Hacking

Hacking is a passion of mine. No, not cracking into other people's computers, but simply writing my own software for doing my own thing. The great thing about a *NIX OS is that hacking is easy. The great thing about a well-documented, stable, and correctness-focussed *NIX like OpenBSD is that hacking is fun.

This page is host to some of the software I've written over the years for recreational/slacking purposes. I only include un-maintained software for (1) my own pride, and (2) other hackers who may find it useful.

Current Distractions

Projects I'm currently engaged in...

vitunes (2008 - today): A curses-based equivalent to iTunes©. It can index any tagged media files and provides a quick, easy-to-use vi-like interface for browsing/playing media, and creating playlists.
?talk (2009): As avid users of talk(1), Neal and I are often bitten by the limitations of it... namely, no saving of sessions. We're putting together a talk(1)-compatible replacement with features we would like. We're still working on a name.
nooBSD (2009): Not really a new distro, but a project dedicated to help noob's with OpenBSD.

Completed & Maintained

These are projects that I've completed (for now), but actively maintain because I use them.

scrotwm-color-bar: A small patch that can be added to scrotwm to enable coloring the text displayed in the bar using a simple markup language.
phpSymon (2004-2009): A simple PHP package that connects to a symon server, grabs the system stats for a given host, and displays those stats in a graphical fashion on a webpage.
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xstatbar (2009): A simple system monitor for X, showing CPU usage (supports multicore CPU's), memory & swap usage, number of processes, battery status, and volume info. I wrote this to replace my xosd-* applications below, which do not integrate well with scrotwm (the window manager I use).
batalert (2009): Whenever I'm on my laptop with no power source around, I always lose track of how much battery time I have left. This program tries to be as annoying as possible in alerting you that your battery will die soon.
minftp client (2007): A simple RFC 959 compliant ftp client. It supports slightly more than what is listed in § 5.1 “Minimum Implementation” of RFC 959.
SapioGo, libnnet, libsane (2005): My undergraduate senior design project with Kevin Upchurch, which won 2005 Senior Design Project of the Year in Computer Science at UC. We created a program called SapioGo which uses the genetic algorithm SANE to evolve a neural network at playing the game of Go. libnnet is the neural network library I wrote, and libsane is the SANE library I wrote.
DisplayOrdinal (2004): A simple C program and JavaScript page that can be used to show the set-theoretic representation of natural numbers (a.k.a. the ordinals).
Stats Helper (2004): A simple JavaScript page that can be used to quickly calculate various statistics about a set of numbers. My wife was taking a statistics course and we couldn't afford one of those fancy calculators that made life easy... so being the good nerd I am, I put this together.

Completed & Un-Maintained

These are projects that I've completed but no longer use or maintain. So sad, all that time spent for each (they were worth it). This is just a handful.

xosd-clock (2004-2009): A simple, text-only, easily configurable clock for X. Display can be configured using any format acceptable to strftime(3).
xosd-systat (2009): A simple, text-only, system monitor for X, showing (essentially) the first few lines of top(1).
xosd-battery (2009): A simple, text-only battery monitor for X, where information is queried using sysctl(3) rather than the apm(4) device (handy for some laptops with bad apm(4) support but a working sysctl(3) for battery info).
find-sensor-mibs (2008): This program can be used to find the MIBs (Message Interface Buffer) of all sensors available via sysctl(3), which is necessary to actually query that sensor. Although one shouldn't hard-code any MIB, this code shows you how to search through all sensors attached in sysctl(3) and find one matching the “name” you want.
Realms (2003): This is a 2D, sprit-based game (similar to Zelda©) that was a LaRC project. It was never completed, but might serve useful to anyone interested in creating a similar style game. The documentation actually shows the evolution of the architecture over about the 3 month period it was developed.
BJ's Compound (2001): This is a Wolfenstien-like game that's written in 100% x86 assembly. It was for an assembly class I took at UC in 2001... sweet lord, this was a class-wide group project with 12 people, 5 of which did nothing, and those of us who wrote this did NOT follow any good software design/engineering approach.... when writing assembly. This project was hell, and it's a true testament to pure hacking, poor design, and the insomnia we all mastered that quarter.