You are welcome as a reader of this web page. My intention is to present my various thoughts on topics that I find intriguing. Some sections will contain mostly text while others graphics, links or interactive content. It would be wonderful if I have captured an obervation or idea that you have had. Maybe you recognize it but have a different point of view. We could try and describe this and possibly augment the sum of understanding.
I am exploring and discovering concepts in computation and the world beyond. What I enjoy much is to condense an understanding of a subject in the form of a working program. It is even more satisfying if the program takes part in interaction or is generating fascinating media. I like the simple rule-based systems where some desired behavior emerges. When I am presented with a problem I tend to find general patterns, and see how the details fit in the abstractions. I detest inefficiencies in operation but also in expression.
More about me: To come as a link here.
I feel that the term software refers more to engineering, namely to observe the interaction with hardware. Computer organization and also efficiency of mechanism given real operation is therefore relevant. Work with kernel drivers or the times I take a step back to consider how a program fits in the whole, such as a deployed network, is therefore relevant to the term "software". On the other hand there is the joy in how a program is expressed, both in structure and computations on a smaller scale. Expressing the subject domain with its rules in the consise way that is a programming language, often enlightens with clear understanding. Program design is in this manner to me a very different topic than software architecture.
Working mostly in C++ I infrequently get allergic to the amount of syntax. For this reason I got attracted to Scheme, and wrote my interpreter: humble.
More software: To come as a link here.
One of my larger hobby projects is a ray-tracer library program. Writing simple c++ source code that utilizes this library you compose shapes in union and intersection with each-other and instruct rendering in transparent or reflecting materials: rayt. Please look around in this "Rho Media Generators" repository, as it contains many projects collected over a longer period. The other major graphical one might be the fluid simulator, which also meant a self-guided study in physics for me. The smaller projects include a stochastic L-System, an autonomous fractal zoomer and a Feigenbaum renderer utilizing SIMD instructions of the CPU.
In 1994 I had a 386 PC and wrote lots of programs in assembly. I had an instruction set and service-interupt reference I read through. I was also in a demo-scene group, and this also gave me some insights. I also got my hands on a freely available very good educational text that was downloaded from a BBS. My neighbor had a modem early on, and also had a nice screen-projector. One of the programs displayed colorful rotating shapes that you could alter in various ways using most keys. I wrote it from scratch with no math processor, which means I had to figure things such as polygon-filling using only integers, check screen-refresh for update and keyboard event looping. Other programs took input from the mouse. For display I used MCGA, copying from a data segment as I usually operated in real-mode as opposed to protected-mode. A segment is just big enough for all one-byte pixels: It's 256 palette based. For cosine we had a table circulating. This was great fun.
More graphics: To come as a link here.
As a kid I often tuned my radio to a station I thought was for US military personel placed in Norway. I think my hunch is because I received it on amp.modulation not freq.modulation. The host was speaking English and they went through new creations from Chicago and Detroit, and so on. This was prior to 1990 when I was also aware of the experiemental group Kraftwerk. After a few years I didn't receive this radio channel.
More sound: To come as a link here.
Games have been around. I created a "royal game of ur" in wood and made some rule-variations that I feel may have been used, while experimenting and playing this with my son. Facination of the mechanics of a board game does to me look to be the same as what we have for computation and programs that may generate fractal images or "game of life" sequences.
More games: KMELN
Statistics operate on big data, and I feel that one must be aware how presentation of statistical material or indicating a specific meaning of such data will most probably have some bias to it. Concluding from collected data in support of a presented argument may fail to mention that there may indeed be alternative causes, or correlations due to indirect or unknown causes for the observations in the data.
At the beginning of my time at the university we would dial-in with a modem, unless we sat in one of the terminal halls. Before this I was often at my neighbors where we joined IRC channels. My first job in programming was also related to communication systems. It was on management system for crypto communication.
Later, in France, I got the opportunity to build up a VoiP service system. After four years we had a big volume and were independently routing calls to providers. I then managed two racks of computers hooked with T1 lines, serving a billing and call-routing system I created utilizing Asterisk, Apache and so on. I administered a DNS for my domain authority and IP address-range. Based on <iframe> I created an interactive billing page for the call-shop, where seconds ticked besides the destination country's flag. After this time in France I moved back to Norway, where I delved deeper in the VoiP related protocols, but for tele-presence. I implemented software that simulated all interaction with a test-subject end-point. During this later time I consumed any SIP related RFC. But also H323 where I implemented X691 where the ASN1 tweaked into python was then the running encoding engine. The teams tested extensions to the H323 protocols and SIP features using my framework.
More comm: To come as a link here.