Ken and Jeanna Fox

My wife is a middle school science teacher looking for interesting people for her kids to exchange email with. If you're interested, drop her a note at jeanna@vulpes.com. She just spent a summer at SEA.

I'm an independent software developer. Some of my Perl code is freely available:

• First a disclaimer: None of my stuff will work with a version of Perl older than 5.8. Also, I've been pretty negligent on tracking the latest development releases, so there may be problems there too. If you run into any bugs, *please* let me know. (Wow, is that ancient history or what? I *said* this site needs an update... ;)
• My X11/Motif module has been released on CPAN. It is in beta right now -- mostly because it lacks full documentation, not because it is buggy or dificult to use. There is an alpha version available if you want to experiment with synthetic resources, images, true color visuals, synthetic events, or advanced X Lib functions.
• I've got the start of an interesting C++ interface to embedded Perl. It's in BETA right now (warning! warning!) but shows a lot of promise for making life easier on C++ programmers trying to call Perl from C++ code. I'm using this a lot in my code -- it's really nice to be able to use Perl regexps in C++.
• I wrote a unit conversion module (v1.3) as part of a bigger Perl project. It's pretty generic so I hope it might be useful to somebody besides me. If you've grabbed an earlier version of this, be sure to update it with this version. I've fixed a bug in unit chaining and added a better definition of Hz.
• Interested in Perl 6? Development has reached the point where the code is interesting to read and experiment with. The VM architecture of Parrot (the Perl 6 "guts") should work well, but I don't enjoy hacking on it. Originally I planned on implementing my ideas in Parrot, but it seems better to work on an independent implementation of Perl 6. Parrot optimizes for performance. An implementation that optimizes elegance might be very interesting, so I'm going for a stackless, registerless VM with cheap continuations and fast multi-methods. Hopefully much of Perl 6 will be written using the new rule engine and will be portable between any implementation that supports Perl 6 rules.

Integrating Guile (the FSF extension language) with Perl is another pet project. (If Perl had nested subroutines and a fully parenthesized syntax then we wouldn't need Guile...) In the mean time, I hope to at least be able to make Perl and Guile co-exist peacefully in the same address space.

Let me know if you are interested in collaborating on any of these projects.

When I'm not hacking, it's usually because I'm miniature gaming (historical and otherwise) or remodeling my house. A couple of my Chainmail conversions are on-line. I worked out a way to see DBM and DBA positions using HTML tables instead of ASCII art. (I just bought a CGI-capable web host too, so you will soon be able to link to positions in a news or bbs posting.) My Origins 2006 Flames of War Tournament Army (RTF (Word) or HTML formats) did OK, but mainly because I'm a good loser.

I wrote a story about a paper airplane.

This was a comment I made back in the late 90s:

Does anybody read personal web pages for the content anymore? Seem like we're moving towards a world where every page is an active, animated gob of audio-visual gibberish. Is text dead? If Wired is the future then I'm going to have to find a less commercial hobby.

The rise of blogs has both stunned me at how suddenly it happened and given me new hope about the Internet. Very cool stuff. Now if I just had more time for my blog... ;)