My name is Jan Čurn, welcome to my personal homepage, a place where you can find some information about me and my work. Until 2014 I was a Ph.D. student in the Distributed Systems Group of the School of Computer Science and Statistics, at Trinity College Dublin - I used to have a dedicated departmental web page there. In 2008 I co-founded VirtualRig™ Studio, a professional software for realistic motion blur simulation in traditional photography and CGI. In 2011 I co-founded Dev tank, a software development company and finally in 2015 I co-founded Apify, the web automation platform.

Here you can find my official Jan Čurn's curriculum vitae, Jan Čurn's LinkedIn profile and Twitter. My email is jan.curn@gmail.com.

Below is a list of several projects I have been working on so far and some other stuff (ANCIENT ALERT: this stuff hasn't been updated in ages and although it's quite embarrassing I keep it here for my amusement when I get back here from time to time. You have been warned.)

User accounts management system

Commercial project intented to automatically manage over 9000 users of network at Institue of Chemical Technology and many other interrelated things like mailboxes or personal cards. Main problem of the solution was to make robust system that would understand whole organizational logic and intelligently decide some unusual situations to minimize human intervention. The kernel of the system was developed in C#, data are stored on MS SQL 2000 database server, web interface was done in ASP.NET with C#. Regrettably the system contains private data so it's not possible to show you how it works. However, you can look at some screenshots here.

download	size	year	environment	platform	language	incl. source	docs
-	-	2004	MS Visual Studio.NET 2003	Win32(x86)	czech	-	czech, detailed, XML

Image processing

During my work at Institue of Chemical Technology I was asked to help with analyzation of morphological quality of stomatal wax on the needles of picea abies. I developed simple tool that processes images from electron microscope. Here you can see some pictures generated by this software.

download	size	year	environment	platform	language	incl. source	docs
-	-	2004	MS Visual Studio.NET 2003	Win32(x86)	czech	-	-

MIPS R4000 memory manager

Part of school project lead by Distributed Systems Research Group of Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague intended to develop elementary preemptive multitasking operating system. We implemented modules to manage physical and virtual memory and mapping between them and to dispatch memory exceptions. Modules were developed in C and MIPS R4000 assembler, compiled using gcc cross compiler and tested on R4000 simulator MSIM. By my opinion the most interesting is module for managing physical memory that can handle variable length frames of up to 64GB of physical memory and operates in logarithmical asymptotic complexity with less than 0.05% overheads.

download	size	year	environment	platform	language	incl. source	docs
-	-	2003, 2004	Linux, gcc cross-compiler	MIPS R4000	english	-	-

Various web presentations

Sometimes I also compose web presentations using different technologies and for different purposes, recently for example for childern medical camp named "Morsky konik" organised by VZP (which I also taked part as couch) using pure HTML, CSS and CGI scripts at http://www.volny.cz/mk or for example for Lipnicka s.r.o. (house building company) using HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL at http://www.lipnicka.cz.

download	size	year	environment	platform	language	incl. source	docs
-	-	1998-2004	PSPad	-	czech	-	-

Eye

System usable for 3D reconstruction of real-world scene from two or more photos. Human assistance is needed to synchronize positions of cameras, to identify equivalent pixels at two photos and relations between them. The result can be rendered by own software engine, textures are read from source photos.

download	size	year	environment	platform	language	incl. source	docs
eye.zip	1608 kB	2003	MS Visual C++ 6.0	Win32(x86)	english	yes	czech, detailed, MS Word format

EyeAI

System for 3D reconstruction named Eye still needs human assistance to synchronize cameras, to identify equivalent pixels and relations between them. The goal of project EyeAI is to minimize these activities. Synchronization of cameras by hand isn't needed any more, non-trivial genetic algorithm to solve this problem was successfuly tested. I also tried some methods based on huge statistics to automatically identify equivalent portions of source pictures, but the result wasn't so obvious. Main problem is with surfaces with non-sharp textures (white wall, sky, ...) so other advanced heuristic methods should be used. I would like to thank for inspiration to Center of Machine Perception of Faculty of Electrical Engineeing at Czech Technical University in Prague, namely to Tomas Pajdla for his valuable time. The project was due to time reasons defered.

download	size	year	environment	platform	language	incl. source	docs
-	-	2003, 2004	MS Visual C++ 6.0	Win32(x86)	czech	-	-

Nibbles

It's classical game with snakes, you control small snake, which grows with some tokens it eats. If your snake run into borders, other snake or itself, it dies. I improved the game with some other features, for example there can be at the same time up to four human or AI players together. Of course you can apply your own keyboard settings.

download	size	year	environment	platform	language	incl. source	docs
nibbles.zip	578 kB	2002	Inprise Delphi	Win32(x86)	english, help in czech	yes	czech, basic, plain text

RxRtoR

Application for renedering of analytical function f: R2->R. You have to type this function in the text-box using arithmetical expression with two variables, the application solves than its values in some points which will be later shown using different view-settings. There are some options you can apply, for example z-buffering, square/random points generation and other.

download	size	year	environment	platform	language	incl. source	docs
rxrtor.zip	234 kB	2001	Inprise Delphi	Win32(x86)	english, help in czech	yes	no

Jokes

Application that shows jokes stored in textfile at Windows startup. More interesting then application itself is multi-thread installation utility which manages files, destination directory and some registry entries. Uninstallation is done by little trick - it uses DOS executable which deletes itself during runtime because Win32 executable cannot do this.

download	size	year	environment	platform	language	incl. source	docs
vtipyins.zip	762 kB	1998	Borland C++Builder	Win32(x86)	czech	yes	no

SmallCars

One of my first programming experiments, implemantation of classical school game for up to four human players. The script was written in BASIC, later it has been compiled to DOS executable, some intro was added and whole these files were included into one Win32 executable (interesting, or not?:-), which you can download below.

download	size	year	environment	platform	language	incl. source	docs
auticka.zip	259 kB	1995	MS BASIC (later Borland C++Builder)	DOS (later Win32), x86	czech	no	no

Links

There are links to pages of my friends and colleages.

Last update 1^st November 2008
Copyright© 2004-2008 Jan Čurn