wjsullivan.net

Overloading the Machine

Code

I've only had a very small amount of formal education in computer programming, but over the years I've been teaching myself more, using the wonderful knowledge pool provided by free and open source software. And some books.

I'm primarily interested in Lisp (mainly of the Emacs variety) and Python.

As of 2010, I'm a Debian Developer, maintaining the xword and planner-el packages.

Here are some of the projects I'm involved in:

F-Droid: This is a project to provide repositories of exclusively free software for Android. I contribute via my gitorious.org branch, suggesting metadata updates to import more applications to the main repository. (F-Droid is also an AGPL server for hosting your own repository, and a free client for accessing such repositories.)
xword: I maintain the Debian package for xword, the GNU/Linux crossword puzzle program written by Bill McCloskey. You can do crossword puzzles in the format distributed by the New York Times and others with it.
Maemo: I do a lot of tinkering with free software on mobile devices, include the Nokia N900. I maintain the nethack game package for Maemo.
Replicant: I help with testing and bug reporting for the Replicant project, which takes Google's Android and removes the proprietary software to create a fully free mobile OS.
delicious-el : I wrote an Emacs client for the del.icio.us social bookmark server. Features include posting, searching posts (by tag and regexp), offline/batched posting, tab completion for tags, offline storage of posts (good for backing up your account), w3m export, and HTML feed fetching.
PlannerMode: An Emacs planning mode. I'm the current maintainer. Keep track of your to-do lists, appointments and notes inside Emacs. It includes nifty features like the ability to publish your planner pages to HTML and create wiki-style hyperlinks in Emacs buffers for fluid organization.

Many smaller hacks and ideas will just be posted on the Journal.

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circum- stances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could. It was in the days of the rains that their prayers went up, not from the fingering of knotted prayer cords or the spinning of prayer wheels, but from the great pray-machine in the monastery of Ratri, goddess of the Night. The high-frequency prayers were directed upward through the atmosphere and out beyond it, passing into that golden cloud called the Bridge of the Gods, which circles the entire world, is seen as a bronze rainbow at night and is the place where the red sun becomes orange at midday. Some of the monks doubted the orthodoxy of this prayer technique...

-- Roger Zelazny, "Lord of Light"