Crazy Caltech projects

CyberDJ (1998)

My house ran a small "pirate" FM radio station, which fell into disuse when people didn't have time to DJ.

I automated the station, turning it into a web-enabled campus-wide jukebox. Listeners could request, rate, and discuss songs online.

And during live shows, DJs could interact with listeners through the webpage.

CyberDJ was a custom webserver, written from scratch. This was 1998, child. We didn't have "web apps" back then.

Ditch Day (1999)

A small part of our stack was this communication terminal with a movie-like "Gratuitous User Interface".

It featured gratuitous spinning and flying windows, gratuitous bar graph indicators, gratuitous everything. The terminal windows swam around nauseatingly as you typed.

CokeOS (1998-1999)

A well-designed embedded operating system. It ran on the 2-MHz processor powering my coke machine (see electronics section).

The intent was to make it easy for anyone to write software to run on the coke machine.