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Open-Source Software

I held several research programming positions at and around CMU from 1988 to 2004. It was there that I was first introduced to open-source software, although I had experienced hacker culture and the concept of sharing what you do as a tourist on MIT's ITS systems via the ARPAnet. I especially remember the comment block at the top of the ITS TECO source code as an early inspiration.

My own adventures in open-source have varied. I have submitted patches and improvements to various open-source projects over the years, especially while in the employ of CMU where such work was generally encouraged. I have also released a few pieces of software that I've written under BSD licenses. Most of it was released under the premise that I might as well put it out there since I wrote it and use it myself as opposed to being part of some master plan or project.

In addition to larger projects I also write copious numbers of small utilities and scripts, mostly in Perl. I am increasingly using GitHub to publish my open-source projects, and maintain FreeCode project pointers for a few of them.

Projects Past and Present

These are some of the things I have worked on, not all of which I have handily available in web-accessible form; please feel free to drop me a line:

libgram: A BNF grammar manipulation and meta-data extraction library written in C. This is an old project and has not been touched in a long time but had some good ideas.
remark: a markdown-like system that I wrote ca. 2003, sadly never really released or pushed publically and yet well ahead of its time [GitHub]
scriptologie: A collection of random scripts that I've cleaned up enough to put up somewhere [GitHub]
Crackalaka: Small, stand-alone IRC server written in ANSI C [GitHub,FreeCode]
Flail: Minimalist command-line MUA written in Perl [GitHub,FreeCode]
WebApp: a web application framework in Perl, largely outdated but still in use and still (perhaps) a little interesting
wookie: Prototype-based wiki implementation in Perl based on WebApp. I still use this for my public-facing wiki, having recently revived and ported it to my hosting setup.
Achat: A web chat system in Perl and (obviously) JS. It was ahead of its time when it was written but sadly it was never released back then; we use it internally and felt it deserved a better fate than the bit.bucket, at least [GitHub]