Dawg's Projects

The following is a fairly comprehensive list of my projects that may be of some interest or use to some subset of the public.

Software

ZyX-Live-OS

I am currently working on several niche LiveOS 'strains' built with the VirOS toolset.

VirOS

VirOS is a system imaging toolset, with a primary focus on the generation of customized Linux(tm)-based LiveCDs.

Guitar-ZyX Master Control Program

The Guitar-ZyX Master Control Program is a Nintendo-DS(tm) based realtime user interface for the excellent rakarrack open source electric guitar effects simulator.

ZyX Rebootless LiveOS Installer

The ZyX Rebootless LiveOS Installer is currently available for download as part of the alpha release of the Guitar-ZyX LiveDVD/USB. Unlike traditional LiveCD installers such as those from Ubuntu and Fedora, which require you to reboot after installation, the ZyX Rebootless LiveOS Installer performs a way-cool devicemapper shell game to 'live migrate' the LiveCD filesystem to harddisk, without requiring the user to reboot as part of the installation process.

Snake3D

Snake3D is the first 3D(OpenGL) video game that I wrote between jobs in 2000.

smirfgen

SmirfGen stands for Small Multi-purpose Initial Ram Filesystem Generator. This tool is both an integral part of the VirOS LiveCD generator, and the qfakeroot program. It can also be used to easily generate arbitrary complete linux systems that run entirely from initrd. This could be used for instance, to easily create operating systems for small memory appliances and embedded systems. Note that smirfgen predates the similarly purposed dracut project. Currently (at least without massive configuration), dracut seems to produce an initramfs about 4x the size of what viros uses to boot the iso, so smirfgen is not yet obsolete for that task.

qfakeroot

Q-FakeRoot is a cool application of SmirfGen and also plays an integral role in VirOS. The name is an extension of the fakeroot tool from debian, which allows unpriveledged users to perform some actions that are normally only possible as root. E.g. creating cpio archives with device nodes. Q-FakeRoot extends this functionality vastly, by utilizing a smirfgen created virtual (qemu) appliance to safely perform actions as the root user. QFakeRoot significantly predates the (lib)guestfs toolkit which implemented the same basic architecture, and has become a better widely supported enterprise solution for the same problem space than qfakeroot.

K.A.B.L.U.I.

Kablui stands for Kick-Ass-Best-LiveOS-User-Interface, and is just a marketing acronym I thought up, and using to name the scripts that I've developed to initialize my workstation desktop preferences and applications. These scripts suit my needs currently, and I hope to extend them and make the useful for a wider audience in the future.

Dawg's Metaverse Tools

I've put quite a bit of work into the tools that generate Dawg's Metaverse from the source content. Basically I started out just doing 'view source' and wgets on Spock's Devsite. But from there I've created one big spaghetti mess of x(ht)ml, css, bash, perl, igal, webcpp, and more. It certainly would take the better part of year to make it into a nice package that others could easily use, and certainly there is no shortage of complex unwieldly content management systems out there, but... maybe a retirement project when my bones are too creaky to play disc golf...

Hardware

D2

The 'D2' is my second prototype electric guitar amplifier. No, it doesn't involve my own circuit board, or self-mined copper wiring. Really it's a carpentry project combined with some $100 bose computer speakers, my laptop, and a ton of great Free and Open Source Software.