Some half-finished bits and bats

Last updated Tuesday 21st January 2003

 

Over the years I've played around with all sorts of little projects, some of which have even been useful.

Every now and again, one of these projects 'comes up' (ie. someone requests something similar) and I find myself having to say "Well... here's a little something... It isn't finished and I don't guarantee it'll even run, never mind work, but you're welcome to a copy."

That, in essence, is what this little bit of my site is for: to distribute things that aren't really finished to the standard that would let me release them properly, if you see what I mean.

 

DISCLAIMERS & WARRANTIES

NB: Absolutely nothing here comes with any warranty of any kind. This software is released in the hope that it might prove useful for someone, but please do be aware that I don't consider these projects to be at all 'complete'.

Everything here has been used/tested, some of it quite seriously, but I make absolutely no guarantees that it will work for you.

In no circumstances shall I be liable for any loss or damage caused by this software - use at your own risk. I am quite happy to receive bug reports, etc. however, and will try to help out if things don't work.

 

DirDiff

Purpose:
DirDiff is a simple, but useful, tool intended to help with the process of checking that backups are acurate.

Basically, it's a fast(ish), smart(ish) directory-contents comparison tool. Special kludges, um, features include the ability to mangle filenames (with a warning) a la CDFS and some other stuff I can't remember right now.

The archive includes full source-code. Which may well be a mess - I don't recall...

Limitations:
There's at least one bug - 'show progress' prevents dirdiff from aborting a file comparison after the first difference is detected. Hardly serious.
The help text is sufficiently out of date that I can't remember which bits of it are out of date ;-)

Download:
DirDiff 1.21 (26 Mar 2000) (23Kb Zipfile)

 

CDPrep

Purpose:
CDPrep is a simple but fast tool to take suitable WAV (or raw CD data) audio files and convert them into raw CD audio files (eg. for use with CDBurn, etc) with optional fade-in/fade-out and extra silence at the start/end.
It was originally written to make my life easier when sampling audio with an i16 card that I then wanted to 'tidy up' and put on a CD.

Limitations:
CDPrep does no sample-rate conversion, although it only raises a warning rather than refusing to run. Also, only 16-bit stereo audio is supported.
The desktop front-end is rather primitive and you'll probably want something like 'PlaySound' (which uses Rick Hudson's PlayIt module) in order to make good use of it.

Download:
CDPrep 0.05beta (23 Jul 1999) (18Kb Zipfile)

 

FancyCode

Purpose:
FancyCode is a simple little tool to take C (or C++) source code and turn it into nicely formatted fancytext (ie. 1stWord+ style, which !Printers will print directly using a printer's text font), DDF (for use with Impression) or HTML (for use on the... Oh, you get the idea).

Limitations:
Very few that I'm aware of. Some buffers in the code are of a fixed size, but this shouldn't be a problem... unles your code has variable names, etc. longer than 256 characters, or more than 32Kb of comment all in one chunk.

Download:
Fancycode 2.12 (5 Dec 1996) (54Kb Zipfile)
(source code is included in the archive).

 

Netplex CGI Utilities

Purpose:
This is basically a translation of Netplex's BASIC CGI library into C. The archive also contains four example CGIs for use with Netplex: a web counter, an automatic index generator, a pig-latic generator and an 'ftp-like' server to allow access to directories outside the normal server tree.

Limitations
The documentation is a bit hit and miss. In particular, there's little to no documentation on the Library itself (hopefully this doesn't matter - it's functionally almost identical to the BASIC version supplied with Netplex, and the examples should fill in the rest) but the individual CGIs are fairly well covered.

Download:
My CGI stuff for Netplex (112Kb Zipfile)
(source code is included in the archive).

 

TapeFit

Purpose:
TapeFit is a fairly powerful little tool to work out the optimum arrangement of (music) tracks to cassettes. I originally wrote it to help me create 'walkman' compilations from CDs which had no gaps at the end of either side.

There was an early version of TapeFit released (to HENSA) quite a while ago, and since then I've tweaked, refined and extended it considerably. Unfortunately, I never quite got it 'finished' enough to make a second proper release.

Limitations:
Again, there's not much actually wrong with this version. It does, however, still have one or two bugs that can show up under some circumstances (specifically, when fixed tracks are used). Having said that, I use TapeFit often and seldom have aby trouble at all with it.

Download:
TapeFit 1.03/2.42 (25 May 1998) (67Kb Zipfile)
(full source code is included in the archive).

 

WebMan

(As featured in Acorn User! No, really!)
Purpose:
WebMan is a simple, clean, fast tool to help with the management of websites.
Specifically, WebMan maintains a database that represents files present on the (remote) website and can compare that against the local copy of the site in order to work out what operations (uploads, deletions, etc.) are required to make the remote site up to date with respect to the local copy.
As a bonus, output may be in the form of a command script to throw at sFTP. This allows website maintenance to be handled by simply running obeyfiles to upload changes and acknowledge than an upload succeded.

Limitations
Like I say, it's simple and clean. That means that there's no fancy user-interface, for instance. Use is very simple, although if the idea of editing an obey file in order to specify an option or two scares you then this probably isn't for you...
I'm not aware of any bugs - WebMan is here because it simply isn't finished (ie. it was intended to have a nice desktop front-end but I haven't gotten around to that yet).
Version 0.05 includes (amongst other refinements) support for automatic generation of chmod commands, etc. on a 'by filetype' basis. This can also be used to prevent certain filetypes from being uploaded, etc.
NB: Version 0.04 contained a bugette which meant that deletion commands weren't properly written to the sFTP scriptfile output. Version 0.05 and later fix this.
Kell Gatherer is developing a desktop front-end for WebMan which is available from his site (see below).

My thanks to Philip Ludlam for making WebMan 32bit compatible.

Version 0.06 is 32bit compatible. Versions 0.05 and earlier are not 32bit compatible.

Download:
WebMan 0.01 (19 Jan 1999) (22Kb ZipFile)
(the archive includes documentation and full source code).
WebMan 0.05 (18 Sep 1999) (29Kb ZipFile)
(the archive includes documentation and full source code).
WebMan 0.06 (20 Jan 2003) (40Kb ZipFile) 32bit compatible
(the archive includes documentation and full source code).
!WebMan - Kell Gatherer's desktop front-end version (includes the above).

 

DISCLAIMERS & WARRANTIES

NB: Absolutely nothing here comes with any warranty of any kind. This software is released in the hope that it might prove useful for someone, but please do be aware that I don't consider these projects to be at all 'complete'.

Everything here has been used/tested, some of it quite seriously, but I make absolutely no guarantees that it will work for you.

In no circumstances shall I be liable for any loss or damage caused by this software - use at your own risk. I am quite happy to receive bug reports, etc. however, and will try to help out if things don't work.

 

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