Papers, Programs, and Samples

This page contains several examples of my past work that I think you might find interesting. Understand that some of my best programs, such as 3d animations, are not on this page due to space constraints.  Other programs of mine are stored on the Java Page.

Some of these files are compressed.  Windows XP and beyond has built in capabilities for unpacking these files. If you can't open them that way, try downloading WinZip (http://www.winzip.com) for a Windows platform. Non Windows users are on their own -- many of these programs only work on a PC anyway.

Sample code for Digital Motorworks, Inc.

GSA Tools

Screen shots of the project I developed at IBM.

Masters Report on data mining the news.

The culmination of two years in school.

Sensor Network Simulation

Final project in my Mobile Computing class at UT, fall 2006. Also includes PowerPoint presentation and Java program.

Implementing Natural Language

Final project in my Software Validation class at UT, spring 2006.

Guns and Crime

Final project in my Data Mining class at UT, spring 2006.

Hamurabi

A Javascript rewrite of an old classic.

How to write a web page that doesn't suck

Just a goofy little essary that I decided to write in 2000. This was done before blogging was popular, so a lot of the tips in there are either even more helpful, or totally obsolete.

Ames 157 final project

This is my final project for an engineering class I took involving 3d graphics design with QuickC and Autocad. It involves a toy pendulum with three magnets on the base that cause chaotic movement.

I've been a big fan of text-based adventure games for a long time, and I finally wrote one of my own in late 1996. The occasion: the second annual iteractive fiction competition. The game: Reverberations, an appallingly silly short "story" about a pizza delivery dweeb turned Rambo. This little vignette features mafia dons, earthquakes, some of the worst dialogue ever seen in an adventure game, and a fairly side-splitting ending. Reverberations won me a modest prize (a book) for the dubious honor of being 13th place out of 26 games, which was pretty good considering some of the competition and reminding you that it was the first adventure game I wrote. It has been favorably compared to Detective, the game widely reputed to be the worst text game ever written. You'll find it in the "reverb" subdirectory of the contest site, and you can also play some of the other games online. My personal favorite is "Delusions" by Chris Forman.

In order to play Reverberations, you will also need to download an interpreter. I recommend using Frotz. If you would like to author your own text adventure, you could do a lot worse than to look into the system I used, a language called "Inform", written by Graham Nelson.

Here's a sneak peek at what the critics are saying about Reverberations!!!!!

Every time I learn a new programming language, my favorite test of my knowledge is to create the Tower of Hanoi. My language of the day is Visual C++ with Microsoft Foundation Classes, and you'll find that this program is one HELL of a lot more impressive than any other version I've posted so far. I built the graphics with 3d Studio, and you're going to love the results. On the whole, it's quite good, and it also has a very entertaining "Magic Genie" feature which will solve the puzzle for you, move by move, if you get stuck. Set the game on autopilot and watch it fly. It's 712K, so it should take just a couple of minutes to download and a reasonably fast modem.

What the Tower of Hanoi game demonstrates is my knack for GUIs in Windows, my understanding of object-oriented programming (the moveable objects are implemented as an array of class CDisc, descended from class CSprite) and my ability to incorporate outside graphics as sprites. The genie feature also sort of demonstrates recursion, but not really because I couldn't apply the full recursive solution to solve it one move at a time.

If you get any kind of error message about a missing file when you run this, please write to me and tell me the name of the file. I'm not sure exactly what peripherals you need to run the program.

Please note: This program is not available right now due to space considerations.  I am considering a rewrite in Java.  If you are dying to have it, write to me and ask for it.

I once played this game called "The Eleventh Hour" by Trilobyte Software. It drove me crazy! Not that it was a particularly great game, but there's this complicated furniture moving puzzle where you have to get a piano out of a door... in the game it moved really slow. Things got frustrating, so I decided to code up a Visual Basic version of the same puzzle. I added a cheat mode so I could try different things, and finally solved it. My program is a cute example of the kind of simple Windows programming you can do with basic shapes and no fancy graphics. And if you're stuck in the Eleventh Hour, this version is MUCH easier to fool around with.

Since the game is written in Visual Basic, you will need to download vbrun200.dll and put it in your \windows\system directory before you can use it.

I took a play writing class in winter of 1996, and for the main class project I wrote a thirty-five page play. The story is about a fire and brimstone preacher whose preaching about the apocalypse takes an unexpected twist.

This is a paper I wrote for a final exam in Fall 1995. Chris likes it and he advised me to post it; and I got an A in the course, so the professor must have liked it too. Its meaning may be a little obscure to anyone who hasn't studied computer science in as much detail as I have, but it's an interesting theoretical discussion anyway with a bit of humor thrown in.

This is my tribute to Operation: Mindcrime, my very favorite Queensryche album. Mindcrime is a heavy metal opera, a veritable masterpiece of great music combined with brilliant storytelling.

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