My name is Eric Jordan. My mini-bio: I am an ex-SAT tutor turned trading strategy consultant trained in mathematical physics with a passion for game programming that also does a bit of web development on the side. I graduated a couple years ago from college. You can always get in touch with me through my contact form.
I considered doing this site as a blog, and I actually started writing several blogs on each of the topics that I love. But the realities of life don't allow me to commit to a daily blog entry on each of these topics, and frankly, I didn't like feeling the guilt of missing a day (or more realistically, a week or month) of entries, so I've decided to run with the retro pre-blog era format, where I just put up new crap as I've finished it. Nevertheless, feel free to wheedle me on the contact page if you think I've left a topic you're interested in hanging for too long.
Couldn't resist a plug for my favorite mini-IDE of late, the open source Processing package. It's basically an IDE that you write Java code in that makes all sorts of graphical things easy to do - a lot of artist/programmers use it because it simplifies graphical Java. For instance, rather than setting up your own difficult frame-rate stabilization code, you just write frameRate(30) and provide a draw() function, and Processing calls draw() 30 times per second as long as your processor can handle it. The resulting project comes out as a pure Java program, so Processing has become very popular for graphical web applets and similar things. I highly recommend it, it's useful for getting stuff on the web that can't handle the speed penalty that Flash incurs (though Flash's Actionscript is a very nice language syntactically, it's quite a bit slower than Java - 10x or more in my experience, depending what exactly you're doing, and for a lot of my physical simulation stuff, I've found that Flash just can't cut it [note: this is changing somewhat with Actionscript 3.0, so maybe eventually I'll switch over, given that Java applets still have that awful delay before they load]). There's even a software 3D renderer included, and setting up OpenGL support takes barely two lines of code. Most of the programming examples on this site will be done using Processing, because it allows me to avoid all the hassles of dealing with Java's graphics functions, as well as the nastiness involved in dealing with applets. If you want to get back to just programming your algorithms and leaving the extraneous stuff to a library, Processing is definitely the place to turn - I highly suggest downloading a copy today. [/plug]
Everything here is to be used at your own risk. As in, if some code that I provide formats your hard drive, makes your wife leave you for the sexy milkman and runs over your cat with a lawnmower (or even - God forbid! - milks your sexy cat with a lawnmower all over your formatted hard drive), don't blame me, I'm not responsible. For entertainment purposes only and so on... That said, unless otherwise noted (as with JBox2d, which is offered under the zlib license), any code you see here is offered under the GNU Public License, which is an open source free as in beer license that says (for your convenient quick reading only - refer to the text for the actual conditions) basically that you can do whatever the hell you'd like with my code as long as you pass along the right for anyone else to do whatever the hell they want. This means that if you alter and/or use my source code in your project, you must provide the source as well - you can't use my stuff without providing others the means to use it, too.
Legal issues aside, it would make me very happy if you sent me a link to or a copy of whatever you make, and linking to this website is always appreciated, as is an attribution. You don't have to, but I always appreciate it, and if you've done something interesting, I will likely return the favor with a link.