MailDrop 0.2

After performing a few mail server migrations, I got tired of moving mail by hand, or recreating a shell script. Facing another big migration, I decided to write a tool to make mail migration easier, and assure myself I didn’t miss anything. Also, it's another excuse to learn more about Cocoa programming.

Here are some screenshots of my progress:

I've put together a page for MailDrop with some screenshots and a download link. I'll try to expand this as time permits, but feel free to contact me if you have questions.

I-5 Passing

In 2006, I worked with artist Christiane Robbins to develop a Cocoa application that visualized live air quality data as part of a video installation for her ‘I-5 Passing’ series. The program rendered the air quality readings from the San Joaquin Valley as a time-series over images of gas stations near each monitoring station, creating a sense of the readings floating through the air.

The work was installed in the San Jose Museum of Art from July to November 2006 as part of the Edge Conditions exhibit. There are even a few photos on flickr. It was also a part of technoSpheres: FutureS of Thinking, which appeared at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at UCI in August 2006.

This also happened to be my very first Cocoa application. I'm happy to report that it ran continuously from July to November 2006 without a hitch.

Dapper

As part of a single sign-on solution, a client of mine needed to setup a central LDAP directory to store user data. I designed the schema and wrote a management utility I called Dapper using Ruby on Rails. If there's interest, Contact me and I may be able to make it publicly available.

Ken Perlin’s Graphics Class

Ken Perlin’s graphics class was probably the best Computer Science class I took in college. Luckily, he made us post each of our assignments online as a Java Applet so when I’m feeling down that I haven’t produced any art in awhile, I can take solace in the fact that I wrote a 3D renderer in college.

This area of my site generates a surprising number of visitors, so I guess other people find it comforting too.

Collated Path

While an undergrad at NYU, I worked with techno-artist Natalie Jeremijenko on a few academic projects. She's brilliant, a little bit crazy, and I had a lot of fun learning from her.

Together we designed a 1-dimensional interface widget that I called the Collated Path. We even published a couple of papers about it.

I've been thinking about the viability of 1-dimensional widgets again lately, since Apple added a 1-D browsing view to iTunes 7 called "Cover Flow." I can pretty much guarantee you that any likeness to my work was coincidental, though.

Open Source

Over the years I’ve contributed documentation, fixes, and source code to a variety of Open Source products, including StAX-Utils, DOM4J, Bricolage, PostgreSQL JDBC Driver, Oscar OSGi (now Apache Felix), and others.

I’ve taken advantage of Open Source projects far more often though, making my life much easier. Thanks!

Balboa Park Condo

I’m ending the year by helping my mother market her rental properties online, and finally getting all her technology straight. The first of the properties is now online, backed by a small Rails web application to manage photos, reservations, and contact info.

International Relief Teams

My godfather is the head of International Relief Teams, and in the Spring of 2006 he asked me how to make their site better. I produced the following design, and helped them eventually choose Convio to manage their donations:

SSRC

I spent a few months of 2006 writing scripts in Ruby to convert thousands of pages for the SSRC into Bricolage. Along the way they also asked me to refresh their standard site templates a bit. Here are the before and after shots:

Before	After

National Research Commission on Elections and Voting

Most of my work for the SSRC is often either intranet-related, or only really interesting to academics. But I was actually pretty excited about this site, for a commission formed to monitor voting problems in the 2004 election.

It's not a lot to look at, and had to be completed in a week or less, but it was also the first presidential election I was able to vote in, so my civic pride was riding pretty high.

Real Estate Blog

On the pretense that I’d design my mom a website, I got a really sweet computer when I was in high school (dual 180mhz Pentiums! 9GB of disk space!). I never really got around to it though, until a few years ago (after I got my CS degree, no less). It still seems odd though that my mom has a blog and I don’t.

When I was thirteen, I played a depressed kid on TV. No, I’m not joking.