Projects

Ever since I was a child I have not been able to resist indulging my creative urges.  As a result I have always been engaged in a number of projects.  These projects are rarely finished.  They aren’t meant to be.  They are universally intended to be endeavors perpetually in progress.  I will likely never stop aspiring to improve them and add new features.  Some of them have only been in the works for a short while.  Others I have been toiling at for many years.

For the last four years my more than full time job has been college.  This hasn’t afforded me a whole lot of time to apply to these projects.  As a result they are even more than usual in a half finished state right now.  What little free time I do find usually gets applied to these projects and they continue to inch forward.

Middle Earth Mud was the first of the major projects, begun in March of 2003.  It is a Multi-User Dungeon, that is a multiplayer role playing game that takes advantage of the telnet protocol.  It is all text, no graphics.  Players connect to the server using telnet, and then play the game by entering commands at a command prompt.  They recieve text descriptions of their location, other players, items they may use, and computer controlled NPCs.  When I started Middle Earth Mud using the publicly licensed CircleMUD code base, which is written in C.  I extensively modified the base code between 2003 when I began it and 2005.  In 2006 I began converting it to C++ and rewriting it almost from scratch.  More information on its status can be found on its page.

Muddy Reality is not so much a project yet, as a plan.  It’s a project in waiting.  Muddy Reality is a Multi-User Dungeon code base, like CircleMUD, that will be based on Middle Earth Mud III’s code.  Once I have finished Middle Earth Mud III, I will strip the Middle Earth specific code from it and release it as a publicly licensed code base for other MUD players to use.  Again more information can be found on its page.

The Galaxy Guide is a more recent project, begun in March of 2008.  It is a web site designed to be a hub for players of an old pen and paper roleplaying game, West End Game‘s Star Wars.  Its primary function is as a database site to store game statistic and make it easy for players to search them.  There are a number of other features planned, however, they won’t be written until the database portion of the site is completed.  Once again more status information can be found at its page.

Finally, my most recent project and the one that has all of my focus is Fridge to Food.  I began working on Fridge to Food in November of 2009.  Shelly and I have been doing a lot of cooking and often we turn to the web for recipes and resources.  However, I found myself frequently disappointed with the existing recipe search sites.  I wanted to be able to throw the ingredients we had into a search and come up with delicious recipes.  None of them did that very well at all.  Usually they would present me with a recipe that used one, maybe two of the ingredients.  And their rating systems sucked, so that I had no way of judging the best recipes.  At some point I realized, “Hey, I’m a programmer.  If this doesn’t exist yet, I can make it exist. ” And away I went.  Find out more about the project and its status at its page.