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| 2003-12-07 | Myer |
| Myer is a "semantic highlighter" for C code, which "colorizes identifiers and constants to show their marginal cost to the program's coupling and cohesion metrics", by "running the preprocessor in reverse". The idea is to focus review by highlighting parts of the code particularly likely to contain bugs. | |
| convertfs | |
| This tool converts filesystems (e.g. ext3 to reiserfs) in place without needing space for two copies. It does this by playing clever tricks with sparse files. "You can convert from virtually any filesystem type to virtually any one as long as they are both supported by Linux for read/write, and as long as primary filesystem supports sparse files." (Submitted by Ville Herva.) See also Parted. | |
| VSDB | |
| VSDB turns Unix filesystem guarantees (even the weak ones offered by NFS) into a transactional database without using file locking or a shared server process. It's particularly good for medium-sized, rarely updated system databases (think aliases.db). | |
| Filelight | |
| Filelight renders a cute interactive visualization of disk space consumption. See also KDirStat. | |
| Scale2x | |
| Emualator users will have seen this, but scale2x uses a simple set of rules to magnify bitmap images with neither blurring nor jaggies (the rules work best on "cartoon" images). The rules are simple enough to run on video in real time, so they are used to increase the display size of emulated games originally written for low-resolution displays. | |
| guievict | |
| "Guievict is a system for checkpointing and migrating the GUI of an X window application. It is based on a window server extension and runtime process re-writing; application binaries do not need to be modified or started in a special way to be used with guievict." It compares favorably to XMX or xmove. Some of Zandy's other software is also interesting. | |
| parchive | |
| "The original idea behind this project was to provide a tool to apply the data-recovery capability concepts of RAID-like systems to the posting and recovery of multi-part archives on Usenet." Of course this is applicable to any file distribution via unreliable media. | |
| wmctrl | |
| "The wmctrl program is a command line tool to interact with an EWMH/NetWM compatible X Window Manager." It lets you enumerate, interrogate, maximize, minimize, activate, move, resize, close windows, make windows sticky, and manage desktops from the command line. This lets you directly implement a variety of commands that would otherwise require window manager support, reducing window manager lock-in. See also Devil's Pie, an application that applies rules to windows as they're created. | |
| 2003-07-16 | Dashboard |
| Dashboard is like the Remembrance Agent, but rather than being tied to emacs it offers a system-wide architecture for capturing "clue packets" from a variety of applications, indexing them, and performing automatic search as you go about your activities. | |
| 2003-06-10 | ReVirt |
| ReVirt (part of the CoVirt project) is a complete Linux-on-Linux virtual machine with replay capability: you can explore the state of the entire virtual machine at any point in the past. For example, if you discover an intruder, you can "go back in time" to see how they broke in, watch the exploit in progress, and discover what was compromised. The overhead of virtualization and logging is only 15-30%, even for kernel-intensive applications. | |
| 2003-05-05 | Zero Install |
| "The Zero Install system makes software installation not merely easy, but unnecessary. Users run their applications directly from the internet via the software author's pages. Caching makes this as fast as running a normal application after the first time, and allows off-line use." It's basically a lazily populated filesystem interface (Linux only) to HTTP. (Submitted by Martin Pool.) | |
| 2003-04-30 | KSEG |
| KSEG is an interactive editor for geometric constructions (things you can make with a compass and straightedge). Its real power is the ability to define and reuse constructions (which are effectively geometric functions) while maintaining a direct-manipulation interface that lets you change anything and instantly see how the whole construction responds. Since constructions can be recursive, you might call this a visual geometric programming language. Included example constructions include Julia fractals, Bezier curves, conic sections, and various other crazy things. To get a feel for how it works, go through the Brief Walkthrough, then read the section on Constructions, then open julia.seg from the examples and try dragging the point "C" around. | |
| 2003-04-29 | Hierarchical Triangular Mesh |
| Everyone knows how to subdivide Euclidean space with quad-trees or space-filling curves, but what about subdividing the sphere? Projections abound for mapping the sphere to the plane, but these projections create singularities, introduce discontinuities, and suffer from anisotropy, nonuniformity or both. Hierarchical Triangular Mesh (HTM) is a uniform way to recursively decompose the sphere into labelled spherical triangles and to convert spatial queries into sets of these triangles. HTM was designed for indexing astronomical data, but should work just as well for geographical data or anything else associated with a sphere. C++ and Java libraries are included. See also HEALPix (a quadrilateral subdivision with FORTRAN code) and Clive Page's survey article Indexing the Sky. (Submitted by Ico Doornekamp.) | |
| 2003-04-22 | Scapy |
| Scapy is an interactive packet noodling tool. "It can for the moment replace hping, 85% of nmap, arpspoof, arp-sk, arping, tcpdump, tethereal, p0f, ...", but it's not just a big ball of features: Scapy defines a simple but very expressive syntax (which reuses the Python CLI) for manipulating packets, protocol layers, and sets of values, so you can easily build any of that stuff yourself in a line or two of script. | |
| 2003-04-09 | darcs |
| Darcs is yet another revision control system, but its "theory of patches" ("I have looked at patches as being analogous to the operators of quantum mechanics," says the author, a physicist) makes it at once much simpler and significantly more capable than most other such systems. See also monotone (submitted by Darius Bacon), a crypto-centric, decentralized version control system which uses NNTP as a transport. | |
| Last updated on 2003-12-07 at 17:22:31 UTC. | |