Programming

Computer programming has always been a hobby. Starting with BASIC on a ZX Spectrum in 1984, later assembly for its Z80 microprocessor, until I had saved enough money to buy a personal computer to explore Pascal, Delphi and C. After my studies, I have worked in Lyon, France at a university in a European team to develop Java software to analyse data from MRI spectrometers and scanners. Java has become my programming language of choice.

Some of the Java applets and applications that I made are posted here to demonstrate and share. To display and use Java applets and applications, you will need a Java Runtime Environment available here. For those interested in learning to develop software, I wrote an introductory Java programming tutorial.


With this little piece of freeware, you can store personal information encrypted on your computer. No access to the information is possible unless one has the password: Encryption programme. Source code is included.

I have always been interested in visualising a 3D world on the computer. I remember that my first algorithm to project points in space on a screen took 6 seconds per point to compute. (Due to both the efficiency of the algorithm and the speed of computers at that time.) When I first saw Wolfenstein, I was flabbergasted and later made a few small 3D applications in C of which I ported this to Java. But then I discovered Java3D. Unfortunately, my hosting provider does not allow socket communication, and I found that HTTP posts are not quite suitable for real time data exchange between avatars. So I abandoned my 3D chat applet.

When I worked with PSpice, software to calculate properties of electronic designs, it was extremely user-unfriendly and difficult to use. Not technically as advanced as PSpice, but a lot easier to use is this applet to calculate currents and voltages in your electronic network. I got stuck developing it on iterating to a solution in a circuit with many diodes and transistors.

This freeware is a banner with scrolling text for downloading. You can freely download it to install on your own web page.

During my studies, colleagues started an investigation to a revolutionary lithography method called the MAPPER principle. I did not quite grasp the concept at first, so made an applet to simulate the MAPPER principle. (It must be said that the current technology is quite different from the original one, so the applet no longer accurately represents the actual principle.)