Eric Haines' homepage

Just some minor personal links. You could visit my professional activities page instead. Or waste time looking over my del.icio.us links. Various public photo albums of mine are here. Older ones here.

Things I Like

Here's a list of books I like. Use my link to Amazon and earn me a vast personal fortune.

Minecraft and Mineways

Minecraft is awesome, I spent way too much time on the private Vokselia server building stuff, exploring the rules, and making videos. The culmination: Mineways, a free open-source program to help people make 3D prints of their game models.

I also have a list of games I like.

Letterboxes

Our Unicycle letterbox.

Our King Bob Willis letterbox.

Dancing Monkeys

One old hobby was working on the Dancing Monkeys program that automatically generates steps for a free Dance Dance Revolution simulator for the PC (called StepMania). Oddly enough, this is one of the most popular non-commercial thing I've worked on, as it gets about 50 downloads a day (16,000 a year). That said, all I can claim is improving usability and cleaning up a number of bugs, I haven't had time to mess with the internals themselves yet.

If monket's down, you can download the Dancing Monkeys & Gorilla program itself from here. You can also download free step files for 18 songs from the Diesel:U:Music 2006 competition. Just unzip the file into your ~StepMania\Songs directory. All step files were created by Dancing Monkeys; my favorite is group_inou's "BPA". These tracks are free to redistribute and remix, for noncommercial use, under the Creative Commons license. If the download link does not work for you, try using Internet Explorer (I had problems using Firefox). An alternate download site is from RapidShare, though they have queues, etc. Enjoy!

Nature Identification Programs

I've made an online wildflower identification program, bird ID program, and a tree ID program. A cool feature I've added to each is that you can generate a random quiz of your abilities: try it for wildflowers, birds, or trees.

Battlefield 1942 and 2 and Star Wars Battlefront

A past obsession: Battlefield 1942. Then I briefly enjoyed Star Wars Battlefront. Then my semi-addiction was Battlefield 2. Now I just read about computer games, not having time to play them (well, except for Left4Dead 2 and Borderlands).

Best Perl Script Ever!

One last resource, for Perl users only: Daily comics and talk shows script (right-click to download) - Andrew Glassner developed this perl script, Jeff Goldsmith and I added some comics to it (well, Jeff added every United Media comic there is). Read the file, edit the top, comment out the comics you don't want, run it. It'll produce an HTML file that, when viewed, will give you today's comics and what's on tonight's talk shows. Beats hunting this stuff down every day. Me, I have it run as a scheduled task each morning. Here's a sample page - it's ancient, so no guarantees that the comics will still be there (the online archives tend to hold a month of material), but it'll give you a sense of what this script is about.

Eric Haines / erich@acm.org

Last change: May 21, 2014