Scott Pakin’s home page

Welcome to my home page! Here you'll find a list of some of the cool projects I've been working on.

For starters, check out my masterpiece, Scott Pakin's Automatic Complaint-Letter Generator.

If you like Magic Eye-style 3‑D images, check out some of my autostereograms.

Prefer 2‑D artwork? Check out my Context Free Art gallery. (Click on each thumbnail for a larger view.) Context Free is a piece of software that lets one create artwork by combining simple geometric shapes in a variety of complex configurations.

At the press of a button, Scott Pakin's Random Art Generator generates a new, never-before-seen piece of abstract art.

Scott Pakin's Handy-Dandy Word-Filtering Program helps you solve guess the mystery word-style puzzles).

I don't know how to knit, but my mother does. To help her design interesting mosaic knitting patterns, I wrote an online mosaic knitting pattern creator. Mom specified what makes a pattern valid or invalid, and I wrote the code.

I've written a few back-end drivers for pstoedit, a handy utility that converts PostScript files to various editable document types. For details of what I contributed, see the pstoedit changelog. My best contribution is a driver for Microsoft PowerPoint—I use that all the time to import vector graphics into presentations.

If you run Ubuntu Linux or a derivative, you may be interested in two of my Personal Package Archives (PPAs)—collections of software conveniently packaged for installation on an Ubuntu system (PPA usage instructions):

ppa:pakin/scott

Programs I wrote

ppa:pakin/other

Programs other people wrote but that I packaged up

I use the LaTeX typesetting system instead of a word processor (such as Microsoft Word) for everything I write. I've even coded up a number of useful LaTeX packages for others to benefit from.

I wrote a handy little Gimp script entitled center-selection, which crops an image so as to center the current selection within the image's boundaries. I also created a utility called Netpbm2Gimp that facilitates programming Gimp filters by reimplementing the easy-to-use Netpbm API in terms of Gimp library calls. If you're not a programmer, check out gimp-netpbm2gimp-plugins, a collection of hundreds of Gimp filters automatically converted from Netpbm utilities using Netpbm2Gimp.

Speaking of the Netpbm utilities, I authored a few of them myself: avstopam, pamhomography, pammixmulti, pammosaicknit, pampaintspill, pamrecolor, pamsistoaglyph, pamstereogram, pamtoavs, pamtodjvurle, pamtooctaveimg, pbmtodjvurle, and pbmtodjvurle. I also help improve other people's Netpbm utilities by submitting bug reports for every bug I encounter.

For programmers: If you use GNU Libtool to create library and shared-object files, my Libtool semantic-versioning calculator Web application facilitates the assignment of a new semantic version number before code releases.

See my GitHub page for other software I've open-sourced that's not listed above.

My winning entries (and honorable mentions) from the 3D Realms Camera Captioning Contest are available online.

Also, in the unlikely event that you need it, you can download my GnuPG key (ID: 6F7F752CCCA3F9F5; fingerprint: 888E 96CC B15F 8E47 6D4A 1F45 6F7F 752C CCA3 F9F5). See also my Keybase account, which lets you validate a few Web identities that claim to be me.