Surfing in Kansas

Eric Holscher

Fredericksburg, Va 22401
eric@ericholscher.com

Objective: Gain experience in a computer related field, and also further my knowledge of most things computer related

Summary: I am a current college student who is interested in Computer Science. I taught myself Perl and MySQL while in high school, and have dabbled in other languages such as Lisp, Ruby, Java, MIPS Assembly, and C(++). I run my own network of Linux servers in my home (currently 4) and have done a good deal of web programming with Perl and MySQL.



Skills:

References: Available upon request.

Projects: I have embarked on a number of projects on my own time out of pure interest in technology, and will summarize them here.

Web-based IRC client ( Demo View | Code ) This is a multi-threaded Perl Script that connects to multiple servers, and has a built-in basic TCP server. The IRC client logs all messages to a MySQL database and is controlled with a small CGI script that sends commands to the TCP server. This allows for two-way communication, and logging in the database.

Web-based C++ Compiler (Link) This was an Individual Study I completed at Mary Washington, which allows a user to upload, edit, and compile C++ code. Designed for use in a lab environment where Intro students wouldn't need a compiler to do their work. It incorporated a MySQL database of error messages and common causes to help the student debug their program without instructor intervention.

Lyrics locater (Screenshot | Web based version) This program was my first attempt at GUI programming, using perl and the GTK+ toolkit in linux. It provides a GUI interface for lyrics for the currently playing song in XMMS (a linux music player). It gets the current song information from an XMMS plugin (I didn't write), and then queries google for the lyrics, using a parsing algorithm to find the actual lyrics. It then displays them in a window with basic lyric management controls. It automatically caches lyrics in a MySQL database for faster look up, and allows users to update/keep/delete lyrics, and rename ID3 tags. This project was later updated to include a web-based version that uses some Ajax and queries the same database as the desktop app, allowing the lyrics to be synchronized.

AJAX File Browser (Link) This was a class project that I worked on with two other students. I wrote the preliminary front-end code, and did all of the back-end work. The back-end work consisted of connecting to my schools LDAP server for authentication, and a lot of file-system work. I helped with the front-end AJAX code as well, however that was not all of my work. We implemented drag and drop and a lot of other functionality using Prototype and Scriptaculous.

Fredericksburg Events Calendar ( Offsite Link ) This was done for my senior year honors project. It is an events calendar for my school and the surrounding community. It is done in Django and Python, and was my first foray into those languages. It is still a work in progress, but it is coming along nicely.