Software
Here is some of the software I have written over the years. All the
programs are available as Open Source
(GPL).
Web software
- Flinch
-
A web link checker that will tell you about broken links on your web site.
It will automatically keep track of all links and only tell you
about problems when they persist for several days, so that you don't
get annoying emails every time a site is down temporarily.
- Comics
-
A Perl script to scrape comics from web pages. It can be run daily to
get the comic-of-the-day, archive it and mail it to you.
Email software
- POPular
-
POPular is a suite of programs for setting up large POP3 server systems.
- html-exiqsumm
-
HTMLified version of the exiqsumm script included in the
Exim distribution.
- popdummy
-
This is a very simplistic POP3-Server written in Perl that returns
always the same mail. It is quite useful when you change the address
of your POP3-Server and you want to tell everybody who is still using
the old server to switch to the new one.
- weximlog
-
This Perl script will do the equivalent of a 'tail -f' on your
Exim log file and list the top 20
list of sender addresses for the last hour on the screen.
Useful little scripts
- genpasswd
-
Generates a random password without the chars like O (letter Oh) and 0
(Zero) that are easily mixed up.
- ns2latex
-
Generate a latex file from bind zone files for a nice four-page overview
of the IP numbers in a class C network.
Stuff you can live without
- chat
-
A fully functional chat facility in a few lines of shell script.
- clockd
-
This little Perl script will show the current date and time on your
Linux console login screen. The display is updated every second without
disturbing your login prompt.
- labyrinth
-
Implementation of a labyrinth game in Sybase SQL.
- mastermind
-
Implementation of mastermind game as OpenOffice spreadsheet.
Some new ideas
The software world is mostly boring. While improvements are made to
programs all the time, mostly they are just little things. We still
use a word processor or - for that matter - a Unix shell in the same
way we have been used to for years. Every once in a while a new concept
comes up, concepts like the web browser or Apples "i*" applications.
Every so often I have an idea how to do something different. Different
does not necessarily mean better, and I fully expect most of the ideas
here to never amount to much. But it is better to get them out for
others to play with and to have their own ideas and improvements.
See these programs as part of an ongoing discussion on improving
the way we work with computers.
Most software here is not really that useable. The criterion for software
to appear in this list is less the actual usefulness and more some kind
of novelty. I encourage people to look at the stuff here, improve on the
ideas and publish their own software. If you do so, please send me a URL
and I'll put up a link.
- convoy
- is my attempt to show much information from log files in little space
- nexus
- converts RSS files with title and link only to RSS files
including the full text
- piper
- helps with writing Unix shell pipes