About the project and myself

To the left you can see the face of the author of this site. My name is Konstantin Vlasov; on many web sites I'm known as CaptainFlint. I'm a software developer, both as a profession and a hobby. I met the world of programming in about 7^th year of school, and, as many other programmers, I started with Basic on such legendary machines as ZX Spectrum and BK-0010. As time went by, I met with other languages and platforms, but currently I'm working mainly with C/C++, Perl, Python for Windows and Linux.

Some time around the start of 2000s, our country met the boom of so-called japanese crosswords. I was carried away by them too; it is very interesting, how the chaotic set of numbers gets converted into a picture, and quite often these pictures were very beautiful! The only thing I didn't like was spending much time painting many cells instead of thinking about later part of solution. At that time I decided to write a program to work with these puzzles: a mouse click is much faster than painting square cells on paper.
I started implementing it on Pascal langauge for MS-DOS, but I did not finish it. The next attempt went much better, and I used C++ with MFC this time. I liked the result, and suddenly a thought came: why not distribute this program over Internet? That's how this web-site's idea was born.

At first, there was only the program itself plus several packages with the crosswords. Then, as new ideas were coming to fruition, the site was being filled with new handicrafts. Some of them remained barely used, the others found their devoted fans. Unfortunately, because of the lack of time, most of the projects are currently frozen. Each program has a large list of wishes and future plans, but I don't have enough time to implement them all. However, some of programs are being slowly developed, and the chances are that new versions will appear in the future.

Not all of my programs are published on this web site. Some of them are too simplistic or too specialized to spend time on publishing them. Others could be of use to some, but they were developed for my own use, and therefore have no proper user interface, no documentation, no means of configuring, and sometimes are not even working properly and require manual corrections. Also, some of the projects I have are just some other open source project modified slightly for some purpose. If you want to check and decide for yourself, you can find some of my programs here: