Here are links to some of the terribly worthless things I have written in my spare time.

• HashTab Shell Extension

  This is a Windows shell extension that adds a tab to the file properties page. The new tab is called "File Hashes" and it displays the MD5, SHA1 hashes of the file's contents as well as the CRC-32. It also has a field where you can paste in the text of a hash for comparison. This is useful for when download sites display hashes of a file and you want to check the hash after you download. See the HashTab page for more info...
  
  Windows Installer
  Windows Installer x64

• Beeblebrox Partition Editor

  This is a GUI partition table editor that I wrote while I was doing technical support for PowerQuest (they make PartitionMagic). We got lots of support calls from people who had simple partition table errors that PM wouldn't work around. I wrote this so I could send it to people and have them fix their errors. At the time I had big plans for it. Then I sort of lost interest for no apparent reason...
  
  Beeblebrox Partition Editor Website
  Download for Windows 9x
  Download for Windows NT/XP/200X
  

• PTCalc

  While I was at PQ I also wrote a bunch of other stuff to help with support. PTCalc is one of those things. It is a simple little LBA/CHS hard disk geometry converter. The only reason I mention it here is because it somehow made it out onto PQ's public ftp server (which is now Symantec's ftp server since they bought PowerQuest) I didn't give them permission to put it there, maybe they think they own it since I wrote it while I worked there. But I worked in technical support and never signed any agreement saying that they own anything I create. Incidentally, that's also why it is a stupid and crappy application. I didn't really know how to program at the time I wrote it. More likely, they think one of their own developers wrote it, but I challenge them to find the source code to it! :) If I were SCO I would sue them. The error message is very amusing if you try to convert with 0 values. USER ERROR.

• Beeblebrox Partition Editor, Part 2

  After working at PQ, I went over to Caldera Systems before they bought SCO. I was working as a tester over there, but I was still interested in hard disk-ish stuff, so I decided to re-write the Partition Editor that I wrote at PQ. Since I was working at Caldera, I had pretty much stopped working on Windows and I did everything on Linux. In school I had just finished with CS456 which was UI programming and we used Java Swing. So I decided that I would do the second version of the partition editor in Java and then it would be portable to Linux and Windows. Turns out, that was a bad idea. Me and a friend wrote the guts in C++ because we needed low-level hard drive access. This was simple enough. Then, I wrote the GUI in Java and we were going to use JNI to go between C++ and Java. I had never used JNI before and I had no idea how complicated it would be. After working with JNI for a while I decided that it would be best if there was only one JNI method which just passed XML data between the UI and the engine. So, this simple little partition editor was now getting very complicated. It got so convoluted, that everyone lost interest and the project was abandoned. :( Now, I believe that you should write an app in C++ if it needs to access low-level stuff and if you have to put a GUI on it and be portable, just use whatever the favorite toolkit is and write the GUI twice. It's easier and it looks better. If you don't need any low-level stuff, just do it all in Java. Now that web-services are abundant, that might actually be a good way to go for Java/C++ interoperability. Anyway, you can download it from the Sourceforge site:
  
  SourceForge Site
  Windows Download
  Linux Download
  

• Snakes Game

  Snakes Game was inspired by a DOS game that Phillip Hellewell wrote when he was 10. I figured that if a 10 year old could do it, then so could I. I decided to use SDL and I made all the little graphics myself. Basically, you are a goo-ball and snakes bounce around the screen. You eat all of their eggs and they kill you if you touch them. Some eggs are special and give you more points, make you invincible, or let you kill snakes. My kids thought it was fun for about 20 mins. So as with everything else, there were some dumb things that I did with this game that kind of bummed me out and I stopped working on it. The dumbest thing was not using OpenGL. OpenGL makes things easier. It only runs on Windows, but could be really easily ported to Linux since it uses SDL. In fact, it probably compiles on Linux as-is, but I haven't tried it. Snakes game is missing sound and some spiffs to the status text. The goo-ball needs to change visual appearance based on what powerups he has. If anyone wants to add this stuff I'd be all for it! If you want the source just email me at this address and I'll send it to you.
  
  Windows Download