Current Projects
My wife, Tarasine, is a knitter, which will be immediately obvious if you stop by her blog, [Pieces of Me]. Listening to her talk about the conversations that occur on the several mailing lists to which she is subscribed is educational, to say the least. Would you believe that knitters have a lingo all their own?
Among the many bits of their colorfully ingenious jargon is the term “UFO”, which stands for “Unfinished Object”. Apparently knitters, too, have a penchant for abandoning half-finished projects. Just goes to show you that knitters and computer programmers have a few things in common.
What follows is a snapshot of the projects I’m juggling.
- Penny Pincher is a half-finished, budget-oriented, personal finiance manager written in Java, using the Swing UI framework. It uses MySQL on the backend. Chances are this one is never going to see another line of code from me—I’m pretty burnt out on Java.
- Vade Mecum is a [Plucker for the Pocket PC. It’s about 30% done (version 0.4 alpha is sitting, unreleased, in CVS), and is not likely to progress any further. Part of the problem is that the PocketPC emulator does not work under linux (or even under VMWare, running under linux), so I can only work on it when I’ve actually booted into Windows. And since I really dislike Windows, I haven’t actually worked on it since last August.
- Chump Change (no website yet) is a web-based, ruby implementation of Penny Pincher. So far, it’s got a login screen and that’s it, but I’ll be using the same database schema (more or less) as Penny Pincher. I’m actively working on this project, so it’s too soon to say if I’ll abandon it or not.
- BuckBlog (also sans website) is my implementation of a blogging engine, written in Ruby. The framework is done, but nothing else, and given that Movable Type works so well I may not ever get further on it.
- I’ve got an NPC Generator already, but for some years now I’ve had a plan to rewrite it from scratch, with twice the features and double the flexibility.
- Dragon is my attempt at a scripting language. I’ve written a few “proof-of-concept” implementations of it, but the furthest I got was as parser that emits an abstract syntax tree. I also wrote a mark-and-sweep garbage collector and a copying collector, though I settled on the mark-and-sweep collector. Since this one is something I’m still interested in, it may yet see the light of day.
There are, of course, countless little things that I’ve got going as well, small one- or two-page scripts that perform simple tasks, and those can always use a bit of extra attention to make them more generally useful.
And on top of all of these, there are the list of things that I’d like to work start, someday, when I have the time. :) There’s just never enough time!
