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

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.

The Case of the Missing PCX Palettes

The BRUT project is now nearing feature parity with the original RESUTIL application, which feels fantastic. So far, the changes made by BRUT are identical to those made by RESUTIL on a binary level. The only missing feature is LZSS compression. As the test below demonstrates, overriding resources without LZSS compression is still possible. The video is a little choppy, but that really shouldn’t be related to the compression since the game would need to decompress the images to display them anyway.

You Know What They Say About Assumptions…

Today, I learned that I am not only much closer to a working decompression algorithm than I thought, but I also made a very bad assumption when starting this project—one that I could have avoided with a little more preparation. When I start a project from scratch or start working on something at work, I plan things out beforehand. I make sure I understand the scope of the work as fully as I can before I write any code.

Decompression Progress

I’ve made far less progress than I was hoping. Part of the delay is just being busy with life. The algorithm isn’t really that complicated. There are some technical things about assembly language that I’ve had to relearn, like how the EFLAGS register works with bitshifting. (Specifically, the carry flag (CF) is relevant to this algorithm.) I also watched a great lecture on LZSS to understand the basics of what the algorithm was likely to do.

More …

How I've helped