Andrew Church
About me
I am an experienced software developer, currently residing in Japan.
Those interested may view my résumé
(current as of 2010/7/26). I am presently available for contract work;
please contact me at the address below if interested.
Software projects
- Services for IRC Networks
(no longer maintained)
- Services was one of my first major software development projects,
developed and maintained over a period of 14 years. It was also
one of the first open-source IRC service software packages, and
has spawned numerous derivatives adding different sets of
features.
- transcode
- Transcode is a video/audio transcoding suite for Unix-based systems.
I have contributed a library of optimized assembly-language
routines, and I also assist with general development.
- Unofficial Aquaria patch repository
- I've made a number of patches (including a PSP port and accompanying
Linux-based build tool)
for the PC game Aquaria,
whose engine was released as open source following the
Humble Indie Bundle
event. The patched source code can be obtained from the Mercurial
repository linked above. I also
wrote
a column on some of the technical issues involved in porting
Aquaria to the PSP.
- Gentoo Portage overlay for
PlayStation Portable unofficial SDK
- A Portage overlay for Gentoo Linux users allowing the unofficial
SDK for PSP development to be installed with "emerge pspsdk".
Includes the dev-games/psp-binutils,
dev-games/psp-gcc, dev-games/psp-gdb,
dev-games/psplink, dev-games/pspsdk, and
dev-games/pspgl packages, along with a number of packages
for builds of external libraries such as zlib. The
psplink, pspsdk, and pspgl packages
normally download their sources from the ps2dev.org
Subversion server, but can instead be installed from local tarballs
copied into /usr/portage/distfiles
(psplink-2460.tar.bz2,
pspsdk-2494.tar.bz2,
pspgl-2264.tar.bz2)
with USE=localsource. There is also an overlay list file
at http://achurch.org/portage-psp-layman.xml
for use with the layman tool. Last updated on 2010/6/20
(psp-gcc updated to version 4.4.4; psp-lua updated to 5.1.4-r1
with additional upstream and local patches).
- PSP game clock
- A simple game clock for use in games like chess or Go to track
each player's remaining time.
- PlayStation 2 Linux files (Japanese only)
- Various files useful for PS2 Linux development, including
instructions on installing Linux alongside game data (English
translation also provided) and a filesystem module for accessing
the PS2's native filesystem format.
- The Patch Pile
- A list of patches to various programs that I've made or collected.
- Other miscellaneous programs / library routines
- bd-gen, a proof-of-concept
program for authoring Blu-ray Disc or AVCHD file
structures (last updated on 2010/3/23).
- quickpng, a fast,
memory-efficient library for generating uncompressed PNG
images (current version: 1.3, released on 2010/3/26).
- tclock2, a simple transparent
analog clock for Xwindows environments.
- Tetrinet for Linux,
a text-based version of a multiplayer Tetris game for
Windows. I subsequently passed maintenance of the program
on to Petr Baudis (see
Petr's Tetrinet
page).
- tinflate, a memory-efficient
decompression library for the "deflate" (gzip) algorithm
(current version: 1.3a, released on 2010/3/26).
- XWaveN, a simple audio
file editor (current version: 72, released on 2010/5/27).
- (Old) Japanese character-code conversion
routines in C for converting between JIS, EUC-JP,
and Shift-JIS coding systems, including a printf()
replacement. Unicode is not supported.
- (Old) The AMOS Intuition Extension (an Amiga
programming language extension), unmaintained since March
1996. Binary and
source available.
- My computer problems notepad—not
a program, but a list of problems I've run into over the
years and the solutions/workarounds I found for them.
Linked here in case anyone else might find the information
useful.
Other things
- Dragonfire Internet Services: A Retrospective
- A retrospective on Dragonfire Internet Services, the web service
provider I ran as a university student from late 1995 through
early 1999.
- Gentoo Linux conversion notes
- A short document describing my experience converting an installed
Linux system to Gentoo Linux without reinstalling from scratch.
- Photo album
- Pictures from various trips I've taken. (Only Japanese text at
present.)
- Console RPG information
- Various information about console-based role-playing games that
I've collected (including my Final Fantasy
1 maps). Very dated.
- Things Seen in Japan
- I recently came into possession of a copy of this illustrated
depiction of life in Japan by English writer Clive Holland,
published in 1907. As the book's copyright has expired, I have
published it on the web (click the link above) for your reading
pleasure. The descriptions and photographs make for a fascinating
contrast with modern-day Japan.