Welcome to himinbi.org. The name sounds a bit strange, but I get it from Norse mythology. There is a bridge between the world of the gods (Asgard) and the world of the men (Midgard) called Bifrost (visible from Earth as the rainbow). It is the only point of entrance for the giants (with whom the gods were warring most of the time) so there is a tower overlooking it which Heimdall inhabited and kept watch from. This tower was called Himinbiorg, so thence the name which translates as "heaven mountain."
I'm not a mythology buff of any sort. I was hunting for a name that ended in "org" and there aren't that many really. ☺ It also has the benefit of being arcane which entertains me. It has the downside though of being nigh unpronouncable and unspellable. So, I use wholcomb@gmail.com as my e-mail address.
I am a computer science graduate from Tennessee Tech as of December 2002. At the time of this writing (April 2004) I am a Peace Corps Volunteer living in Mauritania, West Africa. Stuff from there is being collected at mr.pcvs.org.
I'm something of an information packrat, so there are lots of bits and pieces here. The majority of them are no longer accessible since I got kicked off the honors server for copyright violations. All the stuff I've done though is still around.
I keep meaning to do a portfolio to show some of this stuff off, but am constantly short of time. Some of the more finished bits: (Be forewarned that I worked all of these up in Firefox and most of them have not been extensively tested in IE.)
| Title | Time Frame | Completion | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sliding Rails Paradox | 2006 | 100% | This is an explanation of Lorentz contraction through an examination of a set of rails sliding at near the speed of light. I wrote it for a class in college and finally fixed the math after a couple of years. (Firefox is the only browser that properly supports the MathML and SVG the document is authored in.) |
| Dynamic US Map | 2006 | 95% | This is a python script to take a SVG map and make it into a DHTML map with hover effects. The hover boundaries are convex hulls which is less than perfect and the script needs to be generalized slightly to work for other maps. |
| Set Trainer | 2005 | 90% | Set is a simple little game that's about identifying patterns in groups of cards. I suck at it and wrote this program to hone my skills. |
| 3&D | 2005 | 80% | Several generations of TTU Honors students lived at the corner of Third and Denton in Cookeville. I was in the last of those and we made a shirt. |
| Stylesheet Browser | 2005 | 80% | I have bunches of CSS stylesheets and like to have an idea of how they will look on a new page. This is a set of javascripts which uses the DOM to show how they look on various pages. (This doesn't work in IE yet, only Mozilla.) |
| Recording Canvas 3D | 2001 | 80% | The java3d library renders 3d scene graphs, the jmf takes data and make movies. This class makes a java3d render a jmf data source allowing someone to record 3d movies in any of the formats supported by the jmf. The code works as is, but still has some threading and buffering issues that need to be worked out. |
| CSS Explanation | 1999 | 90% | Long before they were popular, I wrote up a little something covering the basics of how CSS works in an attempt to get a friend of mine to convert. |
| WinCVS Over SSH Setup | 2001 | 90% | I once hoped to do a system of distributed website maintenance with all the data in CVS. As part of that project I wrote a little HOW-TO on getting WinCVS to work over the Cygwin port of OpenSSH. |
| CD Covers | 2001 | 90% | When I was installing debian a while back I made some cd label images in photoshop. They put them in the faq they were later pulled because I never updated them, so I redid them in dynamic SVG. |
| Scale Test | 2001 | 90% | This is a part of a bug test in the java3d libraries. It creates a 2d star or arbitrary pointedness that changes color, spins and is manipulable in 3-space. This was part bug test and part entertaining myself making pretty stars. Most of the classes backing this program have been generalized and moved into the Utilities classes. |
| Scan | 2000 | 100% | This is a simple perl script to run arbitrary command that examine a remote system. It run by portsentry as a response to an unexpected packet arriving. There is a shell script to adapt it to calling by portsentry and mail the results to an administrator. |
| View Platform Test | 2001 | 90% | Java3d allows for view platforms to be moved within the scene graph, but there are some issues with state not being properly maintained. This program demonstrates some of those issues. This is an interesting program; it takes a hsv cone and maps it onto a sphere made up of lots of smaller spheres. The view platform can be attached to random ones of the smaller spheres and the change in view examined. (This code relies on the overlay code in the utilities package and some utility code from the j3d repository. |
| Assembly Strings | 2000 | 100% | This is VAX Assembly code written as a part of my class work on the subject. I went beyond the assignment and developed some reusable macros to handle string to int conversion and input validation. |
| DCL Utilities | 1999 | 100% | This is a bunch of little programs that run on a VMS system. These are descendants of the first programs that I ever wrote. When I came to school there was an old VMS server that handled the campus e-mail. I started changing random parts of programs and slowly worked my way into the magic that is getting computers to cooperate. |
| Get Calendar | 2002 | 95% | I got the little zen calendar from page a day for Christmas. I love this calendar; I've gotten it for 3 years and given it as a gift to 3 people. I wanted to get the entries in my e-mail. They have it online, but you have to go to the site everyday. This program is run by a cron job and it gets the page each day, strips off the html and mails it to me. |
| XCEL | 2002 | 75% | This is a program that I began working on for my software engineering class. The goal of the project, eventually is to aid in the software design process by generating executable program specifications for automated testing. At this point however I am focusing on parsing methods and working at deciphering documents written in a controlled english. What exists currently is the basis for an event based iso ebnf parser ala sax. |
| Helpdesk Utilities | 1999 | 100% | I am saving these because these are the last C I ever wrote. The helpdesk at Tech have to check in every so often and say what the lab status is. Also they have to do usage statistics. These programs do that work. |
| Page Replacement Demo | 2002 | 100% | This is a program for operating systems. It tests various page replacement algorithms and collects information on their effectiveness. |
| Prolog to Clips Converter | 2002 | 90% | Written for my programming languages class this program translates prolog to clips. It was entertaining as a way to learn logic languages. |
Other interesting stuff related to me: