Luke Francl is a programmer, sometimes writer, and advocate for a better world. He wrote the Eikon image search engine, contributes to the LIMO project, is an editor for the infoAnarchy P2P news site, is the author of the Just Looking weblog, and a software engineer at Stellent.
My resume is availible in HTML, PDF and Microsoft Word formats. For more information on some of the projects I've worked on, please see my portfolio.
I like reading a lot. I mostly read fiction, science fiction and urban planning books, with a bit of general non-fiction thrown in for good measure. I also program recreationally, but not as much as I'd like. Real Life often interferes. I write about copyright, the gift economy, ebooks, free software, peer-to-peer software, information retrieval, and various other topics. I like to learn new things.
I do most of my programming at my day job at Stellent. We make software for storing large collections of digital assets, like movies and commericals. I've done work on Lucene search integration, reporting, automatic ingest by watching directories for new files, the user preferences subsystem, lots of unit tests and a ton of bugfixes. Before that, most of my coding time used to be spent on the University of Minnesota Libraries website, for which I wrote the database backend, a couple of standalone webapps and a lot of usability advocacy and improvements.
However, my real passion is for my side projects. Possibly my most useful program is the Word Unmunger. It removes cruft from Microsoft Office documents. I've completed initial work on my Eikon image query system, which was presented at CodeCon 2002. I've made a couple of hacks to the Blosxom weblog software and to PMD. You can also you can download or use my PHP Tent Map program, which demonstrates chaotic orbits in a simple dynamical system (old). I also contribute to LIMO (a web-based Lucene index browser). Chances are, I'm currently cooking up some crazy scheme for my next side project.
I do most of my writing now in my journal and in my weblog, Just Looking. I also have some longer writings and essays which I will post here someday.
I contribute to the New Patriot, Slashdot (rarely), Kuro5hin (rarely), and infoAnarchy (rarely). You can also find me commenting on stories at Hack the Planet and Canned Platypus.
The best way to reach me is probably by email: look@recursion.org. I also hang out on irc.freenode.net. My nick is Look. Feel free to /msg me. If you're into analog communication, my address is:
3229 Garfield Ave #3
Minneapolis MN 55408
If you have any questions or concerns (or just want to drop me a line), don't hesitate to contact me.