Andrew Church
About me
I'm a 31-year-old graduate of Carnegie
Mellon University's School of
Computer Science, currently working as an information systems
engineer-plus-video game localizer in Japan. In my spare time, I do
all sorts of things, including studying (and living!) Japanese, reading,
writing, playing
Go and occasionally
pinball, creating computer software,
playing computer games, and working on jigsaw puzzles, among other things.
I also dabble in music (analog, digital, and MIDI).
Those interested may view my resume (current as
of 24 February 2009).
Software projects
- Services for IRC Networks
- Services was one of my first major software development projects.
It was also one of the first open-source IRC service software
packages (possibly the first), 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 am currently helping with a redesign of the program.
- Tetrinet for Linux
- I developed a text-based Linux version of this multiplayer Tetris
game for Windows. I passed maintenance of the program onto Petr
Baudis (see Petr's Tetrinet page);
the last version I released
is still here as well.
- 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, and dev-games/pspsdk
packages.
- 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.
- Japanese character-code conversion routines
- C-language routines to convert between JIS, EUC-JP, and Shift-JIS
coding systems, including a printf() replacement. Unicode
is not currently supported.
- The Patch Pile
- A collection of patches I've made to various programs.
- Other miscellaneous programs
- tclock2, a simple transparent
analog clock for Xwindows environments
- tinflate, a memory-efficient
decompression library for the "deflate" (gzip) algorithm
(current version: 1.3, released on 2009/4/12)
- quickpng, a fast,
memory-efficient library for generating uncompressed PNG
images (current version: 1.2, released on 2008/2/8)
- bd-gen, a proof-of-concept
program for generating Blu-ray Disc or AVCHD file
structures
- The AMOS Intuition Extension (an Amiga programming
language extension), no longer maintained.
Binary and
source available.
Interests, hobbies, and 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.
- 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).
- Engrish
- Native speakers of English may find my Engrish section amusing.
("Engrish" refers to Japanese-mangled English, and plays on the
fact that Japanese speakers tend to confuse "L" and "R" since the
Japanese language has no such distinction. No offense to Japanese
readers intended, of course.)
- 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.
- Squirrel population model
- I created this model of a squirrel population as part of my high
school Computer Modeling and Simulation class, using the STELLA
modeling program on Macintosh computers. I haven't done much work
with computer modeling since then, but I leave the pages here in
case others find them useful.