What's here? bubkes. Or close to it...
Years ago, I considered starting a small software business with a guy named Michael, initials MK. This domain is what I came up with for the partnership. We never consummated...
I don't remember what the product was.
In 1995, I wanted to learn Java. I was mostly a c programmer at the time.
Note: Libraries were still new. The big use we had for them was the window system code. Window systems were about 10 years old at the time. I was mostly a Unix, X/Xt/Motif developer.
I had learned a few languages in school- some assembly, Fortran, Pascal, a bit of SAIL/Algol, APL, Lisp.
In my first job out of school I was the main programmer. I made a 3D arcade game in Forth, plus a simple bitmap drawing program for the artist. There was also a guy who maintained the Forth language and operating system. Then we hired a guy to do the details of a Motocross game and another to help build a 3D track using fake math (doing the divisions for perspective took too long- this was before the days of graphics chips.) The games never went to market- the 10-person company couldn't make a design with cheap-enough hardware. The company folded after a bit more than 2 years.
In my next job, they used Modula 2 which was sort of Pascal with Modules, for larger programs. 4 years later I joined a "real" startup and programmed in C. Almost 10 years later we tried C++ but it at the time, templates didn't work on Unix. That was good- C++ is a horrible language.
But Java looked interesting.
My 3-year old son saw a very simple Conway's Game of Life display on my Sun's screen saver and asked me about it. All the way home in the car, he asked about it. So I decided to build it for him. Java wasn't quite ready- it took about a year of dabbling.
I wrote a simple XML parser for it, and created the UI from an XML file. One could undo edits, and peak ahead at the next state. One could also change the rules, but no other set of rules is particularly interesting...
My son loved it and used it a lot over the next 5 years. That was very rewarding.
Maybe that was the original product- I've had this website since Feb 1999...
Later I came up with a bit of software to store a family tree. Rather than a big, hard-to-manage tree, it just shows a person's parents, sibling, spouse and kids. Plus you can add life events to it, even if you don't know the dates. Plus you can add stories. This was cool, and I have my own family's tree in it, but I never had timem to develop it into a product. It doesn't even have a GUI. Currenly I have to edit the XML file and then rerun the program... But it's cool to preserve the stories.
I was thinking about putting some episodes from history into this, but never had time...
I think there was one more idea for a product, but I don't recall what it was...
After learning MatLab at NASA, I'd really like to make a Java library that could replace it... Partly because MatLab sucks in a few important ways. And partly because it requires rewriting the code to put something created in MatLab into a product. Plus it'd be fun to code up lots of the algorithms. It'd be fun to learn machine-learning algorithms.
I'd also like to make a better query language- SQL sucks. Again, it'd be in Java, allowing the JAVA IDE to help ensure queries are correct. It could output the schema, as well. Someday, maybe...