Further, please note that this software is provided ``as is'', without any express or implied warranties, and so on, and so forth. In fact, for all you know it will reformat your disks and mail me your password files, and you should treat it accordingly.
Finally, please send any useful modifications, comments, or observations to me, so that I can maintain and improve these programs.
Most of this software is pretty old and not very polished. I haven't touched it or looked at it in a while and probably don't maintain it. On the other hand, if you decide to distribute a derived version, or have a patch you want to contribute, please let me know.
active files and generates a
pattern, suitable for an INN newsfeeds entry, which when matched
against one file produces only the entries that are also in the other
file. It makes use of wildcards to compress the pattern. It will fetch
an active file from a server via NNTP, which makes it ideal for news
sites who want to re-generate their newsfeeds entries, or who want to
send a new newsfeeds entry to a site that is feeding them. (This is
most useful between sites neither of which has a full feed.) I have a
faint hope that this may promote a more redundantly-interconnected
Usenet, and reduce article propagation times and lossage and tooth
decay and urban blight, or maybe it will just get me my rec.arts.sf
postings faster. Here is the article
I posted to alt.sources.
Here is a DNS module I wrote a few years ago (around '94, I guess). It basically implements a DNSMessage class and a family of subclass and component classes, and ways to encode a message into the rfc1035 on-the-wire format, and decode it again. It's very easy to make custom DNS clients or servers this way. It's not heavily documented, but if you're familiar with the DNS protocol its usage should be obvious, I hope. Here's the module: [ rfc1035.py ] (and a simple example of using it as a client). It's one of the first things I ever wrote in Python, so be easy on it. (Note: I have a newer version of this which implements a lot more of the DNS protocol, including dynamic updates, secure DNS, and the like. Mail me if interested. [2Feb2000])
In the course of other software development, I wrote a module which parses XDR definition files (and by extension, RPC definition files) into an internal form, and another module which emits Python code to implement Packer and Unpacker classes and workable skeletons of client classes, all of which work with the rpc.py module in the 1.4 distribution. Here's the article I posted.
I've written an RPC-based audio-CD information server, which works with an upcoming release of OmniCD, a CD player app for NEXTSTEP. The server serves from multiple workmandb-format databases, as well as being able to talk to remote CDDBP servers and cache their results locally. The format of the information it serves is fairly high-level, being a synthesis of the WorkMan and Xmcd database formats. The server isn't done yet, but watch this space.
A while ago I wrote a utility to program PIC 16C84 microcontrollers via a simple parallel port adapter on a Linux or NetBSD box. (The only unusual thing about this being the Linux/NetBSD part.)