Programming Projects
  Data-Driven Website

  
  Okay, maybe this is a no-brainer, but this is the kind of personal project I enjoy. My website began in HTML, but I wanted to make it data-driven so I could do cool things for my Wedding site, such as create my own guestbook functionality, and have updateable journals for my fiancee and I to fill.

I come from a web development background, so I knew all about scripting and SQL, but I just needed a (free) way to do it all locally. PHP came to the rescue, as did a PostgreSQL database backend. It all currently runs off a mostly-reliable dedicated hosting service (Red Hat Linux) that I share with my friends (boys and their toys), served by Apache with PHP. So far, I've got database tables for guestbooks and guestbook entries, journal and journal entries, photo pages and photos to attach to them, and of course generic scripts that can dynamically display all these things. I also have created private maintenance pages so I can easily add or update data as I see fit. "Creating" a new page of photos is as simple as filling in forms via my browser and making sure the appropriate .JPG files are in the Photos directory!
  SQL Analyzer

  
  Another side-effect of going to a data-driven site was that I quickly found I hated the command-line interface for PostgreSQL. Don't get me wrong, I love the functionality it gives you, towering over MySQL with subqueries and stored procedures and the like, but the nature of Unix-based software means you'll get a simple interface. Which meant, of course, I wanted to write my own.

I'd done GUI programming in Java for my senior project at MIT's Media Lab, so it really wasn't that hard. I based the functionality loosely off of Microsoft Query Analyzer, which allows you to open up multiple buffer windows where you can load SQL scripts, run them on different databases, run highlighted portions of scripts, save scripts, etc. Java plugs in very easily to databases using java.sql which I've used a lot at work, so it wasn't a problem writing the database interaction code. Plus it looked quite nice in OSX.

Needless to say, I hardly use this (*sob*). So many unfinished projects! Speaking of which....
  Robo Rally

  
  If you've played Wizards of the Coast's "Magic the Gathering", you may also know one of their lesser known games, Robo Rally. It's a board game where you're a robot running around on a factory floor maze, programming it with sequences of cards. We played it a lot at MIT during the wee hours of the night, so I figured I'd try to adapt it as a networked game in Java.

Unfortunately I've been the only one working on this for an ungodly long time (years and years and YEARS), and only recently I've found that other groups of open source programmers (Search on 'Robo Rally') have more complete versions out there already. But it's okay, because this is my project and I'll keep plugging away. I think my game should offer pretty graphics and if I'm lucky, a decent AI so you can play against the computer.