Mikko Tuomela: Projects

On this page there are descriptions and links to several hobby and semi-professional projects that I am or have been involved with.

Current Projects

FinnQueer: In addition to helping with technical matters and occassionally writing articles, I have coded the publishing system of the FinnQueer web magazine. Originally concieved in 1999-2000, it is based on light CGI scripts written in Perl. As part of my Bachelor's Thesis in Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia, I developed a much more advanced managing and publishing system employing the Catalyst MVC framework, MySQL and MultiMarkdown. This is yet to be made the active backend of FinnQueer. My activities at FinnQueer also include creating PDF publications and image processing.
Tulkaa kaikki: The website of the Tulkaa kaikki (Come All) movement is very important as it contains the programme and a list of supporters of the movement aiming to influence the direction of the Finnish Evangelical-Lutheran Church. In addition to creating the original website (excluding the graphic design and actual content) and associated Perl scripts (for building the site from templates), I have also produced three election mini-websites, a system for managing lists of candidates and administration tools.

The Director: Under the alias Ravel/Sleber Eid, I created perhaps the world's first demoscene production using only Perl. It was a five-minute demo showing different effects (scrolltext, rotozoomer with motion blur, star effects), with the music played by an external player. With this demo, I participated in the demo competition at Alternative Party 2003 and finished third (out of 23 productions). The demo runs on any vt100 text resolution and any system with Perl 5 with Time::Hires - for example on mobile phones using PuTTY. The demo scales its running speed based on the system's performance and textual output rate. This was probably the most intense software project of my life and one that taught me a lot about programming, Perl, discipline, even 3D graphics.