News You Can Bruise for 2003 June 14

Sat Jun 14 2003 23:07 Amazing Software Roundup: That is, the roundup is amazing as always, but some of the software is also amazing. This software roundup will take you to the depths of a star about to explode, to various abstract mathematical spaces, and to the Francophone region of your choice. Live the adventure! No refunds.

• GPSFET lets you modify the firmware of a GPS device. I can't think of any GPS hacks, but I'll keep thinking and let you know.
• With polyb you could explore the world of my crazy Tetris idea.
• Celestial Bodies Mini-Roundup

  A few entries about things that orbit other things.

  • Now that Celestia exists I'm more sympathetic to software that displays the sky as we see it trapped on Earth. Satellitarium shows you where to look for satellites. Like Heavens-Above for your desktop.
  • Boom simulates the collapse of a type II supernova's iron core. I know absolutely nothing about this, and "like most one dimensional hydrodynamical code, it does not produce an exploding supernova," but at least it uses Subversion and has a wiki.
  • XCore deals with a different kind of core: the kind you get by drilling a chunk out of the earth. It uses the earth itself as its user interface!
  • MyMoon gives you information about your moon. (This is the moon that we all share, so don't hog it.)
• Nice gives design by contract and various Python-esque language goodness to Java.
• ep perverts the notion of Unix pipes in a way not seen since the unveiling of tee caused riots at the 1913 USENIX. It lets you define redirects of output to input using configuration files or command-line switches. It looks like you can feed the stdout of one process into the stdin of another, and then feed that process' stdout into the stdin of the original process, in a reign of madness with no end. I say this because there's an item in the TODO: "Add end to reign of madness."
• Condenser finds and removes duplicated code from your Java programs.
• Thanks to Sumana I have an old-school XT keyboard that I use, but if you're using those aggravating modern keyboards with funky buttons that start up Outlook or play the CD in your CD drive, you can use eventd to get those keys to do something.
• RSS Mini-Roundup

  Today we pause in our labors to look at RSS aggregator programs with funny names.

  • I've been trying out Feed On Feeds by Crummy reader Steve Minutillo. It's a server-side aggragator, it's good, and it's getting better. I may be using it as the framework for the mega finder-of-new-content-I-like thing I'll write eventually. Steve, if the RE-based implementation of Magpie doesn't work out for you, you might want to try lastRSS.
  • RSS Mix Tape is a Python/KDE RSS reader. But there's more! You can pick posts you like, add comments to them, and generate your own RSS feed with the comments. It's like having a weblog that only exists as an RSS feed!
  • rawdog, the RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur, generates an HTML page full of aggragated goodness, much like pyblagg.
• FilterProxy is what you think it is. You can use it to change webpages on the fly.
• Verbiste slices and dices French verbs.
• Mathomatic is a portable, fast CAS. It differentiates better than I do. Has bonus "tally" mode where you just type in numbers and it keeps a running total.

Because the poem I came up with mentions a bunch of different programs from this week's roundup, the poem is not a prize. My favorites of the roundup are ep and FOF.

While trying to get to the bar
I got lost in the core of a star
My GPS reads
Only RSS feeds
Which is useless when driving a car

Sat Jun 14 2003 23:33: Oh, that reminds me to tell you about the little test I ran on the readers of pyblagg. I kept track of how many people from pyblagg hit the May 26 Game Roundup versus the Software Roundup that immediately preceded it.

• Game Roundup: 4 hits
• Software Soundup: 16 hits

Clearly, pyblagg readers preferred the great taste of Software Roundup by a hefty margin. This is a shame because the poem I wrote for Game Roundup was a lot better. SR had more stuff though.