code

Technical work

Much of my professional work has been in database-driven website design, development, and maintenance, with a focus on web standards, new technologies, and sustainable practices. I particularly enjoy leveraging technology for education and education administration. Here is some of my recent technical work.

• The Academic Approach
  TeX, perl
  The Academic Approach is a tutoring and test preparation company where I worked on various TeX-related projects. I led the development of curriculum typesetting applications for the online SAT math course product. My application parses the LaTeX source and automatically exports lessons and exercises into transparent PNG images, resulting in a beautiful, interactive course. The same LaTeX source can also be typeset for print.
  

  
• University of Chicago Division of the Humanities
  perl, XHTML
  The new website of the University of Chicago's Division of the Humanities. The design was developed by the talented folk at Chicago's own Studio Blue. The content was written by a team of people in the Division on a Confluence wiki. I then wrote scripts in perl which automatically extracted the Confluence content and plugged them into the templates, generating the entire website in two seconds.
  

  
• Concordia Language Villages' viper
  PHP, MySQL, XHTML/CSS
  viper, an online student information system for Concordia Language Villages, specializing in the management and creation of student session summaries. Written in PHP with a MySQL database, the system features a robust permissions system, and PDF output for final mailings, along with email distribution of summaries.
  

  
• Kanji alive
  XHTML/CSS, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript (AJAX), QuickTime, Flash
  Kanji alive, "a searchable, web-based tool to help beginning and intermediate level Japanese language learners read and write kanji. It is freely available, cross-platform, and does not require any Japanese fonts." The system is currently in an interactive QuickTime format, served by a PHP/MySQL backend. I am now working on a new AJAX front-end, to be launched later in 2008.
• Autolexical Resources page
  XHTML/CSS, PHP, BibTeX
  I am also currently working on a new resource page for Autolexical Syntax, a theory of grammar introduced by Jerry Sadock, to be hosted at the Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics at the University of Chicago page. The page will host an extensive bibliography of papers written in the framework with downloadable PDFs, maintained through BibTeX.

Just for fun

If you actively use these plugins or applications, please consider donating to mitcho (Michael Erlewine).

• The Children of America
  Concept, XHTML/CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL
  Inspired by Barack Obama's landmark address on race in America, this website uses mootools and the Flickr API to serve up a random American child. "Look at their faces and then decide."
  Visit the page: www.thechildrenofamerica.com.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
  PHP, WordPress
  Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches, limited by a certain relatedness threshold. Like the tried and true Related Posts plugins—just better!
  For more information, visit my YARPP page.
• WordPress Plugin Downloads Pepper for Mint
  PHP, Mint
  This "Pepper" displays WordPress plugin download stats (from wordpress.org/extend) in Mint, the wonderful web site analytics application.
  For more information and to download, visit WordPress Downloads in the Peppermill.

  
  
• WP-Smartdate
  PHP, WordPress
  WP-Smartdate is a WordPress plugin which looks for relative date expressions in your blog posts, such as “tomorrow,” “this coming Monday,” “last Friday,” and adds the date reference (like “2007-11-26”) as a machine-readable microformat. For more information, please read Introducting Smartdate on my blog.
  Extended description on Wordpress.org.

  WP-Smartdate 0.1
  4 kb - zip
• Mailplane Japanese localization
  Localization
  Mailplane is an upcoming standalone interface to Gmail, bringing better Mac OS X integration to the web-based application. I am in charge of its Japanese localization.

Academic

• Extensible Authorship Identification
  Extensible Authorship Identification (EAI) is a modular system for authorship identification: given two authors and training corpora of their writing, identifying which of the authors most likely wrote a third text. The unique algorithm first identifies in what ways the two known authors diverge and stresses those tests in computing the new text's authorship index. This was my final project for CMSC 35100, Natural Language Processing, written together with Jesse Farmer. It is written in Python and Perl and requires Numerical Python and NLTK Lite.

  Extensible Authorship Identification, the technical report
  122 kb - pdf

  Extensible Authorship Identification source code
  1.31 mb - zip

Whether it's work or play, I'm always on my computer (Apple MacBook Pro). If you're interested in seeing what applications and tools I use, check out my iusethis page.

Resume and contact

I am available for hire for technical work (or TeXnical work). I am most comfortable in perl, PHP, SQL, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and LaTeX. I also do WordPress customization. Feel free to view my full resume: