Jeffrey Crouse
jeff at jeffish dot org | pgp keyPersonal Statement
As a writer, and a human being, I tend to look at my life as a story that is unfolding every day. As a programmer, I look at my work in a hierarchal, structural way. It is my goal to reconcile my life with my work.Interests
note: This is a list of my personal projects. For professional projects, please see my resume.
Portfolio of Web-Based Work
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Antireal.com
This site started as simply a repository for my own stories, but in the summer of 2002, anxious to try out my SQL and PHP skills, I decided to open it up to anyone else who was interested in posting their stories.
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Pixels and Bits
Taught by Rebecca Ross in the Fall of 2002, the aim of the course was to explore the question, "What are digital images made of and how can we get our hands dirty creating them?". Each student was required to present his work - a series of Java applets - on a website. This is mine. You can view all of the works, or skip directly to the final presentation.
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Content Matching System
Planned with the help of Ivan Askwith as a final project for Terri Senft's class at the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program, the goal of this system was to facilitate the building of online communities by providing a tool that helps users to connect with people with similar interests. It took the form of a bulletin board (which I built with PHP/SQL), where posts with simmilar content are automatically linked. You can read a more in-depth description on the site.
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Computer Simulations
Rebecca Ross's class, Pixels and Bits, left me with a taste for simulations, so I decided to pursue an independent study on the topic. Since I wanted to focus more on the issues involving simulation than the programming itself, I decided to use the Breve programming environment. This site shows my experiments, as well as some of my thoughts about simulations.
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The Witness Project
Rebecca Ross began the Witness Project - a screen-saver that visualizes Death Row information from the Texas Department of Justice - many years ago, but in the summer of 2003, it needed an upgrade. I helped her port the concept to OS X, using ScrenSaverView, and the WebKit Framework, and optimized the back end with a Perl screen scraping script that maps the information to XML, and a Flash interface that parses it.
[Flash required - Get Plugin] -
Carnivore Server
The Carnivore Server is a surveillance tool, invented by Alex Galloway and the Radical Software Group, that monitors all traffic on the network on which it is run. In the Summer of 2003, I became the first official intern of the RSG. In this capacity, I created a Flash template for Carnivore Clients, and contributed to the completion of the OS X version of the Carnivore Server, which uses the Packet Capture Library (pcap) to monitor all traffic on the network on which it is run, and then sends this information to all connected clients. In the process, I learned about Interprocess Communications, including socket connections.
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Interactive Fiction Markup Language
Based on the belief that any author, regardless of technical prowess, should be able to create a work of interactive fiction, I created IFML - a simple XML spec for interactive fiction. Although the browser is still in development, I have created an online demo in Flash. Try out my interactive gallery.
[Flash required - Get Plugin]Coming soon: documentation and tutorials at ifml.com, and a SourceForge browser project.
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Other Links
Just because they didn't make the cut, doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't see them.
- The Einstein Project - A Flash presentation made for a class on Popular Theoretical Physics.
- June First Reboot - A blatant and intentional rip-off of the May First Reboot event.
- Quadraphobia.com - An online radio station playing IDM and ambient. Shut down by the man.
- Freegan - A place to get free stuff, and give stuff away. Still in production.