Right now, all of the programs you find here are written in C.
The source code for all programs on this site is under the GPL
This site was made using the Mozilla composer.

Stories about how and why I wrote the programs on this site

I.      Introduction
II.     Text Search Utility
III.    Portscan
IV.     html2html
V.      SQL Query Generator
VI.     what's next?



I. Intorduction

In the beginning of summer in 1998 I spent most of my time
on The Hamshack BBS playing the online games and downloading
files. One day when I was chatting with the SysOp I told him
that I wanted to learn Qbasic so I could write my own programs
and asked him if he could help me.

What he told me was that the C programming language is more
powerful than Qbasic and that it would be better to learn C
instead of Qbasic.

I already knew that whatever programming language I wanted to
learn I would have to teach myself because the high school I
would be attending in the fall had no computer programming
classes.  They didn't have any when I started in '98 and still
didn't have any when I graduated in '02 and I doubt they ever
will have any computer programming classes.  In the first week
of August I bought a book/compiler bundle: Teach Yourself C in
21 Days with Borland C/C++ 3.1.


II. Text Search Utility

For the next few years I was learning C, but I din't have any
ideas for any original programs.  On January 3rd, 2001 during 1st
hour English class an idea came to me.  If I remember correctly
we were supposed to be taking notes on a lecture. I wasn't taking
notes anyway, so I started planning my first big programming
project: Text Search Utility.  After I got home from school, I 
began working on Text Search Utility 0.0.1 and just minutes after
00:00 on January 4th, I had a program that sucessfully compiled. 
It didn't work like I hoped it would, but at least it compiled.
Eighteen days later on January 22nd, Text Search Utility 0.0.7 
was finished...and it worked!  I discontinued work after version 
0.3.1 because it did what I wanted it to do.


III. Portscan

Something else that I had an interest in was networking(I had 
first set up a network at my house in 1999).  I bought a book
called The Pocket Guide to TCP/IP Sockets C Version from 
Barnes and Noble on February 24th 2001.  I learned enough to
write a simple port scanning program for Linux.  I did not
continue to work on Portscan for long because I knew that 
hundreds, if not thousands of port scanning programs already 
existed.


IV. html2html

The idea for this program came to me during my 3rd year of high
school.  During "web page class" our teacher made a comment about
how you can't make a web page that displays HTML tags.  Something
you should know about this teacher is that the popular opinion
throughout the school was that his computer knowledge does not
exceed that of a two year old's computer knowledge.  After he made
this comment I took note to make a program that converts all
< in a file to &lt; and all > to &gt;.  The idea for this program
sat on paper for almost a year before I actually got bored and
wrote it.  I have no use for it, but I posted it on my website just
in case anyone else does and they want to download it.


V. SQL Query Generator (aka SQG)

By the spring of 2001 I had obtained a rather large collection of
music.  I wanted to have a database containing information about
the albums that I had rather than just a text file.  So went back
to the book store again.  This time I bought Teach Yourself SQL in
10 Minutes.  I started work on my biggest project to date, SQL
Query Generator, on July 12th 2001.  At the beginning of September
I was getting ready to realease the first public version of SQL
Query Generator.  But right after September 11th I decided to put 
it off in order to save news articles from websites and create
a small archive of news, websites, images, and movies from 
September 11th to September 18th.  The first public version of
SQL Query Generator was released on October 27th and announced on
freshmeat.net on October 28th 2001.  A little over one year later
I started making a database of my music collection using SQG 0.7.
When I finished making the database I wanted to put it on my
website.  The only problem was I didn't know how.  So I searched
Google a bit and read a PHP/MySQL tutorial.  With the help of that
tutorial and the documentation on php.net I was able to hack
together a web interface for my database.


VI. what's next?

I can't tell you what programs I will think of next because I
wont know what kind of new programs I'll write until
I write them.  Just check back here after I make a new
program and you can read the story about it then.