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auto-question is a basic multiple-choice question and answer program. It takes questions and a quiz configuration in XML, then presents the quiz to the user on a VT220/ANSI capable terminal. The program uses libreadline for its input handling, libexpat for reading XML files.

asmprofile is a simple assembler profiler. It looks assembler source files and generates instruction counts. The instructions it knows about are hard-coded, but easily modified. The next version will generate some more useful information, like instruction grouping info.

The bulk of this program was created by autoproject, which is suprisingly useful.

avrprog is a serial-programmer via the PC's parallel port. Currently, I've only had success in programming the AT90S8515 using this, but other chips with the SPI logic in them should work too. Never managed to get it to program the AT90S1200.. The programmer hardware is trivial, just straight-through connections:

The current state of things requires manual intervention on the AVR's reset line, as such the program must always be run with the `--nrc' option. I've also done a little diagram of the programmer. I'm powering this off an external 5v supply (old AT PSU).

cdtool is the upgrade for chcd. It's still not very clever, but it's a bit nicer. It'll change CDs on a juke-box, and eject discs. Edit the Makefile to set stuff specific to your system.

em is a simple script to allow the editing of MH mail messages. It can be run on it's own, em, or in the usual MH style, em +inbox 1000.

fbounce is a very simple port redirector. I wrote it in about 4 hours so don't expect too much! It redirects ports quite nicely.

Updated 11/12/2002, now autoconf'd / automake'd and tidied up the option processing. Got versionified, now 1.0.1.

These are my stock "support" functions for C. "dmem" is a dynamic memory allocator, loosely based on Brinch Hansen's parallel allocator with address-mapping for blocks smaller than 24k. The memory pools are arranged in "half-powers" of two, starting at 32 bytes, e.g.: 32, 48, 64, 96, 128, ... up to 32 megs. Where possible it will use anonymous memory mapping to get memory; the system malloc otherwise. The "configure.ac" file provided shows what sort of thing is needed to auto-guess the settings. The tests will not scan for a suitable memory-base, but chooses 0x40000000 on solaris and cygwin, 0x80000000 on Linux and *BSD.

The other stuff in "support" provides dynamic arrays and string-based hash tables.

l337 is a program which l337ifies text (turns it into the gibberish used by crackers and the like). There could be quite a lot more in this program, and there are probably others out there, but it's a bit of amusement. For example, the text:

There's a one-eyed yellow idol
To the north of Kathmandu;

ends up as:

7h3r3'5 4 0n3-3y3d y3ll0w 1d0l
70 7h3 n0r7h 0f K47hm4ndu;

Limitshell is a wrapper for the standard shells (+other programs). It changes the process limits before executing the real command, so that the user is limited in the amount of resources they can consume. Restrictions can be placed on CPU time, number of processes, number of open files, core file size, max file-size and max memory size (various settings).

I'm using it on my machine, and as far as I can see, it works. Read the Install file in the tar.gz archive on how to set it up. An example limits file is included.

Menutool generates simple curses-based menus. Data is supplied in a label:result format; result is printed on standard error. These lists can be specified on the command line, be piped in, or be read from a file.

Version 0.1.1 contains a re-write of the menu drawing code, and handles page up/down correctly. I've also debianized this one, sort of. There's no manual page, but it's not a very complicated application.. The MD5-sum for the .deb is ``a0c328205491b0a72a56e87d40b5bf2c menutool_0.1.1-1_i386.deb''.

Quick MoinMoin Wiki hack, turns a simple line-by-line text file formatted as 'date login description' into a nicely formatted list. Drop the script as 'newsreel.py' in your MoinMoin parser directory (usually hiding under /usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/MoinMoin/parser/ or similar).

oat, the Obscure Administration Tool, is the client side of oatd, the server. Requests are made to the server in the form oat server:file. The server responds with the correct file (based on the client's IP address), which the client spits out.

This is an occam syntax-highlighting definition for the elvis vi clone. It makes occam look pretty. You may want the occam system to go with it.

I've done a vim syntax file now as well. It's functional, but not perfect. There's also a bit of a filetype.vim file. I poked around with folding a bit, and have these bits in my .vimrc (binds {,shift} F2/F3 to {,recursively} close/open folds, F4/F5 to open-all/close-all folds) and makes the fold highlighting a bit prettier (imo).

highlight Folded ctermbg=NONE ctermfg=LightBlue
highlight FoldColumn ctermbg=NONE ctermfg=LightRed

set foldmethod=marker
set fillchars= 

map <F2> zc
map <S-F2> zC
map <F3> zo
map <S-F3> zO
map <F4> zM
map <F5> zR

pmerge is a utility which merges the contents of files (sorting them as it does), in such a way that the ordering of files on the command line determines what happens when the same key is duplicated. In some ways, it behaves a bit like the join/sort utilities. There ain't much documentation at the moment, but `--help' produces something useful.

For example, to merge 2 password files on UID, with users info in then 2nd file replacing the same user info in the 1st file (based on UID match), I would write:

  pmerge -n -f 2 -s : passwd.first passwd.second

A simple utility to turn raw binary files into Intel Hex format files (necessary for UISP), but which may have other uses. Doesn't try and do anything too fancy or clever. Compile with the usual "gcc -o rawtohex rawtohex.c".

rmsem is a simple program which removes sysv semaphore identifiers. Without any arguments, it will attempt to remove all semaphore identifiers, or you can pass semaphore ids on the command-line and it will remove those ones. Be careful about running it when other programs are using semaphores...

A C source-file is provided. To compile it, do something like:

    gcc -O3 -Wall -o ./rmsem ./rmsem.c

runas is a simple program that invokes another program (without arguments) under a different name. I wrote it because I needed to be able to launch bash as a login-session from a machine which only had csh/tcsh.

Here's the line I had in my .tcshrc file:

/home/frmb/bin/runas /bin/bash -bash && logout

s3minfo is a simple program that prints the contents of an s3m (scream-tracker) file. It'll display the header information, samples, orders and patterns from the file. The play-sample option doesn't work yet.

The sources are tar'ed/gzip'ed, and there is no Makefile. Type "gcc -O -o s3minfo s3minfo.c" will compile it nicely. There's also a nice gzip'ed static binary, should compilation fail horribly.

Finally got found to doing some more on this. Added a sample-ripper thing (to S3M samplefile format or just the raw (unsigned) data). Also autoconf'd and automake'd it.

These patches provide some additional features for SMP linux kernels. Three additional system-calls are provided:

int smp_processor( void ) returns the processor the current process is running on
int smp_lockto( int proc_id ) locks the current process to the specified processor
int smp_num_cpus( void ) returns the number of available CPUs

These are some patches for the 2.0.37, 2.2.10 and 2.2.14 linux kernels. It's unlikely that I'll do any more patches on this, as I'm looking at Tim Hockin's sysmp() patch, which is a bit more standard, and can be found here.

Update: there are some patches for RedHat kernels here as well now, for 2.2.12-20 and 2.2.16-3.

Stat is a similar program to stat on solaris. You pass it file-names and it tells you a bit about the file.

xdmchoose is a replacement chooser for XDM. but it's really on the xdmchoose page!

xsel2sel is a program that will run on one machine, connecting to many X-servers. The purpose is to allow the transfer of selection data between servers. It's only really useful if you've got two X-servers on your desk, or if you want to be able to send selections to friends. The README file explains how to use it. The asthetics are a bit poor at the moment but I'm planning on fluffing it up.

You really need a 3 button mouse to use all the nice features (look in README).