Projects
My portfolio of projects, most of which are ongoing in various amounts.
- WhereIsBot
- AutomationWiki
- MacMini Robot
- IPMenulet
- IndigoWeb
- IndigoWidget
- DashSaver
- iTunesWeb
- SpyTrack
- Geolocation
- Open-SESSAME
- VerdantConcepts - website a blog on sustainable design, green roofs, and environmental research
- Forest Image Registry Project
- GreenerMaps - locates environmental news stories around the world - embedding GoogleMaps into Blogger
- FoFRedux - web-based RSS Aggregator
- Where I had my first kiss - fun site and demonstration of MySociety community-web portal code
- Detroit Curling Club - community portal for local sports club
At the 2005 ADHOC/MacHack Programming Conference I teamed up with George Storm and his bTop board creation, a MacMini robot. George had put together an impressively small, and dense, robot constructed of aluminum and various electronics, all built around an Apple MacMini computer as the brain.
IPMenulet is a small demonstration program meant as a tutorial for learning how to write a Mac OS X menulet, or status item. A menulet is a small icon/text/display that sits in your system menu bar. The clock, spotlight, audio volume, menu meters, etc. are all examples of menulets.
IPMenulet is written in Cocoa, and actually includes several iterations of a menulet:
- Simple text
- icon
- menu
- automatic timer

Look for the article in an upcoming MacTech.
- IPMenulet Source (95 Kb, zip)
IndigoWeb is a PHP front-end to controlling the Indigo Home Automation software.
To install, you need to configure PHP to run on your system (instructions). Then put this folder in your /Library/Webserver/Documents folder and browse to http://localhost/IndigoWeb/index.php.
iTunesWeb is a simple, web-browser control for iTunes running locally on an Apple Mac.
It can be used to control your iTunes while sitting at your computer, at a computer in another room, or even over your handheld (an iPaq 1945 in my case).
To install, you need to configure PHP to run on your system (link forthcoming). Then put this folder in your /Library/Webserver/Documents folder and browse to http://localhost/iTunesWeb/itunes.php.
SpyTrack originally started as a means to see who was online where in the world in the SpyMac
community. This is completed through geolocation, determining a user’s geographical location (latitude & longitude) by the
IP address they are connected to. Give it a try here. Since then, I have grown it to provide a graphical display of any information. For example:
- Geographic location of photographs
- Location of Instant Messaging buddies, online community, etc.
- Location of shops, stores, restaurants, sites, etc.
All with one interface. A sample screenshot of the current work in progress:
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Read my article: Geolocation by IP-Address, published in the Linux Journal for more information on this project.
Geolocation Menulet
Based on my work and demonstration of Geolocation by IP-Address, I’ve made a small menulet for Mac OS X that sits in your status bar and displays the determined geographic location of your computer based on its IP-Address. This is a work in progress (want to add more features), but it’s a good demo to start.
Latest Binary
use the following address: http://highearthorbit.com/projects/spytrackserver/geolocation.php
The Open-Source, Extensible Spacecraft Simulation And Modeling Environment (Open-SESSAME) is a collection of libraries, toolkits, and extension points that provide a framework for creating and analyzing spacecraft models of varying complexity. The framework is open-source, so users can examine and modify the source code without worrying about copyrights or proprietary information. The collection of tools also includes other open-source projects that already include a broad user support base. The framework is extensible by allowing users the ability to provide added functionality and models and propagate these extensions back to the user community through a publicly hosted repository.
Open-SESSAME Project Homepage


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