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Kewpie is the end result of my DVD printing work. You can read about it here. My latest Linux experience is with DVD Printing on my new HP C5580 All-In-One device (which works fantastically well on Fedora 10 Linux - no setup required, so I had to invent my own problems :-). Mountie is my new app of particular interest for those who hate both gnome and KDE. Part of what I think of as my "stick in the mud" software project for those like me who hate "helpful" software. When you start mountie it pops up a dialog describing all the devices available to be mounted or unmounted, and then lets you say where to mount them or what to unmount. No popups grabbing focus away from where you were typing, no automounting things under obscure directories with obscure names only a gnome developer could love. You are in control of when and where at all times :-). Download the Qt4 source tarball at: mountie.tar.bz2 (updated on Oct 26, 2008 to fix segfault that happens when you don't have a ~/.mountierc file). Sort of hardware and software: The story of getting my diNovo Mini keyboard to work: diNovo Mini and Linux. Random tidbits of wisdom (maybe :-) about linux (mostly fedora related). The story of my quest for Xen enlightenment. I wanted to be able to print to image files, so I hacked up the PDF printer, cups-pdf, to produce my own cups-png printer to generate a series of .png files (one per page). This isn't software I developed, but software I tortured into coughing up its secrets: Linux is Easy!. My latest masterpiece is the most vitally important program since the invention of the 3,478,939'th screensaver! Check it out at QtMess (it pops up reminder messages :-). Well, NTPTime 4.2 had some bugs that cropped up in international versions of Windows, so NTPTime 4.3 has been released (about a month later). This version avoids all use of symbolic names in the code that is setting the security attributes on some event objects, so it no longer has any locale problems. The 4.3 version also adds support for the Kiss-O-Death packets that NTP servers can send to tell clients to stop bothering them. I recently built a new system with an Asus P4C800-E motherboard, and wanted to get the COM2 port working. That experience is documented here, and while working on that I generated a silly little program for controlling the output pins on a COM port. You can find the program here. OK, I admit it, there isn't a whole lot of other free software here yet, but what there is works pretty well. If you are a fan of The Prisoner TV series, you may be collecting the DVDs, and if you are collecting the DVDs, you may know there is a problem with the audio on the original Set 2 box set. The dvdsum program is an attempt to come up with a way to identify which DVDs are good and which are bad. The clock.zip file contains a silly little digital clock program to complement NTPTime. After all, if you can set the time accurately, you ought to be able to look at it too :-). The zip file contains both the executable and the source (it isn't very big). The ntcli is a collection of NT command line programs that emulate familiar Unix programs of the same name. It currently includes basename, cat, cmp, ls, and rm. The binaries are to be found in ntclibin.zip and the source in ntclisrc.zip. Despite the NT in the name, they should also work fine on Windows 95 or Windows 98. The B5Outlook program is used to make sure you never miss an episode of Babylon 5 (not really very relevant anymore since the series finished, but an example of using COM with Visual C++ to talk to Outlook). It downloads the schedule from the TNT web site and updates your Outlook 98 appointment calendar with entries for each broadcast (it can also alert you when it notices changes in the schedule). Well, as soon as I released B5Outlook, TNT went and stuck the dates in the web page in a new format, so a few days after the first release, I had to make a new one :-). And, a few days later, I've made another new release (probably the last one). This one allows customization of the reminder entries for each individual episode. The qsort.zip package is the source code for a qsort library routine. The primary motivation for this was to integrate it with perl someday, so perl could avoid various quirks of several vendor's library routines. This has in fact been done, and then completely replaced by merge sort (which turned out to be faster even than qsort), so it is gone from the latest versions of perl, but I leave the original source here in case anyone wants to play with it for some reason. For folks still playing 7th Guest or 11th Hour, trilobyte.zip (198399 bytes) is my collection of programs to play games and solve puzzles which appear inside those games. Be sure you unpack the zip file with whatever option your unzipper needs to unpack directories. Both source code and binaries are included, but you may also need some libraries you can download from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/visualc/download/mfc42cab.htm. To use some of these programs (the one that play games against Stauf), you will need to be running under Windows 95 or 98 (not straight DOS), and running both the 7th Guest or 11th Hour games and my program at the same time. You can use the Alt-Tab keystroke feature of Windows 95 to switch back and forth, making Stauf's moves in my program, and my program's moves against Stauf. Alternatively, you could use two computers, but that option seems less likely to be available to most people. The checkmail.cmd script is a perl script I use to delete spam off my mail server just before I read mail. It is handy since it only reads the headers and can avoid having to download the whole message if I can tell it is obvious spam. It would need to be customized before you could use it on your own server, so you probably don't want to tackle it unless you are willing to learn something about perl programming. The upload.cmd script is the perl script I use to keep these web pages up to date. It keeps track of which pages have changed since the last upload, and automagically generates the whats-new.html file when it uploads new pages. That's it for the real software, now on to the vaporware: UCEBgone is a purely hypothetical spam filtering system which may or may not ever exist and may or may not look like this description if it ever does exist, but its fun to read about anyway. Finally, crossing the borderline between software and politics, there are these thoughts on how usenet really ought to be reorganized to make things much more difficult for the spammers. |