Summer of (iPhone) Code

This summer, I was fortunate enough to be selected for the National Science Foundation funded “Research Experience for Undergraduates” program at the University of Houston. I have spent most of my days in the Computational Physiology Lab, run by Dr. Ioannis Pavlidis of UH. While the details of my project are still mostly closed door, I do intend to post a full description when I am able.

The basic overview of what I have been doing is developing a simple two-dimensional desktop game that supports the iPhone as a wireless controller. The game, which I’m planning to call “The Sky is Falling” in it’s final release, provides a means of light mental engagement between user/player and the desktop environment. My goal was to create a game that did not distract the user from other “IMPORTANT” events happening on screen and I believe I have been successful with the project thus far.

The game will soon be used in lab tests and formally presented and published as part of a larger research endeavor later this year. Coding for the iPhone and Mac has been an exciting learning experience and I’ve gotten to work with some really neat people along the way. I can’t wait to be able to share my work publicly – after it has been published.

Sniffica Updates

As a lot of people know, I've been working hard this semester on my first solo iPhone application: Sniffica. So far, the experience has been good but absolutely the most difficult project I've ever worked on. I intend to have a working beta testing build by April 30, 2009 to present at the Belmont University Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Along with the main pieces of the project, I was able to base my Marketing class's project on Sniffica and develop a plan for marketing my application once it's complete. Check out my ideas by reading the PDF!

Proxy Initializer

I developed this simple Apple Script to automate the process of starting a dynamic SSH tunnel to a proxy server. This script basically just turns on your airport SOCKS proxy and then creates the dynmaic SSH tunnel

Why would anyone want to use this? Well, if you have a school like mine (Belmont University), then you probably have a difficult time connecting to web services that use non-standard virtual ports. For instance, my old web host configuration panel used port 8443.

Proxy Initializer allows me to create an encrypted tunnel to a server outside of Belmont's local area network and on a port which Belmont does not block (1080). All of my web traffic is then forwarded to this server before it goes to the Internet, and then all responses are returned to me from this server. Basically, it gives me utter freedom in a controlled environment (God-Mode!).

Website Revamp!

I'm currently working on giving my website a new design and some better content. So far, I'm really digging the new look and feel.

AirplaneBoarding (JAVA)

I just finished up this interesting project for Modeling and Simulation. The project was coded in Java and created a plane and a line of passengers. Then I used the Monte Carlo to simulate several boarding strategies thousands of times, and compute the average of the results. This was a great learning exploration into object-oriented application design. I put a lot of effort into making a good class structure.