Five Things About Me

Tor, you sneaky devil. You tagged me before anyone else had a chance. You grabbed the brass ring. Kudos.

So to continue the "5 Things" meme (for the record, I really hate the word "meme"), I present for you five things you probably don't know about me. Actually, some of you will know some of these facts, but I doubt any of you will know them all. I've tried to pick the most quirky or interesting bits out of my otherwise humdrum life.

  • Some time in 1998, I became the lead developer on the LiteStep project. LiteStep was a very popular replacement for the Explorer desktop shell on Windows during the late 90s. It provided a new taskbar, desktop window, NeXT-like dock, and pluggable UI and theming system. For hardcore users tired of the boring Explorer UI, it was the state of the art.

    Originally created by a fellow named Francis Gastellu, it had by 1998 grown rather quiet. At the time, the codebase was silently fading away, with none of the original developers still working on the project and few active developers interested in or able to make a large time commitment to get LiteStep going again. I discovered LiteStep and was attracted by its ability to replace the entire desktop Look & Feel of my Windows machines. I had also been an avid Win32 developer, releasing the shareware program "Hack-It" to some minimal financial success. However the LiteStep code was in really rough shape.

    Almost all the logic was packed into a single large C file that controlled the main desktop window. All the other modules were heavily dependent on this one piece of code, which ultimately crippled LiteStep's ability to incorporate certain types of UI plugins into a user's desktop. I tackled the problem in two ways:

    1. I started converting the core plugins to C++ pure virtual classes and implementations, to allow for a more componentized system
    2. And I reworked all the critical functionality from the desktop module into a central runtime, allowing all other modules to finally remove their desktop dependencies

    Over the next year, LiteStep started to grab the attention of the desktop theming community once again. "Skinning" in general really took off during this time, with the launch of new shells GeoShell, DarkStep, and others. An article published in Wired (for which I was interviewed but not quoted) detailed this new movement.

    Sadly, with the release of theming capabilities in Windows XP, the rise of Linux desktops, and the rebirth of Macintosh with OS X, LiteStep has long since fallen from grace. But to this day I still have the odd person walk up to me and thank me for my efforts during that time. LiteStep, we barely knew ye.

    I suppose an addendum to this item is that for many years I wrote at least as much Win32 C++ code as I did Java, and I still have the programming guides to prove it. How's that for diversity?

  • I do not remember a time in my life I was not in front of a computer. The first computing experience I can remember was programming and playing with BASIC on my Atari 400, writing little games and buying programming books containing short apps I could type in...carefully...one finger at a time. I remember saving my programs to the Atari cassette tape drive and praying, praying, praying it would actually take. I remember dialing up to text-based information services at 300bps over an acoustic coupler. In third grade, a mentor came to my elementary to teach me to program in Apple BASIC, though I never owned an Apple computer until my current MacBook Pro.

    Throughout gradeschool and highschool, my primary interests lie with computers. I ran a BBS called "Terminal Nightmare" (clever, eh?) for which I toiled many hours creating ANSI graphics and advertising on more popular boards. I brought C programming manuals to school in 8th grade to read during slow periods. I wrote C and assembler code on embedded processors for my dad's electronics design ventures in 9th grade. And so on and so forth. I've been a computer geek as long as I can remember, and I've never had a problem with that.

    Toward the end of highschool I started thinking about degree programs. I initially started my post-secondary education in Organic Chemistry, and completed the first two years of requirements. But I hated labs. Some time during the second year, I discovered that there was something called a "Computer Science" degree. Oh, hell yes. From then on I never performed another titration or chromatograph, and I couln't be happier.

  • When I am not programming (which is extremely rare) I am an enthusiast of complete-information strategy games. I have spent some amount of time reading about and studying Go, which is my favorite game. I enjoy playing various Shogi variants (including Shogi, Chu Shogi, Tenjiku Shogi, and Tori Shogi), though I don't claim to be good at any of them. I will play Xiang Qi, but it's not one of my favorites, and I have not learned any particularly good strategies. I also play Chess, having been taught by my father at an early age.

    Occasionally me and a few local friends will get together and play these games until the wee hours of the morning. Some people have LAN parties; we have strategy gaming parties. We most frequently play Bughouse when we can find four people and two clocks, but we often just get together to play the above games one-on-one.

    And by "complete-information" games, I mean those in which there is no element of chance. I do not enjoy dice games, and I will play card games only if present company prefers such games. My opinion is that if I lose a game, I would much rather it be due to my own ineptitude than due to random chance.

  • I was one of the best fight-game players in local arcades in the late 1990s. Oddly enough, I was never drawn to Street Fighter, but I spent literally thousands of dollars over the years getting good at the Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct series of games from Midway. My friend and I would generally spend most weekend nights at arcades, usually playing for minimum cost against players short on skill but long on quarters. We got quite good.

    I was also pretty heavily addicted to those games. During my first two years at the University of Minnesota, I generally skipped class to play. There was such a rush from getting a higher combo, or beating a new player who tried to represent. I also made many friends in those arcades whose names I never knew and whom I have never seen since...but there was a bond among us gamers.

    When I had the means, I began to collect arcade machines. Unfortunately, the means ran dry after only a few purchases, but I've been happy to have them. I own the following arcade machines, stowed in my basement and occasionally played:


    I also own the hollowed-out remnants of an old Gun Fight cabinet. I intended to restore it, but the side art and wood were in very poor shape. It's rotting in the garage.

    I'd love to have a Ms PacMan, Q*Bert, or Tron machine. Unfortunately, so would the rest of the world.

  • I write and eat left-handed, though I prefer my right hand for almost everything else. Unfortunately, like most lefties, this means I can't use writing utensils that may smear or smudge. You lefties know what I'm talking about: the dreaded "pencil hand" you get from dragging your hand through what you've just written. In junior high I finally got tired of having to wash pencil lead off my hand every day, and for several years I utilized a novel solution:

    I wrote backwards.


    • --

    I'll tag Ola Bini, Nick Sieger, Pat Eyler, Evan Phoenix, and Jochen Theodorou to blog "5 Things" people might not know about them.
Written on January 7, 2007