Projects

Present

Urbana-Champaign Independet Media Center

Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center - The Independent Media Center is a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, objective, and passionate tellings of the truth. I am one of the founding funders of the UC-IMC and I try to help with whatever technical and organizational issues I can.

Prairie Greens of East Central Illiois - The 10 Key Values of the Prairie Greens are: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice and Equal Opportunity, Grassroots Democracy, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Community Based Economics, Gender Equity and Cooperative Values, Respect for Diversity, Personal and Global Responsibility, Future Focus and Sustainability. I have been with the Prairie Greens since almost the very beginning during the Ralph Nader campaign of 2000. It is a great experience building a political party from the ground up. I am currently the secretary/treasurer of the Prairie Greens.

WEFT Champaign - Volunteer Operated, Listener Supported, Community Radio for East Central Illinois. I am a trained airshifter at WEFT, I did a morning show for 2 years but am currently taking a break from broadcasting. I am currently a co-chair of both the Computer and Technology Committee and the Associates Executive Committee.

GrooGroo Productions - The dream child of Matt Williams. Groogroo Productions is a (currently theoretical) consulting and programming venture pulling together the talents of a bunch of us that once worked for the USGS and/or attended UIUC. If I am the one to pull it together I would like to focus on serving non-profit organizations. It may never fly but its fun to think about it. Under the guise of groogroo I am currently hosting and maintaining many community web sites on my server.

Past

Independent Consulting - I spent some time paying the bills by doing independent consulting for a few different projects. I do all aspects of web design and programming. I work in C++ and Perl. One of my projects was a complete rewrite and upgrade of the IMSA Toolkit <meta>search engine. If anyone has any work for me, just check out my resume and let me know.

GrooGroo Adventure Game Engine - An incomplete but not quite dead yet project. The GrooGroo crowd started writing an adventure game engine in C++ so that we could write our own text adventure game. The engine was not completed because many of the authors got busy with other projects. The only code written so far is a very simplistic command language parser. Someday we'll finish this (though maybe we'll switch to Perl or zmachine).

IMSA Alumni Association Database - Arun Bhalla and I were once working on a unified database to track IMSA alumni whereabouts and to display that information on the Web. The database would be a powerful networking resource for Alums. We didn't have any support from people to work on this, so we didn't get it done, so the cabinet pulled the job out from under us. So now (as far as I'm concerned) its on hold, but its not dead.

nDmaze - I wrote a C++ program that generates n-dimensional mazes and allows players to navigate within them. This was a proof of concept game that I developed as a project for a few different programming classes. Both ASCII (view 2 dimensional slices of the N dimensional maze) and GL (view 3 dimensional slices of the N dimensional maze) interfaces exist.

Mech Mania - Since 1996, various members of the GrooGroo crowd have participated in the UIUC Student ACM MechMania competition. This competitions puts teams in a lab for about 20 hours to code the brains of space ships which duke it out in a competition the next day. Its the best fun ever for geeks. In 1998 Team GrooGroo took 3rd place, the first ever UIUC team to show. In 1999 the contest was completely flawed and there were no clear winners but we may or may not have technically taken some place.