News You Can Bruise for 2005 January 23 (entry 1)

Sun Jan 23 2005 18:00 PST Crouching Software, Hidden Roundup: Yes, it's the first Software Roundup in a year and a half! And I still have a backlog of 137 non-game items to investigate. Since statistics prove the real draw to this site is the Game Roundup, I'm posting this first and the new GR will follow.

• Debian is taking over! At least it is when you run debtakover, the program that turns non-Debian systems into Debian systems.
• I always hated the POV-Ray language, but pypov lets me program it in Python. Thus proving that the real reason I hated it was that I'm incompetent at graphics programming. Thanks, pypov, for invalidating my lame excuses!
• Magic Rescue is an attempt at an undelete utility for Linux.
• You know all those specialized database programs for keeping track of your wine or whatever? Who has so much wine that they need a database? Anyway, Happydigger keeps track of the archaeological artifacts you find while messing around with a metal detector. I wonder if there's another such specialized software for keeping track of your paleontological finds? I don't see one, but I did find the cool Paleontology Database Network and the USGS' Paleodata, which doesn't seem to exist yet.
• It was probably not a very gutsy move for Freshmeat to accept this clone of Freshmeat to its application database. But there it is.
• SlideRule does what it says. Nice scrolling trick on the webpage, too.
• letterize is supposed to give you mneumonics for your phone number: a boon for those of us who can't remember our own phone numbers. But if your phone number's the same as mine, and I don't see why that shouldn't be the case, it will just print a newline and exit. I guess this could itself be a sort of mneumonic, but one that would require keeping a copy of the program around. I'll stick to my checksum-based mneumonic.
• NanoHive, in addition to having a great name, is a simulation tool for demonstrating physical properties on the nanometer level. It's like the haptic nanoCAD program in The Diamond Age, but harder to use. I say wait for the haptic version unless you're a big nanotech nerd (or perhaps I should say, an incredibly small nanotech nerd). Sure makes cool demos though.
• Timekeeping Mini-Roundup

  The forward progression of time. Without it, would our universe be the same? No one can say for sure. Here are four programs that react in various ways to the asymmetric dimension that really puts the "time" into "space-time"!

  • orbitclock the time in the sort of format you might see on one of the computers on Deep Space Nine. Not liable for inaccuracies caused by chronoton distortion.
  • gtoday displays the fixed and movable feasts of the Greek calendar. I don't read Greek or know anything about the feasts, but I assume it does what it's supposed to.
  • First there was phase-of-the-moon software. Now there's sunwait, the crunch that's a blast to munch. I mean, the program that lets you set up a cronjob to turn on your house lights 5 minutes before sunset every day. Or activate your solar-powered deathbots from their long slumber. Just as an example.
  • Speaking of the sun, its reliable machinations form the basis for the atronomical Rube Goldberg device that is IridiumFlares. It tells you when and where to look to see Old Yeller's light bounce off an Iridium satellite, or bounce off the moon, then hit a satellite and head right for your eyeball. Tip: if you mention Iridium in your software somewhere where I can see it, I am almost certain to include it in a roundup.
• The Revisionist snoops through Microsoft Word's internal versioning metadata to prove once and for all that, eg., joint-company press releases are largely created ahead of time and the people in question never actually said those lame quotes. Be still, my heart! Has other, more interesting uses.
• BBS nostalgia reaches new heights with DuhDraw, a clone of the venerable TheDraw ANSI-art program.
• Keep Subversion and CVS repositories in sync with svn2cvs. Satisfy your local CVS bigot. Are there CVS bigots anymore? Surely the one thing that unites all version control system bigots is the lameness of CVS.
• enblend is a neat little one-trick pony that improves the look of panoramic pictures made out of multiple smaller pictures.
• And finally, lipotell is a script optimized for finding the parts of your filesystem that have all the space-taking-up junk. Those files have no right to be so large!

The winner: pypov, which I hope people more graphically inclined than I get some good use out of. And now, the traditional prize of a limerick, soon to be a major driver in improving open source software quality:

pypov shows me why, back in the day
I couldn't use POV-Ray
They say only fools
Go blaming their tools
I've just about had it with "they".