Projects

Contents

Here are some projects I have thought of, am working on, or have worked on. It's up-to-date, plus or minus 4 years.

Technological

KyleWiki3: This probably my largest project I have ever worked on. I have been the sole developer for the last two years, since August of 2005. It is a wiki system written in PHP and utilizing MySQL that can be completely understood by a single person (which was a necessity for obvious reasons such as developer count). It features user privileges, extendibility for rendering such as music and math markup, and much more.
KyleCards: This is going to be a system that interfaces with Moodle, the open source course management web application, that gives students the ability to electronically manage the creation of a research paper with things such as notecard making and information outlining. I'm still in the stages where I'm settling on user and application interfaces.
Infinite Whiteboard: I was once thinking of having a new form of wiki, a whiteboard that was basically infinitely zoomable and could have many people edit it at the same time.

DistMandel: I've always thought the Mandelbrot Set was a cool fractal, and I liked the concept of distributed computation, so I thought it would be a fun project to merge the ideas together.

Z80 Computer: I attempted to build a computer based on the old ZiLOG Z80 processor. I wired all of the chips together on a breadboard, and even got some simple programs to run. But, I think I bumped some wires somewhere, and the system now does not start up.
Theremin: I plan on building a theremin, the first electrical musical instrument from the 1920s. It is most likely the only instrument that is played without touch. The most recognizable use of the theremin is in the theme for the old Star Trek that almost sounds like a human voice.
Static Electricity: I have always been fascinated by static electricity (which really should be called high voltage electricity, but by old nomenclature, we are stuck with calling it that). There are many cool experiments involving things like Leyden jars and negative ion generators.

CARDIAC: The CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation was a small device by Bell Labs for teaching students about the internals of how a computer works. Lacking any source for obtaining one online, I resorted to reproducing it based on the few pictures I could find.
Marble Computer: I've made a few very simple computers that operate by dropping marbles. Usually my experiments revolve around making a computer that can play the game nim. I've also developed some physics relating marbles to electricity.
Paper Models: A very inexpensive hobby is making models out of paper. It's very fun and requires very few tools.

Compositions: Over the past few years I have been learning about music composition and have written a few pieces.
String Quartet No. 1 in A minor: I wrote a string quartet intermittently between November 2006 and June 2007 after some study of music theory. It was a lot of fun then getting people together to play it to then hear my work.
The Vinyl Diary: A modern musical: I made the website for this musical (funny, it kind of looks like this one), and I am helping with arranging the music.
The Great Book Chase: My brother asked me to write the soundtrack for the movie he was writing.

The Great Muffin Stories: My siblings and I thought it would be funny to have a competition to each write a short story that somehow related to muffins.
The Wrath of Tuesday: We also had a similar competition, but this time we had to somehow incorporate chickens.
The Belgian Carrots: On the Christmas of 2008, I received a working Underwood typewriter, and this was one of the first things which flowed from my fingers.
The Flargipades: Using the typewriter, my brother and I had a comedic correspondence concerning a fictional Uncle Flargus of ill repute.

KyleNomic: A game which had rules allowing for the changing of the rules. This was played the summer of 2007.

Lab reports: Miscellaneous laboratory reports from chemistry and physics classes.
Research papers: Research papers from the last few years.
Portfolio: The historical portfolio project from my 10th grade history class. It's in the format of a magazine in nearly 30 pages.
A Non-Trivial Group-Theoretic Algebraic Manipulation Engine Toolkit Thing: A final project which I worked on for the course 6.945 at MIT ("Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Systems"). It's basically a system which lets one interact with groups in a somewhat general manner to the point a 2x2x2 Rubik's cube may be solved. There's also source code in Scheme.