Who the Hell is Frank Mitchell?

This site is just for bits and pieces which I think may be of slight interest to somebody else, added whenever there's something to share.

Home
The main page, innit?
Writing
Attempts at fiction writing, for your amusement.
Game Stuff
Ideas related to pen-and-paper Role-Playing Games, with the occasional thought on boardgames, card games, or (if I shed my Luddite ways) computer games.
Software
Stuff I've written, mostly for my own edification.
Rants
Other opinions I must share.
Resume
A possibly current resume, curriculum vitae, whatever.
Links
Grab-bag of possibly interesting links.
Simpsons Avatar
For those who miss it.

Official NaNoWriMo 2006 Winner

Official NaNoWriMo 2005 Winner

Fri, 24 Feb 2006

The Dreaming Princess (Rough Draft)

The Dreaming Princess is a novella I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2005. It's still a very rough draft -- basically from my brain to the page, with minimal editing. The title may change too. So read it at your own risk. A ZIPped version is also available for download.

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Updates, At Last

Not only have I updated this site after a year, I'm making drastic changes. When I first put up a title page back in Dec 2004 (!!), I wrote the following:
Those who know me know to look elsewhere for fancy CSS or dancing badgers or blogs recording the pointless minutia of my life. I type HTML directly into Emacs, my artistic abilities are extremely limited (duh), and last time I kept a journal the entries were months if not years apart.
I'm partly going back on that paragraph. This page is, of course, a blog, although most if not all entries will record updates to content, and provide a link. I also plan to do some CSS hacking, to make the site more readable and interesting. However, I'm still using Emacs.

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On Writing

When I was in high school and college, I majored in Physics ... but I thought my real future was as a Writer. Capital-W writer. A few form-letter rejections and one line-by-line critique later, I pretty much gave up.

Now, with my very own website, I've made some more attempts at writing fiction, which I will post for your derision. (Hey, it's a sort of publishing, and it's cheaper and more ecologically sound than a vanity press.) My writing still sucks, although I hope not at an Eye of Argon level of sucking.

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"... And The American Way"

"... And The American Way" (formerly titled "Form US-5187") is a transparently political dark fantasy I wrote in October 2003, cleaned up a bit.

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Bookmarks

A Ruby script to collate bookmarks from Netscape/Mozilla, Opera, and IE into a single YAML database. Instead of preserving the original hierarchy, it uses folder names as "labels" attached to each URL. (I found that I had the same links filed in different ways in different bookmark files.) At some point I might write as script that converts the YAML file to Mozilla bookmarks, using a description of the canonical hierarchy of labels.

The tarball also includes a multithreaded link checker script, to verify that links still exist. I haven't gotten around to a proper installer, so if you want to use this as a module elsewhere, you'll have to copy it to the appropriate location yourself.

Download here.

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Eiffel Dependency Metrics

Ruby scripts to compute Robert Martin's dependency metrics, as described in Agile Software Development, in Eiffel code. I have a sporadic interest in Eiffel, and wondered how Martin's metrics translate into Eiffel.

Most other languages have an explicit statement stating what modules or classes a source file uses (C/C++ #include, Java/Python import, Ruby require, etc.), but Bertrand Meyer in his infinite wisdom decided that resolving class names to their definitions happens in an "Ace" file when a program is assembled. Right now the scripts don't use Ace files, and assume (hope) that names are unique and that Ace files don't rename classes. This poses problems in, for example, the GOBO libraries, which have different versions of the same class for each compiler supported.

Like the Bookmarks scripts, this program is divided into several modules, one of which is an "Eiffel scanner" which is arguably more complex than a true Eiffel parser would have been. The scripts need not only packaging but better tests, so the numbers may not be accurate.

Download here.

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