I'm Kiran

I'm a Systems Administrator, Web Developer and all around tech helper.

I can be reached at me@kiranwelle.com or the social links below.

Where I started

When I was 12 years old, my mother taught herself how to build simple websites and Visual Basic applications. When she wasn't using her reference books, I borrowed them and fell in love with HTML.

Programming didn't capture my attention until I found PHP and JavaScript two years later and was able to do more and more with my little websites. I've dabbled in various languages and applications over the years.

I started working as an IT intern after graduating from high school and worked my way up through Help Desk to a Systems Administrator position that allows me to do a little bit of everything; from desktop support to networking and server support to project planning.

Where I am

Systems Administrator, Nitto BioPharma, Inc.

Handling most of the IT operations for a pharmaceutical research and development company.

New Dad

Learning the ins-and-outs of raising two tiny human beings and how to work on little sleep.

Web Developer

Building hobby projects in PHP (often utilizing Laravel). Check out my latest project, Alphonic!

Where I'm going

Family will always be my first focus. With my kids growing up, I will focus on finding opportunities to teach them and encourage their curiosity.

Professionally, I hope to focus more on long-term projects and less on desktop/server support. In the meantime, I'm working towards a PMP certification in the near future.

Skills
  • Back-end Development (PHP, Laravel)
  • Software Design
  • Database Design
  • Technical Writing
  • Windows Server management
  • Windows desktop support
Guiding principles
Education
  • B.S. Computer Science, California State University — San Marcos
  • Certificate, ITIL Foundation, APMG International
Recent writings

Releasing Our First Build

The No CD Fix When I briefly looked at removing the CD requirement before my last post, it seemed fairly straight forward until I noticed there was a InstallationType variable that changed a bit of behavior in a few places. I figured this could be a source of issues if the CD were suddenly no longer available. To explain why, let’s cover a bit of video game history. If you’re not interested, feel free to skip to the next section.

Rebuilding Birthright: Organizing the Project

Now that we’ve compiled Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance, it’s time to get everything of consequence into version control so we can manage and update the code effectively. Based on some of the batch files included in the source leak, it seems likely that Synergistic saved changes in ZIP files. While that was potentially a reasonable approach at the time, based on the tools available, it’s definitely not a good idea today.

Rebuilding Birthright: A New Beginning

Somehow, it’s been over a year since we started Rebuilding Birthright. In that time, I’ve almost finished BRUT, the Birthright Resource Utility for viewing, modifying, and extracting files from Birthright’s resource files. I’ve also done enough research to put together the beginnings of a Birthright Modding Reference for creating custom adventures. Unfortunately, I’ve run into a bug. The game crashes when picking up the quest item (the item that marks the adventure complete) in custom adventures.

Texturing Birthright adventure maps in Doom map editors

In my last post, I mentioned that the main Doom map editors don’t have any way of loading Birthright textures. This can be fixed by creating a PWAD with all of the textures from TEXTURES.RES. As I shared in The Case of the Missing PCX Palettes, we’re able to submit PCX files to Birthright’s resource files, but we’re not able to get them back out in their original state. A lot of information is lost when RESUTIL or BRUT convert the PCX files into Birthright’s internal bitmap format.

Creating Custom Adventures for Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance

Implementing LZSS compression in BRUT is still on my task list. I’ve written out a first draft of the algorithm, which is giving me some trouble. I hope to get that implemented soon. Since I’ve been staring at assembly language far too much, I decided to dig deeper into what we know about Birthright’s adventures, especially how they’re defined, referenced, and loaded. In the future, I’ll build a reference page to make finding some of the technical information necessary for proper level building easier.

More …

How I've helped