5.2 Code

Some coding things i have worked on or am working on. Those that i haven’t removed out of sheer embarrassment can be found here, though if you can find it on my emacswiki.org page, those will be better versions.

They are roughly in order of possible usefulness and/or date. Nothing earth-shaking—just thought I would put them up for the sake of completeness. They are signed with ‘Evans Winner’ or ‘Theron Ttlåx’ or ‘thorne’ or whatever i had in mind that day. I’m not gonna lie to you: most of this is either silly or is tuned for my own use and won’t appeal to anyone else. I am self-taught as a programmer, and it shows. I don’t know CS stuff; i don’t know abstract algorithms; i don’t know my O’s—big or otherwise.

Some newer things for Emacs, then Linux, and win2k/XP batch… older stuff for DOS-batch, C, and asm:

• twit.el—Post to twitter.com from Emacs. This one is hosted on the Emacs Wiki I’d like to expand it to be a useful way to read twitter, as well as just post.
• rep-words.el—Also on the Emacs Wiki. Find instances in a text in which a word is repeated too many times in too short a span, as defined by you. Recursively edit it. I used this to go through my 115,000-word novel manuscript to good effect.
• ctrl-lang.el-—Emacs generic major mode for syntax highlighting IBM AS/400 Control Language source files. Also does command documentation lookup via browse-url. It’s also about the first attempt i made at Elisp programming, so i’m afraid to look at it now.
• ul.el—Also now at the EmacsWiki Drop-in replacement for Emacs’ standard underline.el. Adds the ability to do underlining continuously or by sentence—in addition to the old by-word style. Also allows you to underline with font-lock using delimiter characters, like underscores.
• litmus.el—Emacs derived major mode for working with fiction manuscripts. Really just implements my own idea of the Right Thing. Meant to be used with my tiny set of ‘troff‘ macros, litmus.tmac.
• litmus.tmac—‘troff’ macros to make fiction easier. Only a tiny handful of markup codes allow you to get a properly formatted MS— 12 pt/10 pitch font, 60 chars per line, 25 lines per page, etc. Only works with US letter paper.
• paginate.el—A little like the ‘UNIX’ ‘pr[1]’ command, but for Emacs. Adds a header and page-break chars every N lines. Allows a lot of flexibility as to the header. Somewhat old-skool.
• wc.el—Yes, a word counter. Trivial, yet still not included in Emacs’ default distro.
• markdown.el—Tiny Emacs generic major mode for syntax highlighting Markdown source files.
• glass-poem.el—An Emacs Lisp function to take a short text phrase and turn it into minimalist/post-modern pseudo-poetry. Just for fun.
• focus-unfocus.el—Use Emacs to ’conduct’ a small ensemble. In other words, it changes the screen color on a schedule you set. Pretty silly, really.
• flog—A ‘bash’ tool for managing and updating blogs. It’s what i used for my general blog, my blog about the arts and of course, the blog about flog. I don’t use it any more though. It is a very barebones hack, but it is RSS-2.0 enabled and supports multiple blogs (by way of init files you make). Let’s say it is alpha software, so don’t use it for anything important. It requires some kind of bash shell, with the standard tools like ‘head’, ‘cat’, ‘echo’, ‘sed’, ‘grep’ and whatnot. Also requires that you be serving the pages from your local (Linux only?) machine, if that wasn’t clear. ‘flog’ is currently version 0.2.0.
• flogger—is a little tcl/tk gui front-end for flog. It’s also barebones and i’m not a real programmer, so you get what you pay for. But it works and i used to use if for my blogging. Requires tcl/tk interpreter ‘wish’ of course.
• pingls.bat—Requires win2k/XP. Automatically ping all sites in a list of sites. Options to ring system bell on failure, loop through list, delay between each ping, etc. I’ve used this at work for over a year for monitoring systems on the network. In fact, sadly, this is probably the one out of all of these i’ve actually used the most.
• filep.bat—Requires win2k/XP. Verify the existence of all files in a list of files. Outputs last-mod time as well. I use it at work to quickly verify that a bunch of files were created each day that were supposed to be created, without having to navigate to each one and look at it individually.
• csdmail—is a set of scripts and setup stuff that allows you to run a csdmail ‘server’—which is to say allows people to send csound .csd files to your machine via email where they will be automatically rendered using csound and then the resulting sound file placed in a public ftp directory for them to pick up. See the csdmail page for more info.
• mkwav.c—a tiny little thing in C that puts a 16 bit, mono, 44.1 khz .wav header on whatever arbitrary file you give it. So you can hear what that letter to grandma sounds like when played through your DAC. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now i use Linux and if i want to do this, i just ‘cat’ a file to ‘/dev/dac’. mkwav.exe is a pre-compiled DOS .exe version. It might work... I think it was compiled with djgpp for a 32 bit console.
• quote.asm—Genuinely useful replacement for DOS’s default ‘echo’ command. Okay to use with special characters (except double quotes) and no arbitrary newline added to output. 16 bit assembly code. Pre-Assembled .com file: quote.com
• jot.bat—Genuinely useful if you use DOS a lot. Quick note taker. Uses the ‘copy con’ trick, but has some nice options in case you want to use it for automatic logging of batch file output or some such. Another one that i thought it would be cute to format output with ansi.sys. Oy.
• burp.c—(or a precompiled version for (I think) 32 bit windows console: burp.exe) This is a batch utility for making N-length strings of semi-random data for automatically generating random filenames or filling up test files with data.
• findfile.bat—A little like linux ‘locate’. Lists all files under specified directory tree that match a string. Mostly for batch programming. Unfortunately it seems i wrote it requiring ansi.sys for pretty output. Stupid, stupid, stupid…
• getvpage.asm—tiny 16 bit assembly program. Returns the current video page under DOS. Pre-Assembled .com file - getvpage.com
• getvmode.asm—Returns the current video page under DOS. Pre-Assembled .com file - getvmode.com
• join.bat—DOS batch file similar to unix’s ‘cat’ command. Concatenates two text files and writes to stdout or a file. Some options about appending newlines as i recall. I think it requires the quote.exe program above, as well...
• just.bat—Output the system date or time by itself with or without a newline and without being prompted to change the time/date. For batch scripts, really.
• evac.bat—‘Evacuates’ a directory. Moves all files in the current directory to parent directory and then deletes the current directory. (Has some other options.)
• slide.bat—rather silly utility to change directory to ‘sibling’ directory. Uses cd ..\foo. Kinda pointless, really, yet i ended up using it more than any of the others.
• halt.com—Two byte 16bit DOS .com program written directly in DOS debug. Halts the system. Won’t work under 32 bit systems, of course.