Software

I've been a Unix geek for a while now, and I've written a number of tools over time. As I write things I think will be interesting or useful to anyone but me, I'll put them here... for free, as my Unix cult membership requires.

I used to write a lot in Perl. I'm now officially a Perl Apostate, and do everything new in Python. I also have a growing collection of Scheme libraries and scripts (using the Chicken implementation).

dtcommand

This is a quick Korn shell convenience script which creates escape-sequence control strings for DtTerms. This doesn't do much useful unless you have CDE and use the dtterms. So, you can do things like BOLD=`dtcommand foreground blue` and put the variable $BOLD in your prompt string, and voilá your prompt is blue. Just remember to put a $PLAIN at the end of the prompt.

tardist

This is a simple perl script which I use to bundle up software. Normally, makefiles can be made to do this, but that's often overkill. This file uses mechanisms already used by the ExtUtils libraries that are now distributed with perl. Really, it's just a simple wrapper. Having said that, it's darned useful.

ipcat

(In Python) This is a simple version of cat(1) which looks at each line. If it finds something which looks like an IP address, it attempts to do a name lookup on it. Currently it keeps a hash of resolved addresses in core to speed up lookup times. Added: 01Oct98.

nigh

(In Python) This looks for DNS-named neighbors near (or nigh) to a given address. Look at the code for more detailed documentation and justification. Added: 10Nov98

PyKstat

This is a Python interface to the Solaris kstat(3k) interface. Now you can get machine load and all the data in iostat, vmstat and nfsstat from the comfort of your Python interpreter without forking! Updated: 13mar2001.

Ratio

(Python) Notice that this module lives at another web site. I released this software for other geeky musicians interested in Just Intonation. I quickly got sick of fiddling with all the ratios by hand, so wrote this over a few weekends. 4Nov99.

period.py

March 2015: An updated version of this is available in PyPI now, period 0.6. You should use that version

This is a Python library which allows you to specify complex time periods, things like Weekday.Hr07-11,13-17. Once you have specified a time period, you can check to see if some time is within that time period . By default, it checks against the current computer time. Can also try to determine if a day is a holiday. Last updated on 2jan2002.

PyLisp

This is a Python library which implements a simple lisp-1 interpreter. This is very alpha software, and the interpreter is quite brittle. Some day in the future it'll have expert system code incorporated. 16may2001.