Projects

Superblock (1999 - present)
Superblock is a company that I founded in 1999 as Superblock Information Systems. It was reformulated as Superblock, LLC in 2006. I currently offer custom software development, web hosting, and other technology services under the Superblock name.

  • Corduroy (2006 - present)
    Corduroy is a web-based billing system for small businesses. I created it to handle the invoicing for Superblock after I got fed up using QuickBooks. After adding things like banking integration for downloading transactions, online invoice payment through PayPal and other merchants, and project management, I turned it into a software-as-a-service and began hosting it for other companies.

  • den.im (2011 - present)
    den.im is an integrated reader for things like RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, and Facebook streams. It is currently in development and will be launching in 2012.

  • Velvet (2005 - present)
    Velvet is a hosted software solution for executive recruiting firms that handles project, contact, and company management and reporting. It was created as a hosted software-as-a-service through a partnership with Prospect City. Superblock does hosting, backend support, and custom development for the service in addition to creating private, customized versions of Velvet for new customers.

Open Source Projects
I've been involved in open source software since the mid-1990s. I started with Slackware Linux and switched to OpenBSD in 1998. I've contributed bug fixes and feature enhancements to a number of open source projects, as well as released a lot of my own code.

  • OpenBSD (2001 - present)
    I have been an OpenBSD developer (jcs@) since 2001. I've mostly concentrated on ports and packages that pertained to the use of OpenBSD in my professional work.

    I wrote the i386/amd64 NVRAM driver in 2004 to support tpb on various ThinkPad laptops.

    I wrote tftp-proxy for pf in 2005 while working at DLS to support its new OpenBSD-based PBX and firewall products.

    I wrote the acpithinkpad ACPI driver in 2008 to support knobs and buttons on newer ThinkPads.

  • halfmoon (2010 - present)
    halfmoon is a small MVC framework for PHP that does things like Ruby on Rails wherever possible. I started writing it in 2010 after doing Rails for a number of years and needing to use PHP for a small web project. I've since used it for other web projects where setting up Rails hosting for would have been more of a hassle than it was worth. It's currently powering goingtorain, HN Trades, and a few other private sites.

  • Blandroid (2011 - present)
    Blandroid is an Android ROM focusing on stability.

  • iTunes Remote Control (2010 - present)
    My fork of iTRC contains bug fixes and enhancements like previous- and next-album buttons.

  • Adium PipeEvent Plugin (2010)
    PipeEvent is a plugin for Adium that can be used to pipe event information to an external script.

  • vmwh (2010)
    vmwh is a userland helper for running OpenBSD under VMWare. It currently supports automatic clipboard synchronization.

  • pixelclock (2005)
    pixelclock is a small pixel-based clock for X11.

  • All of my other git repositories can be found on github.

Websites

  • jcs.org (1999 - present)
    My personal website, in operation since 1999. It started out as a Perl CGI-driven site, then rewritten in PHP various times, and finally in Ruby on Rails. It aggregates and normalizes my data from various websites that I use, like Flickr and Twitter, and then mashes it all together as one big, continuous stream of data. It currently has a MySQL database backend (though it uses Rails' caching mechanisms to avoid touching the database), uses 27 Ruby classes, and runs on two Mongrel servers proxied through Apache.

  • Domain and SSL Certificate Expiration Calendar (2011 - present)
    A free site that lets one list domain names which will be looked up through whois and/or queried through SSL and their domain and SSL certificate expiration dates added to an iCalendar. For easy and automatic monitoring of domain name and SSL certificate expiration and renewal dates.

  • HN Trades (2010 - present)
    HN Trades is a site for Hacker News users to trade domain names, books, and other stuff. It was created in about 5 hours after seeing yet-another thread on HN about unused domain names.

  • Fitbit Low Battery Notifier (2011 - present)
    This site was built to use the recently released Fitbit API to monitor the battery level of each user's Fitbit tracker and notify them by e-mail when the battery is low. It is currently being used by over 10,000 Fitbit users.

  • goingtorain.com (2008 - present)
    This single-serving website was created in May of 2008 after being fed up trying to use weather sites like weather.com. All I cared about was whether it was going to rain that day, so I created this simple site to automatically lookup your city/state by geolocating your IP address, check the weather for that city, then parse the result and tell you in a one-word answer "yes" or "no", whether it was going to rain.

    When it was initially released, it made the front page of Hacker News, Delicious, and Mashable.

    In July 2009, some Chinese developers released a cheap-looking iPhone app that cost 99 cents and would just load goingtorain.com and show the answer. I blocked the app from accessing the site and it has since been removed from the App Store.

    In March 2011, an API was created for integration into the DuckDuckGo search engine's zero-click information for "is it going to rain" and related searches.

  • American Volkswagen R32 Registry (2005 - present)
    This site is a registry for MKIV Volkswagen R32 owners to list their cars, find other local owners, and view R32s for sale.

  • Metra Train Schedules for iPhone and Android (metra.jcs.org) (2009 - 2012)
    Metra spent part of $3.9M on a new website in 2009 that still had no mobile browser support, so I created this website, optimized for the iPhone and Android, to display train schedule and delay information. Metra later added a basic mobile interface to their site, though its interface is quite clumsy. The maintenance required to manually update the schedules from Metra's PDFs, as well as the availability of offline iPhone and Android applications and the Google Transit mobile site prompted this site to be shut down in early 2012.

  • rt.fm (2000 - 2009)
    I operated the rt.fm second-level OpenBSD FTP, Web, AnonCVS, and CVSup mirror hosted at DLS. I finally took it out of service due to hardware problems and sold the domain name.