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Ground Zero: Fatman's Page |
12/2009 - Note on personal website re-design - Yeah, I know that this page is ugly. I have plans for a site re-design that won't look like it came from 1996.
Hey there, my name is Alan Caulkins, and this is my personal Web page. If you are interested, I've got a pictures page with images of me in my native habitat. You may be wondering about my username, "fatman"; "Fatman" and "Little Boy" were the names of the atomic bombs detonated over Japan at the end of World War II. Back in the days when I majored in physics, I had a slightly morbid interest in nuclear weapons. Since I don't much like the attention of Internet pedophiles, "fatman" is my choice of pseudonym.
I'm currently an independent consultant with my own business. Consulting takes up most of my time right now, but I occasionally get a chance to work on this site.
I have several interests right now, but one of my main activities is running maxint.net. I got started with it in the summer of 1995, when I started using the Linux operating system, but I didn't actually register the Internet sub-domain until 1998. I also have interests in artificial intelligence, physics, robotics, and operating system design, though I really only consider myself a rank amateur in those fields. I've been known to practice a couple of martial arts as well- Tae Kwon Do, Hapkido, and Judo, and I'm just starting to learn Kung Fu. I have a few software projects that I'm working on, and I'll try to keep links to them, in case they are useful to people with similar interests.
Strangelet - A web application library for Common Lisp that uses the Araneida CL web server.
Consul - A user authentication and authorization library for Common Lisp applications. It currently only has a module to store user data in a CLSQL-connected database, but I'd like it to eventually provide interfaces to shadow/password, Kerberos, LDAP, and other schemes. Consul also has a web component for working with Strangelet.
Wing Commander III Simulation - A space strategy game that takes place in the Wing Commander universe (although copyright/trademark concerns may result in a re-naming). The game was originally written as a pen-and-paper RPG by my (now) brother-in-law Steve. Long ago, I offered to automate it so he could actually play the game himself, intstead of always acting as Game Master. I have recently breathed new life into the project by moving the implementation language from C++ to Python. This is currently my most active project, but is still in early development, so watch this space!
Passman.pm - an object-oriented user management module that I wrote in Perl for the Kansas State University CIS Department. It is designed to manage the passwd and shadow files used by Unix operating systems. Passman.txt is a simple documentation file for the library.
Gobo (sorry, no link yet) is a robotics project that I've been tinkering with for a couple of years now. I've had a lot of false starts, but I've settled on an overall design. Now that I don't have to devote most of my time to school, I might actually get somewhere with it.
Having been on the Internet for several years now, I have amassed a pretty hefty collection of joke email. Not wanting my humor directory to be a complete waste of hard disk space, I put the collection online, and so the Internet Humor Archive was born! Enjoy the fruits of my obsession.
Maxint.net is my personal network. Check it out.
Kluge.net belongs to Theo, my ex-roommate from Worcester, who I can say with some measure of admiration, is insane.
Open Source software is something I hold near and dear to my heart. Sometimes, though, I forget about trendy marketing and call it by it's original name: free software.
Perl is an awesome programming language that allows you to do some very impressive stuff with just a little bit of code. It has become my (and most everyone else's) language of choice for Unix system administration tasks, and I often find myself using it from the command line to write quick, disposeable one-liners that make my day go a lot smoother. Many people don't realize it, but Perl is also cool because it can be used easily for programming on Windows. (Hey, if you've got to do it, at least it doesn't have to be in Visual Basic. :-P )
Python is an increasingly popular language that has gotten a lot of my interest lately. If Perl is for digging battlefield trenches, Python is for building pyramids. Like Perl, Python truly shines in a Unix environment, but it can also be used for easy (and extremely low-cost) Windows programming... I've even been using it to play with OpenGL on that operating system.