The following is a selection of my work from graduate school and beyond.

Spring 1997

For starters, in 390.1 Federal Information Policy, I co-wrote a policy paper on the Communications Decency Act with Quinn Stewart. I also created a less formal look at the CDA.

In a totally different realm of information science, I also learned a little Java. The first program I wrote is a pretty lame little calculator, but it does hex, dec, and oct with conversion between the three. The other program I wrote is an artificial life applet. It's still not all worked out, but it's running and it displays some valuable information.


Summer 1997

David Cook of ACITS taught a course on CGI and Javascript over the course of six weeks. The main product of that class is the GSLIS IT Lab's Equipment Reservation Form. Originally written by Jon Drucker, Mike Carlson, Luke Rosenburger and myself, it has since been turned over to me for upkeep. During the winter break of 1997, in fact it underwent significant changes to deal with the change in years, and now the code is almost entirely my own. There's an accompanying calendar and archive.


Fall/Winter 1997

Building on my experience in David Cook's class during the Summer and incorporating my new job as System's Administrator for GSLIS, I undertook to create an online form for GSLIS account requests. We had been using an annoying paper system where students filled in a form one after the other, all their ID numbers on one sheet of paper in plain sight of anyone who wanted to see. The final outcome was the GSLIS Account Request Form. Behind it all is another set of perl scripts which take the input and put them into a nice database. That database can then be fed to another set of scripts which actually add the user accounts. Having done account creation both ways, I can safely say this is easier.


Spring 98

Right now I'm working on an even bigger project than any of the above. For an independent study I'm creating a perl/tk based GUI that will ease user administration on Solaris 2.5.1. I'm also working on a perl/tk GUI that will simplify the management and installation of patches to Sun systems. Once either of these gets to a point where I'm happy with them I'll put up separate pages for them. NOTE: Progress on this work stopped for a good while because Sun had restricted acces to the patchdiag.xref file that it depended on. Well, Sun made that file public again, but by that time, our organization was moving away from Solaris and the database file had grown some inconsistency with the script. As such, it's now pretty much shelved. Nonetheless, I learned a heck of a lot about both perl and perl/tk.

Summer 98

For John Legget's Seminar on Hypertext and Hypertext systems, we were required to think about the future of computing. As such, I began the SUITCASE project. Some of the stuff, I'm not sure of anymore, but I actually think some of it could (or at least should) come to pass sooner than one might think. In addition, we were asked to consider an Active Reading Machine. Much of this exercise focused on the difficulty with current electronic reading system. My solution could be considered a step backwards.

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Last modified: Thu Sep 14 14:33:01 CDT 2000