sax and Trumpet duet.

Priority search tree demo

my final project for Brown's Computational Geometry course. A priority search tree is a data structure that allows for efficient searching and point location in one and one-half dimensions (the upper bound on Y is missing). It is a hybrid of a heap and a balanced search tree (heap for y-coordinates, search tree for x-coordinates).

Heap

an array-based implementation of a priority queue, using a Java Vector to do all of the dirty work. I wrote this while learning Java.

TreeGraphics

a Java package for visualizing binary trees.

1995

Jacksonville Charter School

my group final project for ED/0100: Going to High School in America, 1945-Present. "What would an ideal school look like if it were built around thematic units that cross disciplines? This paper spells one answer out in detail" (SDSU's Interdisciplinary Teaching with Technology).

An untraceable, universally verifiable voting scheme

my final project for my Seminar in Cryptology. Applies blinded signatures to a voter's ballot so that it is impossible for anyone to trace the ballot back to the voter. Achieves the desired properties of privacy, universal verifiability, convenience and untraceability at the expense of receipt-freeness.

Trabajo escrito de Español Trés:

¿Son los estereotipos verdaderos?

Las fiestas con mi familia

¡Estoy harto de la actividad de los políticos!

Querida Srta. Alicia

xmsg

a graphical network messaging system (uses Tcl/Tk and Sun RPC). Unfinished.

1994

Cecco del Caravaggio's Resurrection (PDF file, 80Kbytes)

a 5-page essay about Cecco del Caravaggio's Resurrection, an oil painting in the Chicago Art Institute, for my 17th Century Italian Painting and Sculpture course. Cecco del Caravaggio, now known as Francesco Buoneri, is one of several artists who painted in the style of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

1993

The Tragedy of Young Oedipus Rex: A Disco Dancer Destroyed

an 8-minute play I wrote for the Theater Merit Badge in Boy Scouts. It's pretty goofy, and all of the main characters (except Oeddie) are named after teachers or administrators at my high school.