This blog receives a lot of spam. Most of which gets deleted right away. Lately I’ve been getting spam that doesn’t contain any advertisements but doesn’t make any sense in the context of the page. This leads me to think this not-advertisment spam is some sort of probe spammers are using to determine how many comments get posted to this page. Typically the comments are taken from book so often enough they aren’t picked up by the spam filter. Today I received this:

I saw tonight in the observatory, through Alvan Clark’s telescope, the Dumb-Bell nebula in the Fox and Geese Constellation… I have rarely been so much gratified… Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime… What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair as you ascend; - that this is the road to the stars. Every fixture and instrument in the building, every nail and pin, has a direct reference to the Milky Way, the fixed stars, and the nebulae, and we leave … the Americas and history at the door when we come in.

According to the Commonwealth Observatory at the University of Kentucky the quoted text was written in a journal by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This weekend I’ve created yet another screen saver. I decided, though, that this one will not be a freebie.

Download

Here’s a new Composition that I made last night. It shows Earth with real time cloud map that is updated every few hours. Be advised: the patch uses some rather large textures.

Earth With Clouds (MOV)

I fixed a bug in the 3d splines screen saver which was preventing it from correctly saving the user defaults. Download the Splines Saver version 1.2

I embeded the splines composition into an actual OS X screen saver to make it easier for people to install. Download it here.

This is a screen saver I created after developing a custom Quartz Composer for another project that I was working on. I created a Quartz composition to test the patch I was working on and since it looked rather neat I decided to develop that into a screen saver.

Version 1.2 fixes a bug with saving the screen saver settings.

Splines Saver 1.2

Evaluate 1.0

Evaluate is a Dashboard widget that uses the Javascript ‘eval’ function to process text entered into an input line. The results are output to a buffer so that you can view results from previous calculations.

Download

Email

caleb@unr.edu

PGP Key

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin)
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=o4o3
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Caleb Cannon Resume - Extended

Caleb Cannon Resume - One Page

Current Projects

These are some of the projects that I am working on.

Ephemeris

Ephemeris is a small solar system simulator / screen saver for OSX that I have been working on. The program is similar to Celestia but intended to be light weight (e.g. No 20Mb textures). Currently the program is about 60% complete. Here are a couple of screen shots:

InteracTable

InteracTable is a chemistry/periodic table program for Mac OS X.

Past Projects

Websites

University of Nevada, Online Catalog

I designed the online course catalog for the University of Nevada during the summer of 2006. The system was designed using C#. Technically, I regard the site as a content management system tailored to large scale documents with a few features customized for university catalogs. The system provides an editor interface where catalog maintainers can make changes to the textual content of the catalog using a familiar word processor interface. All changes to content are rigorously logged for auditing and tracking of changes. In addition to providing the online interface I designed a custom parser that converts the HTML content into LaTeX which can then be compiled into postscript or PDF. LaTeX is a well established typesetting language and the documents produced by LaTeX are well formatted with page numbers, a TOC, and a subject index.

Department of Physics Website

The previous website for the Department of Physics at UNR had become very dated so I asked for permission to redesign the site. I am particularly proud of the index page of this site. Almost every bit of text on the index is a link. The background image is a page taken from some of my undergraduate class notes showing part of the derivation of the wave equations describing electromagnetic radiation.

Calendar of Events - University of Nevada, Reno

While I was working for Campus Computing at UNR I designed websites for numerous departments. Of particular interest is the Campus Events Calendar. The events calendar features several “views” such as monthly and daily events listings. It is syndicated by various department websites through RSS and special ASP scripts. The events calendar was implemented using ASP, SQL Server and VB Script. I will be updating the events calendar again during the Fall ‘05 semester adding a new type of view, extending existing views and adding various navigation and usability features.

Academic Skills Center

As an undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno I was part of a team that developed the Academic Skills Center Tutoring Enrollment site. The primary function of the website is an enrollment and scheduling system for students seeking academic assistance. Essentially a calendaring system, the site collects availability information of students (about 1000 per semester) and tutors (about 60 per semester). The system pairs groups of students with qualified tutors, reserves an area for the group to meet and sends notifications to all parties. The system attempts to maximize the number of contact hours between students and tutors. Secondary functions include message boards, tracking and generation of statistics for contact and effectiveness of the tutoring program, a payroll system, online instructional utilities, and various other features.

OS X Apps

I recently purchased my first Apple computer (iBook G4) and in the process of learning to develop for OS X I wrote a few small applications that some might find enjoyable.

IFS Fractal Generator

This is a simple (ie. featureless) IFS fractal generator. The program reads the components of one or more affine translation matrices and uses them to draw fractals.

A Screen Saver

This is a simple screen saver I wrote with Cocoa. It animates the motion of several particles as they’re moved around the screen space by a set of gravity wells. The colors of the lines drawn and background are slowly rotated. The overall effect is very pleasing.

Evaluate Widget

This is a calculator widget intended to replace the limited calculator that comes with Dashboard. It uses the Javascript eval function to evaluate expressions typed into an input line and buffers the results. Any valid javascript can be evaluated.

Diversions

I have numerous ways of not doing what I’m supposed to…

Colors

I wrote this to help me pick out color schemes while I was creating websites for UNR.

Graphing Applet

I created this applet for the Mathematics Department at UNR.The applet uses a parser written by ??? to convert expressions to RPN which is then evaluated at intervals to generate the functions graph.

Artwork

A collection of various logos and images I create or generated using various programs

The Garbage Can

This is where I put all of the old code I’ve written that never really went anywhere. Some of it is complete trash. Some of it is interesting enough that I may continue working on it some day but for whatever reason I’ve either lost interest or don’t have the time to pursue it. Feel free to download and play around with anything found in this folder.

PHP Games

Useless but slightly fun stuff I created with PHP.

Stickes

I’m not really sure why I wrote this thing. It was a complete waste of time.

Go

Go is a Chinese board game that is often compared to Chess. This implementation allows people to play extended games of Go - the games are stored on the server and you can log in at any time to review, chat and/or make a move.

Othello

This version of Othello features a very cludgy implementation of the minmax algorithm. This game does not allow human vs. human games.