Chris Rywalt's Portfolio Page

	Chris Rywalt's Portfolio Page
This is me.

This is stuff I've done, for various reasons, at various times.
Please don't take anything I say or do seriously. I don't, why should you?

In response to receiving a link to this page on FBI keystroke monitoring, I wrote this hack to escape the Feds' prying eyes.

I've got a gallery of recent drawings (some of which I've been selling on eBay).

I've written a couplafew pieces for Tee Vee and I copyedit for them, too.

I liked seeing the Faces again so much, I figured I'd put together a page using them to make The Cynical Mood Generator. Fun with JavaScript.

Long, long ago, I created a series of symbols called Faces. Here they are.

After moldering in my bookshelf for N years (where N is an arbitrarily large number) I finally got around to scanning in the entire run of Campuside, the cartoon I authored for my alma mater's newspaper for a couple of years. Campuside has a special place in my heart, just above the cholesterol blockage.

A number of places on the Web claim to have images which consist of the Netscape color palette -- the famed ``Netscape Color Cube''. Some of them are wrong. This one, which I generated using some C code and good old Thomas Boutell's gd library, is not wrong. I think.

Not long ago, my wife and I discovered the wonderful fact that we are pregnant. Since I like to play with Web pages and I'm an amateur journal writer, I figured I'd put together Web pages detailing the whole pregnancy experience. Imagine my surprise when I blurted out to my wife, ``I'm writing a book!'' And so it is a book. And it is called It's Just Another Baby.

Along the same lines but much neater than Virtual Tangoes -- though written before I wrote Virtual Tangoes -- I designed the Apple Corps. Like its cousin, this uses gd, and similarly, the code and data files for this can be snagged directly. The most recent major change has been to recode the Perl script into C, an effort which once again owes its success to Thomas Boutell, this time for his cgic library.

Virtual Tangoes is a Web-based game, held together by Perl scripts and C code, that uses the gd graphics library by Thomas Boutell and the ImageMagick convert package (for rotation) so you can play this anicent Chinese game with the almost-latest technology. (If only I knew Java when I wrote this).
The code and data files for this can be grabbed directly from their directory. Note that none of the images created by users ever resides on the server end -- they're rebuilt every time the page is loaded by a script called in a server-push Netscapey manner.

My Animation of an unfolding Dymaxion Map is available as either a 1.4 meg ZIPped 640x480 QuickTime or a 40k ZIPped 320x240 QuickTime, or a 400k 160x120 Java animation. The source code to generate the Persistence of Vision Raytracer frame files for this animation is written in C.

I've done icons and other graphics for WestNet Internet Services' homepage. Most recently, I designed the animation for WestNet's custom configuration of Netscape.

I've done a lot of writing, graphic design and image manipulation for Aloysius Thudthwacker's HyperDiscordia HyperText Creature From Hell, most notably the graphics for The First Church of Jesus Christ, Elvis, a page devoted to a scholarly subject, a Personalized Pope Card Generator, and, most recently, the all-seeing Five Ball of Magick.

For some time, I've been working on getting some of Buckminster Fuller's important work on the Web. Anything here is intended for reference only -- buy the books.

In the same vein, I've scanned some of my photographs of applications of Bucky's work. There is some discussion of the artifacts as well.

My Cumulus Vitalis has been rewrit (and my finger has moved on).

There's very little of my writing at this site. It once occurred to me that most of what I've found on the Web is complete drivel, and then it occurred to me that my stuff must be complete drivel also, and I see no need to inflict anyone else with it.

However, I came to a conclusion not long ago: the World Wide Web is like everyone in the world being allowed to have a free subscription to any magazine they like, and also everyone in the world being allowed to publish any magazine they like.

The nice thing about this is, if someone puts out something absolutely horrendous, no one has to actually look at it, except the few twisted souls who wish to. This is in direct opposition to billboards, which take up your time and your space without anyone at all asking you if it's okay.

How much nicer the Internet is than billboards.

P.S: Thudthwacker would say that there are are two kinds of people in the world -- those who get it and those who don't. He's wrong (but infallible -- he's a pope, after all). The two kinds of people are those who divide the people of the world into two kinds of people and those who don't. The Goddess prevails.