Beacause much of the principle attendant to web publishing is not to
admit that your stuff was done by someone else, some of the work I've done
I'm not allowed to publicly take credit for. The stuff I have participated
in, though, includes the following:
- GE Capital Assuance, formerly AMEX Life Assurance
- Porting of a sales-data management database (SQL) interface from a proprietary
app written by one of GE's executives in VisualBasic (ugh) to a web
interface using perl. The project took about three months of the hardest,
most grueling, most depressing work my partner or I had done. The results
did speak for themselves, to an extent -- the hardcopy of the source we
wrote half-filled a 1" ring binder. The VB code would have filled fifteen
to twenty of them -- 4MB of code was condensed to about 100k. The trick was
performing such a condensation -- as anyone who's ever ported bloated code
will understand, it would be simpler to write a whole new 4MB than to try to
deceipher someone else's 4MB. The end product was almost as fast over the
Internet (90%) as the old code had been over an FDDI LAN, and was accessible
anywhere in the world from a browser. We were fairly pleased with
ourselves.
- Chronicle Book Publishers
- Chronbooks was another online database project; we built the interface
that enables people with web browsers to perform searches of the database
(the emphasis was on simplicity -- we were reminded of how complex it can be
to engineer simplicity), as well as a wagonload of clever CGI tricks and a
lot of dynamic content generation.
BTW, while working on this one we found out something else of interest.
Chron Books is owned or somehow interlocked with KRON-TV, which at the time
was doing a lot of coverage of the Olympics. KRON was running a fairly
detailed Olympics site which was logging some totally other number of
million hits an hour on a single Pentium Linux box. The Chron Books site
went onto an SGI PowerChallenge used for some file serving and nothing else.
The two were on the same 10Mbit ether. The Linux box was instantly
responsive on logins and http access. The PowerChallenge was five to ten
times slower, on average, in terms of latency, response time, and CPU
throughput.
- Earthclock
- Not a programming project, actually. When the company did a revision of
its site, it was decided to throw together a "cool stuff" page, to
demonstrate a few of the nifty tricks in our repitoire. Two "cool things"
and about an hour into the effort I got moved onto another project, but I've
returned to them now and then to make tiny changes. This was back when
dynamic updates and server-includes were still new and sexy (sometime in
1996; Wired would probably have claimed them to have been obsolete long
before, but Wired's ideas of technology are too distorted by money to be of
value anymore). Alongside Earthclock, which was pretty much a shell script,
some HTML, an image postprocessor and xearth, was Atomic Time, which
was a server include, ntpdate/rdate, and a few facts about atomic clocks.
- rdb
- This was a rapid-development (three hours in and out) SQL database
project that I did for Seniors.Com, an
online community and resource for seniors the company runs. The old folks
wanted a place to exchange their recipes. "rdb," awaiting a better name, is
a quick-and-dirty SQL-based database app that provides just that. 100%
dynamic output, using templatized formatting and some JavaScript here and
there. As it happened, rdb was an aside for another project, while I did
some experimenting with our database code. That project may show up in
here, eventually. Also for the same site I did conferencing and chat
systems.
- Heron
- Heron is a fairly straightforward web-interfaced conferencing system
built around a database (generally mSQL). It borrows some general structure
from Usenet, some interface from Kevin Hughes' Hypermail, etc. It's
intended for a content-provider environment where any number of sites may be
sharing the same software, but may not want the conference to look like the
conference on the other sites, or to be connected any number of odd ways.
Supports drop-in embedding of conference links, so a user can be bounced
directly to a conference topic. A
sample is, again, running on Seniors.Com.
- Santa Rosa Subregional Long Term Wastewater Draft EIR/EIS
- Actually, I didn't work on this project, but I mention it because if you
live in or around Santa Rosa, California, and were wondering how the city
managed to spend all those millions of dollars (to accomplish essentially
nothing) on the wastewater crisis, here's where a big chunk of that money
went.
- Klein Electric Guitars
- Klein is a small company in Sonoma, California, that makes custom
electric guitars. Nice ones. Very nice. They cost more than two months of
my salary, so I can't tell you exactly how nice. I've done a lot for for
them, off and on, for the past couple of years, doing desktop publishing,
hardware, a little bit of web design. I also wrote their mailing- and
customer-tracking database from scratch, a fun project I recommend no one
try. :)
- Lyn
- Lyn is a CD player utility for Linux -- one of many, though when I
started coding it was one of about three. Lyn uses a color curses
interface, is quick, clean and has a bunch of nice features. Since it's
gentle on screen updates (compare workbone), it's easy to run over
low-bandwidth net connections, so eight or ten people can be logged into the
same machine, bickering over what tracks to play.
- A lot of utilities for the WWIV BBS software
- To many to list and too boring for most people to btoher with, but I
wrote 'em, and they usually did fairly well in the "marketplace" (freeware).
Most of them started as adapations of existing software, but did more stuff
faaster and/or more efficiently and with more configurability and features
than the original programs -- plus they're all free, which many of the
originals weren't. Odd what some people in the DOS programming world feel
is worth money.
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