You have reached Nick Zaillian's CS Homepage

A little bit about me:

• I grew up in Santa Monica, California, but have, for the past 3 years, been living in New York City, pursuing a degree in Computer Science at Columbia University's Columbia College.
• I attended Santa Monica's Crossroads School, where I was a member of the Drama Conservatory, co-founded the now-defunct Hip Hop Club, and once got in trouble for ghost-riding the whip in front of the school's administration building.
• I moonlight as a soul-jazz DJ named "Z-Smooth" at Columbia's WKCR FM (but, shhhh!...you didn't hear that here!).
• A few months ago, I was in a show called "The Sound", written by Sam Alper and directed by Dan Rogers at NYC's 13th st. Rep.  In December 2010, I directed a piece and performed in a couple of others that were a part of "Running Scared: The Technology Show" (staged by the same company: The Collectin).
• In the very distant past, I was on the season/series title-winning team of the short-lived Discovery Kids for NBC television program Operation Junkyard, a children's spinoff of the popular TLC engineering series Junkyard Wars.  Apparently the program still airs from time to time.  I do not get paid.  Choice moments posted by somebody here.

In my spare time, I often find myself working on software projects.  Some of the more recent of these include:

WaveformWidget: A library that provides a Qt widget for efficient visualization of audio waveforms.  This was something that I found myself needing for a casual project (that I have yet to complete) but that seemed not to exist.  Well...now it does.  Source tarball can be found here, the git repo is available at github, and API documentation can be found here.  This library is licensed under the GNU LGPL.

Nicksmap: A tool that scrapes New York area craigslist housing posts, uses some hackery to make sense of the (often vague) location descriptions, then lays them out on a google map.  Back-end recently got a shiny new Python/Django codebase (original implementation used Google Web Toolkit/Java EE).

Fun with Foursquare: How to gain mayorships without really trying.  Cheatsquare is a related project.  You can grab a self-contained app bundle for Mac OS X here.

BathroomWiki: A New York City bathroom-finding mobile web app.  Uses the HTML5 geolocation standard to locate users and point them toward the nearest truly free-to-use restroom.  Only targeting Mobile Safari at present (this will change once I have a more modern Android test device than my old G1 and can assure a decent user experience on that platform).

Angry Bard : A Shakespearean insult generator for Android.  Available free in the Android Market where it's currently got a rating of 4/5 stars (down from 4.5/5...[sheds tear]).  Recently completed an iPhone port (with a few nice additions) that will be made available as soon as I come up with a trade name to associate with my iTunes Connect account.  

Qt OpenCV Integration: How to slickly integrate the OpenCV computer vision library with the Qt Framework.  This was a nice opportunity for me to get comfortable with OpenCV and a language that once drove a 14-year-old me to inadvertently demonstrate why introductory programming courses should not be taught with Java and hand-holding IDEs.  Source hosted on github.

Rasterbator for Mac OS X: The popular GPL tile-printing utility with the vulgar name bundled up for easy installation on the mac.

Simple Server: A stripped down HTTP server in under 50 lines of Python code! For illustrative purposes only (if you need a real http server, I recommend Apache HTTPd ).  

If there is something that you would like to know about me but cannot find here, get in touch on Facebook or send an email to [email protected].

This website is hosted on Columbia's CUNIX cluster.