Projects
Cocktail – http://cocktail.fbartho.com/
This was a project I undertook with @mulka in January 2010. The purpose was to be a more dynamic replacement for IRC. We thought that it might be possible to produce an environment that would give people the ability to mingle among themselves while being potentially far removed from the actual location of a conversation. The thought was that all the 3D aspects of such existing virtual conferencing software was actually hampering the conversations.
We worked to create an adhoc chatroom enviroment where people would go to a "conference hall" and would see everyone as they milled around. As people moved from conversation to conversation, a dot representing them would visually move through the crowds. Each conversation would be ephemeral. The contents would only exist for each participant if they were present when the content was sent. Each participant to a conversation would get a chance to censor themselves if they were in the middle of a statement as a newcomer arrived to the conversation.
One goal was to try to make these conversations more dynamically on-topic. We hoped to introduce mechanisms to help conversations dynamically split when a secondary topic was raised. As people joined and left these more topical conversations, their relative size and dynamism would be visually represented by some mechanism, like natural diffusion where the better the conversation, the closer to the center of the screen it would be, while the weaker the conversation, the further to the edges of the room they would be. Each time these conversations split naturally, all non-participants would be shed naturally, and so afk users would come back to find that they weren't able to just lurk and read everything at their leisure.
After a few weeks work, we had some interesting UI. People could join our room and become a part of a specific conversation. Many people could dynamically enter and exit the individual conversations, and all of this was a nifty Cappuccino based client side user interface. Unfortunately the project has been put on hold as @mulka and I went our separate ways. It was a fun proof of concept and taught us many lessons.
garmin – http://garmin.fbartho.com/
This is a little bookmarklet I wrote back in 2008. If you have a garmin gps device, if you go to a googlemaps page and click the bookmarklet, you will get the center of the map as a waypoint on your Garmin.
UMSolar – http://solar.fbartho.com/
This is where some code for the University of Michigan Solar Car team used to live. The original googlemaps tracker for the 2007 race was hosted here
Travian - http://travian.fbartho.com/
This is some proof of concept code I messed around with a while back that merged a bunch of greasemonkey stuff together. The specific purpose was to add clientside features to a game Travian, however actually using this code is a violation of the terms of service of the game, and since they let users pay for some of these extra features, you shouldn't use this.