Business Software
Vindicator
Inventory management software for the small and medium sized winery. Designed and developed with the King Ferry Winery, this application tracks and reports the movement of bottled wine in and out of bond, with tracking tools for wholesale and retail sales, sales room, tasting, testing, and breakage.
Originally written in the 4th DIMENSION environment for the Macintosh, this has been completely redesigned and reimplemented in REALbasic for the Macintosh, Windows and Linux platforms. The new application now has tracking featuers and reports for the new New York State Liquor Authority requirements for shipping to customers within the state.
Zerf
(limited beta release)
A forward-chaining rule based application for decision analysis.
This application was originally written as a pair of programs to facilitate a survey a campus for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Each of the offices, labs, restrooms, hallways, doorways, stairs, elevators, etc., were surveyed and measured in a variety of ways. For example, a door survey contained information about the width of the door, direction of the swing, type of handle, location of the handle, and proximity to nearby walls and doors.
The survey information was data entered in a large database which included analysis rules to determine if a item needed to change to bring it into compliance, what those changes were, along with time and material cost estimates. Summary reports from the system were prioritized lists of items to be fixed, collected together by facility, type of change, or other grouping established by the user.
While this new version has a similar rules-based "knowledge engine", it is much more flexible and can be applied to a broder range of problems. Rule sets can now include "metarules" with determine what kinds of rules will apply to a problem and in what order, and there are backward-chaining features as well.
Open Source Projects
Open source projects have been an excellent source of development tools, techniques, and software. CDB appreciates the work of these casts of thousands and participates in projects, giving back to the community where it can.
VTS
Available from SourceForge
The Visual Test Shell is a protocol analysis tool for BACnet, an international communications standard for Building Automation and Control Networks. Originally funded by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and now in the public domain, this application is being used all over the world and has been selected as the principle tool for testing compliance to the BACnet standard.
VTS was written in C++ for Microsoft Windows and uses the libpcap library to gather and generate network traffic.
BFR
Available from SourceForge
The BACnet Firwall Router is a networking tool for BACnet networks that provides network and application layer filtering. It is a C++ application written for a PC that boots from a Linux floppy disk, currently the Coyote Linux distribution from Vortech Consulting. This project was also funded by NIST.
BACpypes
Available from SourceForge
BACpypes is a BACnet protocol stack written in Python.
MinML++
A C++ port of the MinML package written in Java, a small and fast XML parser suitable for embedded systems. The configuration files for the BFR are XML documents, this library was originally used in the BFR and has been split out as its own project.
Games
CBD programmers have been developing multiplayer text and graphics games since 1983. While they have not been commercially viable, they have been a great source of inspiration for the types of machine/user interactivity that makes applications fun.
Games have always "pushed the limits" of both machine capabilties and a programmers capacity to manage the design and implementation of systems. Moving from mainframe time-sharing systems with hard wired "dumb terminals", to dial-up networking with home computers, then on to the Internet has presented stimulating opportunities and challenges.
The games have all been designed with player vs. player and cooperative team play.
Quarp
(alpha software)
Our first serious attempt at multi-user gaming, this project grew from experience with the Adventure and Zork text games and a Computer Assisted Instruction application called Instruct. The text games provided the inspiration for rich, persistent virtual worlds, and the CAI application contained an excellent natural language parser.
muRunner
(limited beta release)
A multiuser twist to the popular Lode Runner game.
muSnake
(limited beta release)
A multiuser twist to the popular Snake game.
muBoulderDash
(limited beta release)
A multiuser twist to the popular BoulderDash game.