Oliver Steele

PackageMapper traces your FedEx, UPS, and USPS package routes on a map. I built it for personal and family use; you’re welcome to use it for as long as it stays up.

Flash Troll Generator is a timesaving tool for anti-Flash posters. I couldn’t bear the thought of so much human time wasted on recapitulating the same reactions to every post that mentioned Flash. I hope that with an hour of work, I’ve saved everyone else thousands of hours that can be spent on something more productive.

Storybase is a user-editable ontology of stories and characters. It stores an RDF-like ontology of entities and relations. I used it to learn Ruby on Rails.

html2db.xsl converts an XHTML source document into a Docbook output document. It provides features for customizing the generation of the output, so that the output can be tuned by annotating the source, rather than hand-editing the output. This makes it useful in a processing pipeline where the source documents are maintained in HTML, although it can be used as a one-time conversion tool too.

static-preview.php allows you to preview files that you edit on your server’s filesystem, without storing them in the WordPress database. It is intended for the case where you have access to the file system of your web server or a staging server capable of running php. It allows you to use a text editor such as emacs to edit a file in one window and preview the results in another window. This gives you more full-featured editing than the web browser, and a faster edit-preview workflow cycle than copying between a text editor and and the WordPress Writing web form.

An open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software.

Python libraries for compiling, minimizing, and determinizing Finite-State Automata.

A simple chart parser (<100 code lines for the parser itself).

Simulated video feedback, shipped as a screen saver for After Dark. This algorithm is now a staple of media player audio visualizations.

A Python interface to the WordNet database of word meanings and lexical relationships.

An object-oriented programming language based on Smalltalk and Scheme.

A graphics rendering and geometry engine that shipped with MacOS 7.

A test bed for manipulating virtual textures, haptically rendered with a force-feedback joystick. This was my wife’s thesis work; I did the programming.

A hypertext authoring environment. I implemented a hypertext text editor for it.

A arcade-style game for the Commodore 64.