Boo's Home Page

Hi, everyone! If you don't know me, I'm a software developer. Actually, if you don't know me, I'm a professional cliff-diver who likes to write about software code every now and then, when the cliff-diving thing is getting my ego too over-inflated and I need to be brought back to earth. I emphasize that that's only if you don't know me.

This page sat mostly unchanged for 7 years, starting out with the phrase "I've graduated from UMCP, finally," and was modified only to add a few more links here and there, for the most part. Thus, for example, it continued to give prominence to my first attempt at JavaScript, writing of it as a recent achievement (in fact, I think up until 2007 or so it said "I learned JavaScript yesterday", but at least I rephrased that at some point).

I don't have time right now for a major site redesign, and no particular plans to that end, so this will continue to be a dumping ground for some of my geek-related writings and code. But I'll try to keep the content reasonably up-to-date as compared with before. And the floppy-disk background of this page will continue to reflect my status as a mover and/or shaker in the tech world. With all that said, let the geeking begin!

While we're talking about this page, one thing I did do about 6 months prior to this content update (the latter being early November, 2008) was to do a total HTML rewrite of this page. The original version of this page was generated by a Geocities home page wizard, which had much the same look and layout as the current version you are looking at. But the HTML of the wizard-generated page was a horrible relic of the 20th century that made me want to hurl every time I had to edit it to add a new link or anything. So I rewrote it, preserving the original look and layout as much as I could, but using semantic markup and CSS. Here's the before and the after. If you're not a Web geek, you'll just see two essentially identical pages; the difference is seen when you select "View Source". If you should happen to download the two files, you may note that the "after" is just under half the size of the "before".

In 2007 or so I wrote a long-winded treatise exploring some concepts in the JavaScript language, which I hope some will find useful or at least entertaining. If putting an anonymous function inside an associative array is old hat to you -- or if you have no idea what it means and don't want to know -- you can skip this.

Probably my most successful JavaScript effort to date, the CookieWiper bookmarklet can be useful. Drag it into your Personal Toolbar folder or the "Links" bar. It attempts to delete all cookies related to the website you're looking at.

Here's something considerably less useful: a Greasemonkey script to fix the annoying lie/lay grammar bug in the otherwise wonderful CSS Zen Garden. You need Firefox (or maybe Mozilla will do) and Greasemonkey to use this.

I have some instructions on how to send me encrypted e-mail (from a Unix or Unix-like system) should you ever need to, say, e-mail me a password or something.

Here is possibly my first publicly released (and totally useless) piece of software, the Shavian Converter.

And yes, the minute you all started reading the intro, you were saying to yourselves, "I've just gotta see that 'first attempt at JavaScript'!" So here it is: the Twelve Days of Christmas in less than 2000 bytes. According to what I wrote in previous versions of this page, I wrote it within a day of starting to learn JavaScript. Go me.

A Google search turned up only two instances of the All Your Base novella. I don't know who the original author is, but he/she deserves high praise for recognizing AYB for the incredible wealth of artistic raw material it provides. Since we can't afford to let this fall into oblivion, I'm hosting a copy here.

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