This page collects my projects that don't easily fit into either the "software" or the "technical documentation" box.
Web resources I maintain
The Unix Cookbook — a collection of working code illustrating various obscure corners of Unix and Internet standards.
The BROWSER Project. What comes next after PAGER, MAILER, and EDITOR? That's right...BROWSER. I'm trying to spread a new convention for passing your browser preference to application programs. Browse this page to see who conforms and what work still needs to be done.
The terminfo/termcap database — In January 1995 I accepted the maintainership of the BSD terminal-type database from John Kunze. You can download it in either termcap or terminfo form from here.
The HTML Hell Page — some curmudgeonly comments on bad Web design.
My collection of fortune cookies on liberty, politics, the Second Amendment, and other subjects. Most are quotes from the Founding Fathers of the U.S, the sort of thing that ought to be taught in high-school civics classes but isn't anymore. Many people asked me to make these available on the Web after seeing random selections in my mail signature.
The INTERCAL Resource Page. The most twisted computer language ever designed now has its own Web page.
An SF Glossary This is a glossary of terms and coinages used in science fiction. It describes main and variant meanings and (where known) first usage and date of inventions. Contributions and corrections are invited.
My collection of modes for the Tengwar, including modes for Lojban and Esperanto. Soon to come: Volapuk and Klingon.
The Retrocomputing Museum — a collection of amusingly (and horrifyingly) archaic languages, programming tools, machine emulators, and games.
The Magic Numbers Home Page. Daniel Quinlan, Christos Zoulas, Greg Roelofs, myself and others are attempting to build on the well-established Unix engineering practice of file magic numbers to develop a semantic file type system for the Internet. We're drafting an RFC and designing a file type registry.
Alodar's Tower — Resources for players and fans of Magic: The Gathering. Includes Alodar's Axioms for deck construction and recipes for many decks, with explanations. (Yes, I've also contributed card designs to Usenet: The Flaming)
The Riddle-Poem Page — all about making and enjoying riddle-poems, a fun and stimulating game for children and adults.
The Eric Conspiracy Page — Yes, now the
blood-chilling truth behind all those sinister rumors can be
revealed. There is an Eric Conspiracy — and you
have fallen into its clutches. MUHAHAHAHEEHEE!
Other Things I'm Up To
I have designed an fvwm2 layout you may find interesting if you have a sufficiently large (1600x1200) monitor; see Eric's Big Blue-Steel Desktop.
Projects now On Hold or Dead
I used to publish a regular column of SF reviews in rec.arts.sf.written called "Raymond's Reviews'. I stopped when I lost my net access in 1993 and was too busy to resume it when I got access again. They're archived here.
I designed and maintain a netnews suite, TMNN-netnews, which includes threading, security and modularity features not paralleled in other news suites. This has become much less interesting as the S/N ratio of USENET has plummeted.
Past Projects
Chester County InterLink was an effort to develop a truly user-friendly and flexible Internet-access BBS. The project started in September 1993; we went on-line in February 1994. We had over 2000 users as of our second anniversary and usage has continued to rise since. You can go there, log in as `guest' with password `guest', and check it out.
Trove is a project I launched because I thought Sunsite was doomed. The classical model of Internet software archive scales poorly, requiring too much maintainer intervention. A better model of low-overhead, web-accessible software databases is badly needed. Trove was going to be it, until I got swamped. Fortunately the best ideas from Trove got picked up by SourceForge.
From February 1997 to late 1998 I co-maintained the Sunsite archive, the largest and most popular software repository in the Linux world (what is now Metalab). I designed and wrote keeper, the archiver's assistant software now used to maintain that site.
I worked with the Linux File System Standards Group and representatives from the BSD UNIX community to generalize the Linux File System Standard so it would define a common directory layout for open-source UNIX operating systems.
I was heavily involved in the GNU Emacs 19
development (in fact, I was the primary Emacs-lisp library person
for about two years during 1991-1993). The vc.el mode for one-touch
version control within Emacs was mine. So was the gud.el mode for
universal debugger control, and the package-finder feature under
the Emacs help system. I also wrote the support for package
unloading in the Emacs 19 kernel.
I was for a couple of years an active member of the nethack developers' list. I wrote the color support, introduced blindfolds, and edited the `Guide to the Mazes Of Menace', the nethack manual.
I added many of the new features in pcomm-2.0, the UNIX clone of ProComm written and maintained by Emmet Gray, including the point-and-shoot dialer interface and the support for Zmodem-upload autorecognition.
I was one of the principal developers of the ncurses library, the open-source clone of System V curses distributed with Linux.
Future Projects
I am particularly interested in helping realize the following potentials of the Internet:
- Cooperative distributed open-source development
- I think the Linux development project is an exciting model for what is possible in the way of decentralized cooperation on the Internet. I would like to help develop tools to assist in network-distributed software development, version control, and documentation support.
- Promoting PGP and other technologies for digital privacy
- I have been a member of the cypherpunks list and will rejoin when I free up some time. I am very interested in technologies that promote individual freedom by making it difficult for governments and corporations to control or monitor network activity.
Sadly, I Too Am Mortal...
I want these projects to survive me. If you are reading this page and have information that I am dead, disappeared, seriously injured or otherwise unable to maintain a net.presence, take a look at my continuity page.