Personal Projects

scojones

Are any of you guys working on your own personal programming projects in your spare time? I know alot of people on here work programming jobs so the last thing you might want is to be coding in your spare time.

I'm currently maintaining an app called Zenjb. It's an application for Linux, written in C with GTK for the GUI which lets you transfer mp3s and files onto any Creative Zen mp3 player. It uses libnjb to do this, and also uses TagLib to read the id3 tags. It's just about finished, and when it is I'll be releasing it under the GPL but I'm not quite happy with the way it is multi-threaded at the moment and this needs to be improved before publicly humiliating myself.

I have several other projects which haven't really gotten off the ground because of my procrastination. Does anyone else find it hard to keep yourself motivated?

aidan_walsh

Thats based off your FYP, isn't it sjones? Remember reading about that and thinking it was pretty interesting.

Only working on my own FYP at the minute (JavaME Jabber client), though my work wiki has some ideas on it that I am trying to flesh out (simple backup, CDDB-based cover art server, and some more "radical" stuff) but I don't seem to be able to give them as much time as I would like.

scojones

Aye it is, although it's completely different to what it was this time last year. The FYP version was really 0.0.1, compared to the features I've added to it now. That Jabber client sounds interesting, I haven't really looked at the jabber protocol much. Is there any good APIs out there for Java that let you play around with Jabber, to make things easier for you?

On an off topic note, you'll see me around Tralee next year Aidan. Going back in September 2008 to do a research masters down there.

aidan_walsh

Writing it all with nothing more than a bunch of RFCs, Eclipse and an emulator Thankfully my web host has an option to run a server off that, so that was one less headache.

Not sure how much I'll be around Tralee myself next year, see how it goes this year first.

Khannie

I recently did my first non-work coding in about 5 years; A hack of x264 and mencoder to produce PSP compliant PMP-AVC video files on linux. The motivation was because I couldn't get properly sound synched vids with mplayer frameserving the x264 encoder.

You're right though...I used to love coding...now that I do it for a living it's hard to motivate myself to do it outside work.

daymobrew

I have BusSched for Palm/Pocket PC/Windows and a modified version of TrainSched (original is also on sourceforge).

I keep meaning to add a few small enhancements to TrainSched and to type out the entire DART timetable but procrastination is my soulmate. For BusSched I should type out all the Dublin Bus timetables, but that is so unappealing.

cornbb

I wrote a digital audio manipulation plugin (sort of a special effect) for my Masters thesis, been meaning to continue work on it but sadly have gotten nowhere in months. As you say, its really difficult to settle down to that in the evenings when you've been coding at work all day!

Q_Ball

All those projects sound really good! I'm just working on a website using GWT. Find it hard to find time more than anything else.

I could go and further my work on either of my fyp ("Universal Remote Control for a PDA" and "Modelling personality on artifical agents to create socially interactive AI"), but i'd have to go digging for the code.

Dr Pepper

I've been trying to get the ball rolling on a fairly basic sky-mapping astronomy project for about a month now and haven't written a single line (have just done some reading/research). Biggest problem is that I despise looking at computer screens when I go home in the evening!
If it wasn't for that curse, money, I'd stop working altogether and tinker about with all sorts of weird and wonderful things (and maybe start to enjoy programming again!)

rsynnott

Most of this stuff: http://blog.rsynnott.com/categories/projects/ in various stages of neglect, plus a FYP.

PixelTrawler

I work for a large international company where everything is branded - all our intranet and internet apps have to follow a certain branding doc.

I don't do much nixer work but when i do i enjoy it as it gives me a break from the look and feel i stare at all day long

Evil Phil

None at the moment. I've a couple of ideas I want to get started on but I just don't have the time

OMcGovern

I've a few personal projects in various states... but after 10 years of commercial programming, the enthusiasm fades !

1. Java 1.5 disassembler which writes just about all the class data to a database.
This is working and implemented as an Ant Task.
It's nice cos you can scan an entire set of Jar files after a build.
From here you could produce UML diagrams, class dependancy checks etc.
I'm half thinking of releasing it as open source... might wait until I convert it from a disassembler to a decompiler. I'm a bit unsure whether it's worth "competing" against other libraries like BCEL and ASM.

2. Gravitar game in Java.
Only just started last week, but I love that old "Asteroids with gravity" game.

3. GPS reader.
I bought a GPS "mouse" on eBay, and want to run a laptop in my car to track my position. Maybe integrate it to Google maps api, to show maps.

4. Sound recognition and sound synthesis applications.
I've a crude demo of both working in Java using Sphinx and FreeTTS libraries. You call out a phone number, and it reads it back. But it's like talking to a partially deaf person who can only half hear you at the moment !

5. Java WebCam.
I really want to write a little security app, to save a webcam photo say every second, to an AVI file. Or maybe something more intelligent like motion detection. If anyone's interested, here's some Java code I posted to access a webcam before.

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=570463&tstart=180

regards,
Owen