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.

You see, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study in Scarlet"