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I am a professional software engineer, and over the years
I've worked on a few little software tools and toys,
usually to experiment with some specific single thing or the other.
A few are collected here,
click links for more information but be sure you allow javascript to run in your browser.
I'm happy to get feedback or questions; email me at
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The CheckOff Android App is the first Android app that I've developed. It is a very simple checklist manager, for to-do lists, grocery lists, etc. I have not yet put it on the Google Play Store, and I'm not sure if I will, but clicking the link will show you what a play store page would (sort of) look like, and give more details about the app.
The FontPicker Applet is a tool for web developers that allows easy experimentation with fonts and colors. I wrote this years ago to learn about Java applets, and you can experiment with the applet and download the source code. Tech marches on, and I've not tested this on a variety of browsers lately, so be warned.
The IP Address and Subnet Calculator is some javascript code that I wrote to compute some information about IP addresses and subnets when I was setting up some test networks, so this is also a tool for web developers.
The Character Codes tool displays the glyphs for each of the 256 8-bit character codes, with their hex and decimal values. You can also see the HTML encodings and you can build a string that you can copy and paste into an HTML document to display characters that might otherwise be hard to insert.
Color Cubes is another tool for web developers, though somewhat obsolete now. Click the link to view slices of the so-called browser-safe color cube. No one worries about browser-safe colors anymore, but it was a fun little javascript project.
GEDCOM
refers to the file format used for genealogical ("family tree") data.
Files in this format typically have a ".ged" suffix.
The most commonly used version of the format is 5.5, which is compatible with several earlier versions.
I wrote some Java code for reading a GEDCOM 5.x file as if it were an XML input source,
which allows XSL stylesheet transformations to be applied directly to the GEDCOM file data.
Specifically, I have an implementation of the
org.xml.sax.XMLReader
interface (part of a standard Java release) and an underlying
abstract class that provides a starting point for any implementation of XMLReader.
Source code, a jar file, and javadoc are available on request.
In early 2002, the LDS Church released an experimental XML GEDCOM version 6.0, which is very different than 5.5, and which does not seem ever to have caught on. I created and shared a GEDCOM 6.0 DTD based on the textual specification, which seems to have been the first, and for a long time the only, machine-readable DTD available, and seems to have been used by several people who were experimenting with GEDCOM 6.0. Remove the ".txt" suffix before using.
The latter half of my professional career centered around network security, specifically developing software that is used to configure, control, and monitor enterprise-level network firewalls.
An enterprise firewall is a special purpose computer that acts as an enforcement point where all data packets traveling between the internet and the organization's internal computers can be examined, to apply the organization's security policy to each packet and decide whether to allow, block, or modify the transmission. For example, one security policy rule might be a directive to block data going to China.
I've been part of the firewall management software design and development teams for a couple of firewalls, most recently a product acquired by McAfee, an Intel company. My involvement with firewall management began with the user interface design, but after the early versions of Control Center I became more involved with the "back end" (general software modules design, database, web services, and interactions with the firewall engine).
This 2011 datasheet, McAfee Firewall Management, which appears on the McAfee website, mentions some of their security enforcement management tools, including my team's product, McAfee Firewall Enterprise Control Center, see p. 3-4, and a few other products with which I had some small involvement (including McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator and the McAfee Firewall Enterprise Admin Console). Sorry, no free downloads here!
