Stuff I've written

Mostly this is small Unix utilities although some of them are useful on Windows too. The most important is probably XMLTV, although respell does contain a surprisingly large amount of work.

• amount: an alternative to explicitly mounting and unmounting floppy drives or using an automounter. Just stick 'umount' in front of your command line, and things will be mounted automatically and unmounted when the command has finished.
• colour_trace: a debugging aid which uniquely colours hexadecimal strings in trace output, so you can see where the same pointer value is being used.
• cpp_compress is an imperfect 'compressor' or obfuscator which #defines long strings so the C preprocessor can expand them.
• dtd2latex: convert DTDs to LaTeX source so that they can make a (reasonably) nice-looking printed document. This is not quite 'literate programming for DTDs' but it's better than nothing.
• echo_hello, a program which does what it says but is 'extensible' to other commands like echo_goodbye.
• guess_install is for programs which are useful enough to distribute, but too simple to merit a full configure script and packaging. This program just guesses where the files should be installed! You can distribute it as your install script. I plan to change some of the programs on this page to use it.
• lcra and nsra: rename all-uppercase filenames from DOS or Windows systems to more tasteful lowercase ones. Can also change other file naming conventions that don't really agree with Unix.
• The beginnings of a project for Lossy PNG image compression. It should be possible to generate smaller PNG files by losing some image detail - but the output is a completely standard PNG. So far I only have this working for compressing raw image bytes (RGB or grey), not full PNG files.
• outlook_text_to_mbox: convert the text or CSV formats produced by MS Outlook 'save as' to Unix mbox format.
• pathmerge is a small utility for more manageable setting of PATH and other variables in shell scripts.
• pip: I like to write long shell pipelines but not every program can read from stdin and write to stdout. Pip is a wrapper that turns almost anything into a filter.
• add_line and remove_line atomically add and remove lines from a file. This is sometimes useful in shell scripts which run on several machines at once.
• respell converts English text between american, british and canadian spelling conventions. It's essentially a set of three tables mapping 'words' to their spellings in the three systems, and then a program doing relational join to translate. There is a rather fiendish algorithm to 'disambiguate' a spelling convention; what this means is you can universalize a spelling system by making a few tweaks to it, so that it can be converted to any other without ambiguity. This could be useful for message catalogues.
• revert is a tool to set back timestamps on files if they have not changed relative to a 'source' file; it is a useful complement to make(1) and programs that generate source files.
• similarity-utils, a couple of programs to detect similar or almost-duplicate files.
• unacorn: a small tool to help port RISC OS Makefiles to Unix, for porting C programs.
• unarc: a command-line tool to unpack or create most common archive formats (.zip, .tar.gz, etc.). Also deals with the problem of cluttering the current directory.
• wutils is a pair of wrappers wrm and wmv which wrap rm and mv respectively, updating an Apache .htaccess file to add redirections so that links don't get broken when you move files around.
• xls-colour: a version of xmlterm's xls which supports coloured directory listings à la GNU ls.
• XMLTV: This is an XML-based file format for representing TV listings, and a suite of programs to process those listings. There are listings-grabbers for several countries and a web-based application to semi-automatically choose what you want to watch.

Web based stuff

• txt2pdf: a very basic convertor of plain text into PDF format. Sorry, not currently running on this site, but you can still download the source :-).

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