Hello

...and welcome.

About Me

My name is Eli Marschner. That's me in the picture above.

I am an undergraduate student (class of 2007) and full-time geek majoring in computer science and mathematics, and minoring in physics at Tufts University. (“To what end” you ask? Good question. Any ideas?)

I am now happily employed at Endeca Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts as an Associate Technical Consultant.

About This Page

This is a personal website. There isn't much here. This page was originally just an excuse to do some cheesy things with CSS.

Other Sites

These are other sites that I have been involved with in some capacity. Many of them are in disrepair and/or a perpetual state of development. Some may disappear faster than I update this page. All of them are amateurish excuses to waste valuable time, so nothing is guaranteed.

vcki

Conceived in February 2007, vcki isn't quite a wiki, nor a blog, nor a bulletin-board...but it could pretend to be any of those quite nicely. It was/is written primarily out of frustration with my past attempts at useful webapp development (all of which were doomed to bloat and over-specialization), but also as a way to familiarize myself with Ruby (not Rails), and to scratch an itch that started when I saw Anselm R. Garbe's diri. It simultaneously strives for ultimate simplicity and eminent utility. For more on vcki, consult vcki itself.

Thinger

I started hacking on a general information management system, tentatively called ‘Thinger’, during the summer of 2006. It's generally based around concepts best described by the buzzwords, ‘folksonomy’, ‘tagging’, and ‘web services’, and is less than alpha-quality — but I work on it whenever I have nothing better to do (which is to say, rarely). Update: This project went nowhere...

Tufts Karate Club Website

I recently redesigned designed the old Tufts University Shotokan Karate Club website. Through the wonders of XML, XSLT, and a little Javascript it is was much more easily maintained than the old previous site.

PySC

The budding sapling of a website publishing framework temporarily dubbed PySC for Python, SQLObject, and Cheetah (all of which it uses extensively, for better or for worse). Update: I have since found web.py, which I think is already better/more-useful than PySC could ever be, so I really have little to no incentive to continue development of PySC. (Kid is really cool too...)

Trio

A site I made some time during 2003-2004 for myself and a couple of friends for occasional use as a mind-dump. Development and regular use petered out a while ago, and various things have broken (this was my first real attempt at web-deveopment, so lots of things were/are BAD). Uses PHP, Smarty, MySQL and tries to follow web-standards. (I could have just used WordPress/Movable Type/Drupal/TextPattern, or any one of the multitude of pre-fab website-in-a-box tools that are out there [and probably ended up with a more impressive site], but where's the fun in that?)

What I Do

As a comp-sci/physics/math (now ex-)student, I spend a lot (most? too much?) of my time glued to a keyboard or buried in books filled with all kinds of abstract equations and theories. However, all work and no play...etc. So:

...Other Things I Enjoy
(in no particular order...)

• Programming (sometimes even when it is work)
• Music (Jazz, Funk, Avant Guard (whatever that means), Punk, (sometimes) Metal, Classical, even some Pop (*gasp!*)...the list goes on and on)
• Fiddling with geeky things like Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD/Plan9/etc... (not just OSes, but that's all that comes to mind at the moment)
• Movies
• Food
• Cooking
• Bicycling
• Snowboarding
• Shotokan Karate

Other...

A Note About My Name

My full name is ‘Edward Eli Marschner’, but I always refer to myself as ‘Eli’ rather than ‘Edward’ (or ‘Ed’ or ‘Eddy’ or ‘Eddie’, etc.), and usually prefer to be addressed as such — the reason being that I am the 5th consecutive ‘Edward Marschner’ in my family, which can get confusing. My parents, being the wise and practical people they are, decided it would make life easier if I wasn't mixed up with my dad (who, though now usually addressed as ‘Ed’ or ‘Edward’, has lived much of his life with the nickname ‘Bud’, which isn't even his real middle name) and/or his dad (who was known as ‘Ed’, ‘Edward’ and ‘Pappy’, and whose middle name was ‘L’ — yes, just ‘L’) — so I've always been ‘Eli’.

Ray Traced Image

This is the final scene rendered with the ray tracer I made in Comp 175 - Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, during the fall semester of 2005. I believe this specific rendering was done with 10 levels of reflection/refraction ray-bounce-recursion — maybe 15 — I don't really remember. There's also a larger version. Nifty, and lots of fun to code.