Computer hacking

Retro MS-DOS game programming

These games were solo-written during high school, for ~100 MHz Pentium processors, back when one had to write libraries for graphics, fonts, mouse, and keyboard from scratch — Interrupt 15/4F! That was so long ago that modern browsers can now emulate the environment in their JavaScript engine. Click any of the links below to reach a playable in-browser game.

• Alien Attack I (June 1997), inspired by Asteroids.
• Alien Attack II (October 1997), inspired by Scorched Earth.
• Alien Attack III (November 1997), inspired by getting extra credit for Social Studies.
• Alien Attack IV (June 1998), inspired by Raptor. This was the last, and the most sophisticated, of the games written in high school. The browsable source code shows that the author still had much to learn about software engineering. The game website shows that the author's web design tastes were even more atrocious.

Programming competitions

• USACO provided a great introduction to algorithmic thinking in high school.
• For early-2000's college students, TopCoder was a fun weekly activity.
• The 2004 Caltech ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest team went on to be fairly active in the startup scene.

Windows XP

• (2006) Battery Meter (moved to its own page)

  Synopsis: Free translucent battery meter that floats in a corner of the screen, providing an unobtrusive but easy-to-read graphical battery indicator, as well as an estimate of the time remaining. This was written as a replacement to the standard Windows XP battery meter, which has two major shortcomings: it does not display the time estimate unless the mouse cursor is placed above the system tray icon in the taskbar, and furthermore, that icon has too few states - it looks exactly the same whether the battery status is 30% or 2%.

Quantitative stock trading

• (2004-2009) Portfolio tracker: C++ source.

  This program reads a list of Buy/Sell/Dividend/etc transactions from a file called Transactions.txt, which should be placed in the same directory as the executable. The syntax of this file is illustrated by the following sample file (note: it is a fictitious portfolio, and will not generate the graph below!).
  

  The program should be called as follows:

     assemble daily-summary.tex

  It will automatically download the required stock/fund quotes from Yahoo, and create the following:

  • The LaTeX file daily-summary.tex, which compiles to PDF (sample page).
  • a human-readable data file of daily and cumulative returns (sample).
  • a Gnuplot script named plot.scr, which can be run to produce the following 3 charts for on-screen viewing and PNG output:
  • A standard cumulative return chart (sample).
  • Another chart with the same performance curves, but anchored to 0 at the right side instead of the left (sample).
  • A chart showing the portfolio's relative gain against the S&P 500 over time.

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