Version 41 of Neil Madden

Updated 2005-01-09 20:42:50 by NEM

Email: nem AT cs.nott.ac.uk

I am a PhD student (researching Cognitive Modelling) at the University of Nottingham[L1 ] in the UK. 'Been a Tcl user for quite a long time (since 1999 when I worked for a year at IBM's Hursley development labs[L2 ]. Paul Duffin was using Tcl a lot there, and developing Feather). I am interested in almost anything which can be done with Tcl, but in particular:

  • Non-deterministic search : A little play with automatic backtracking.
  • A vision for Tcl 9: I am working on an essay with some ideas for Tcl 9. [L3 ]. As everyone and their cat seems to be flooding the wiki with ideas at the moment, I thought I'd keep my contribution tucked away on my own site while it bakes. Feedback appreciated.
  • Games: I wrote TkPool (with a little help from dkf).
  • SDL: I started work on a binding to this media library, but I haven't finished it yet, and lost the code a while ago. Setok has a binding called libOIL, described at Oil, which is very good.
  • Artificial Intelligence: This is related to my PhD research. I am currently working on a forward-chaining production system (rule-interpreter) library, suitable for use in games. It will naturally come with a Tcl binding when finished.
  • Web: I'm contemplating writing an application server/content management system in Tcl. There are some old ideas at StarSite. I've been corresponding with Colin McCormack about this. He has some very good ideas - and code to back it up! This is a long-term goal, which must come second to my PhD work, so don't expect anything useful to come of it... yet. I'm considering naming the CMS ArTcl, so please don't use that name for anything, as I'm rather proud of it!

OK, various pages I've created (for a complete list, look for my name, or NEM):

All contributions/code that I place in this wiki are public domain. You can do with them as you will, but I do not provide any warranties or guarantees of any kind.

My personal site is at http://mod3.net/~nem/cgi-bin/xml.cgi/ currently, until I can be bothered to transfer my domain name (tallniel.co.uk) over. Thanks to jyl for letting me come in on mod3.net - it's a great server. My website runs on a little Tcl/tDOM CGI script I knocked up. It uses XML document files and XSLT stylesheets to produce the output (XHTML 1 Strict + CSS for styling).

You can find my university web-pages (there's not much there that isn't on my personal site), at http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~nem/ . You can email me at nem AT cs.nott.ac.uk if you wish.

Things I am vaguely proud of (aaahhh!):

Cameron Laird mentioned me in [L4 ]. What he describes there is a project I was working on. I gave up on it, but I am gradually resurrecting the idea (see above).

I contributed the first socket code to the TclJava project. I (or someone) still need to polish up bits of this and get async sockets supported, but it's mostly there (with the exception of fileevent as it's not done in Jacl yet). Note: I don't use Jacl much these days, so I don't know what the current status of this is. I haven't had any complaints/abuse/lawsuits so I gather that either my code works fine (possibly, I think Mo polished it up a bit) or nobody uses sockets in Jacl.

Other bits and bobs (mostly older stuff)

I once worked on a couple of extensions for Jacl/TclJava - one called Hyde which was going to be an OO-system for Jacl (well, everyone writes one at some point :), and another called JFeather which was going to be an implementation of Feather for Jacl. I never finished either. Hyde is now the name of a Critcl clone for Jacl (not written by me, but somebody with the same sense of humour - Jacl and Hyde). JFeather got ridiculously complicated, and I think I concluded that it couldn't be done for some technical reason (I think it would require writing raw Java bytecode, which is not something I ever want to do).

I wrote a simple .sig file for when I was posting on USENET, which was Tcl code using tkhtml to grab this wiki page and render it. It attracted some attention, and lives at Simple TkHTML Web Page Displayer. I worked up the code into a full package, imaginatively title TkBrowser. It has a sourceforge page at [L5 ]. You might be able to reuse some of the code, but there are better ways. I am contemplating writing a simple XML/CSS renderer, which would take an XML file (such as an XHTML document) and a CSS stylesheet and attempt to primitively render it into a Tk text widget. It wouldn't be even CSS1 compliant, but perhaps do enough to be useful. With default stylesheets and an accepting parser (such as tDOM's -html parsing mode), it might even make a passable web browser... But these are just dreams at present. I particularly want this to create something along similar lines to XMLMind editor [L6 ], which I use at the moment. It's quite good, but irritates me in some ways, and I've always thought it looked like a fun project.

My first attempt at a Tcl package using the C-API was a little Tcl CD Audio Package for UNIX. A simple extension to allow Tcl scripts to play audio CDs using the CD-ROM drive. I have lost the code for this. It worked, but wasn't great. SDL can play audio CDs.

I've done a little experimenting with Haskell (a great language). Have a look at Interfacing Tcl with Haskell for my conclusions.

Simple XML report writer - I'm quite pleased with this nifty little script which I used for creating reports for Uni. Convert to EPS, run through distill and you have a PDF (albeit with one very long page...:-). (See above for my ideas on where to take this..)

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