Index Librorum Liberorum

Contents of http://www.fourmilab.ch/

by John Walker
15th January 2004

Frame-based site navigator.
Frequently asked questions.


Overview

My Web tree is organised as a collection of subdirectories, each containing a separate package or class of files (for example, electronic texts of public domain works, short documents, etc.). The directories and their contents are listed briefly below, followed by detailed descriptions of each. After the summary brief notes point out recently added or updated items. You're welcome to any and all of this stuff; except as otherwise noted, it's all in the public domain and you can do anything you like with it.
  • anagram: Anagram Finder lets you search for anagrams using your own computer.
  • atlast: Embeddable FORTH-like language kernel in C.
  • autofile: The Autodesk File, a 1994 history of Autodesk in documents.
  • autostock: Annotated database and chart of Autodesk stock from IPO to present.
  • babbage: Explore The Analytical Engine through historical documents and a Java-based emulator.
  • basket: Excel spreadsheet for evaluating performance of currency baskets.
  • bget: Memory allocation package for embedded systems in C.
  • bullets: Windows screen saver that riddles your screen with bullet holes.
  • cellab: CelLab: programmable cellular automata simulator
  • cites: Citations of this site by Web critics.
  • codegroup: Encode/decode binary file as five-letter code groups.
  • craters: Windows screen saver that simulates cratering of planets.
  • cship: Explore special relativity through starship flight simulation.
  • dictool: OpenWindows access tool for "Languages of the World" CD-ROM.
  • diesel: Tiny string macro language embeddable in applications. In C.
  • documents: Assorted documents by John Walker, most ASCII, some PostScript.
  • earthscr: Windows 32-bit screen saver that shows the Earth from a variety of viewpoints.
  • earthview: Interactive server lets you view the Earth and Moon.
  • etexts: Public domain electronic books edited by John Walker.
  • evilempire: The "Evil Empires" bumper sticker, in PostScript and PNG image formats.
  • fist: Program, dating from 1969, which prints a clenched fist along with the slogan of your choice.
  • français: Resources for learning French.
  • ftpreport: Reformat FTP activity report as Excel CSV database or HTTP log.
  • gravitation: Documents and interactive applets illustrating aspects of General Relativity.
  • hackdiet: The Hacker's Diet book and support software.
  • homeplanet: Home Planet: free Earth/Planetarium/Satellite for Windows 3.1, 95, and NT.
  • hotbits: HotBits: radioactively-generated random bytes, as uncertain as the universe.
  • md5: Command line utility computes MD5 digital signatures on Unix and Windows.
  • milscrsv: Millennium Screen Saver counts down to doomsday for ill-conceived software.
  • minerats: Can low-cost semi-autonomous robots help rid the world of land mines?
  • moontool: OpenWindows tool to display phase of moon and other info.
  • moontoolw: Microsoft Windows tool to display phase of moon and other info.
  • netpbm: Additions to the NETPBM portable bitmap toolkit.
  • onetime: Generates one-time key pads or password lists.
  • palm: Tools for the Palm Computing platform (Palm, PalmPilot, etc.).
  • poss: Excel catalogue of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.
  • pstampr: A small, robust rasteriser for lines and filled polygons.
  • random: A program to test the randomness of data streams.
  • rpkp: Archives of the RetroPsychoKinesis Project.
  • serverstats: Access and browser statistics for this server, updated daily.
  • settime: Utility to set clock of Unix machine from U.S. time standard.
  • skyscrsv: Windows screen saver that shows the sky: stars, planets, etc.
  • slidescr: Slide Show Screen Saver shows images and plays sound files from a directory.
  • smartall: Debugging layer for malloc()/free(), finds leaks, clobbers, etc.
  • solar: Solar System Live: interactive orrery on the Web.
  • splits: Split a file into arbitrary-sized pieces.
  • stego: Steganosaurus: hide encrypted binary file as gibberish text.
  • terranova: Visit a new terraformed planet every day.
  • uscode: Complete U.S. Internal Revenue and Immigration and Nationality Codes.
  • webtools: Tools for World-Wide Web authors and site managers.
  • yoursky: Your Sky makes star maps for any location on Earth at any date and time.
  • xd: Extended dump and load program; use any text editor on binary files.
  • xsunclock: OpenWindows program to show day and night; tracks satellites.

  • New and Improved...

  • rpmsize: Find packages clogging your hard drive in Linux distributions.
  • The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
  • How to Mount a Lens on a Linhof Technika Recessed Lensboard.
  • anagram: Anagram Finder lets you search for anagrams using your own computer.
  • Art of Money Getting: P.T. Barnum's Art of Money Getting.
  • fist: Program, dating from 1969, which prints a clenched fist along with the slogan of your choice.
  • In Darkness: Africa--Eclipse 2001. Images of the total solar eclipse of June 21st, 2001, observed near Lusaka, Zambia.
  • Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy-Content?. Einstein's 1905 paper which derived the equivalence of mass and energy.
  • The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition--in Your Palm: a Palm Memo Pad document rendering portable the wisdom of the Ferengi.
  • qprint: Encode/decode files in MIME "Quoted-Printable" encoding.
  • Naked Eye Sun-Spotting: On rare occasions near the peak in solar activity, a sunspot group large enough to be glimpsed without optical assistance (other than a safe solar filter) traverses the Sun's disc. The document chronicles the extraordinary sunspot group of late September 2000 and provides tips for observing the next such event.
  • flashback: Flashback creates snapshot backups of directories you're working on to save yourself from fat finger incidents.
  • On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. Einstein's original 1905 paper introducing special relativity.
  • Vacuum Propellers speculates on "propellantless propulsion" which violates no law of physics.
  • hackdiet: The Hacker's Diet computer tools now available for the PalmPilot.
  • Viewing Venus in Broad Daylight: When Venus is bright and far from the Sun you can see it in broad daylight with the unaided eye.
  • The Three Inner Planets: Have you seen ever Mercury? Here's how.
  • eclipse99: Images of the total solar eclipse of August 11th, 1999 from Esfahan, Iran.
  • How to Play DVDs with any Region Code on Windows 98. Defeat region code locking in Microsoft's DVD Player and view DVDs from all around the world. (May not work with all DVD decoder cards.)
  • Blazing Satellites: Guns in Space. Manned orbiting battle stations, armed with rapid-fire machine guns! Bad science fiction? Well, actually, space age history, just recently revealed. Read all about it, and explore guns in space: yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
  • Slide Show Screen Saver shows images and plays sound files from a directory.
  • Switzerland from Space fuses Space Shuttle imagery and Web navigation to let you explore the home of the www.fourmilab.ch server from orbit.
  • Your Sky makes star maps for any location on Earth at any date and time.
  • babbage: Explore The Analytical Engine through historical documents and a Java-based emulator.
  • gravitation: Bending Spacetime in the Basement demonstrates the universality of gravitation by showing the attraction between masses of less than a kilogram.
  • cellab: CelLab: programmable cellular automata simulator
  • rpkp: RetroPsychoKinesis Project experiments now on-line.
  • hotbits: Radioactively-generated random bytes, now with direct access from Java.

  • Detailed Descriptions

    anagram

    Did you know that "aim of blur" is an anagram of "Fourmilab"? Well, now you can find all kinds of cool anagrams yourself, on your own computer, without even connecting to the Internet. Fourmilab's Anagram Finder is a command-line program which finds all the anagrams of a given phrase made up of words from a list of 117972 words legal in the popular crossword game. You can build your own dictionaries from custom word lists and search for anagrams using them. The program is written in C++ and may be built on any system with a modern, compatible, compiler such as GCC. A ready-to-run Win32 executable and complete source code are available. Written in the literate programming style, the hyperlinked source code may be read on line.

    atlast

    ATLAST (Autodesk Threaded Language Application System Toolkit) is a (very) FORTH-like language kernel designed to be embedded into applications, rendering them extensible to a degree far beyond normal macro languages. Indeed, using ATLAST, it is often possible, in the spirit of FORTH, to "factor out" much of the control structure from an application, reducing it to a set of data-driven services whose interaction can be modified by the user with ATLAST. ATLAST is written entirely in portable C, and has been tested on MS-DOS, Windows, a variety of Unix machines, and the Macintosh. Complete documentation is included in PostScript, Microsoft Word (PC/Mac RTF format), and LaTeX source code form. ATLAST has been placed in the public domain and may be used without restriction or compensation.

    autofile

    The Autodesk File, 4th (1994) edition. The history of Autodesk and AutoCAD told through contemporary documents, edited and annotated by Autodesk founder John Walker. You can read this 900 page book on-line on the World-Wide Web, or download a copy to read or print off-line in either PostScript or Adobe Acrobat PDF format. (Free Adobe Acrobat Reader software for the Macintosh, Windows, DOS, and various Unix workstations is available directly from Adobe Systems.) The WWW and Adobe Acrobat versions have hot-links for all table of contents items, cross-references, and index entries. These files are big; think before you download.

    autostock

    Microsoft Excel database of Autodesk, Inc. stock (NASDAQ-ADSK) from its initial public offering to the present (I usually update the database quarterly). Daily high, low, and closing prices are included, along with volume. Annotations point out significant events in the company's history and contemporary news items. All quarterly sales and earnings reports are noted. A daily price chart linked to the database is included as well as a database which ranks Autodesk among countries of the world, considering its most recent yearly sales as Gross Domestic Product and number of employees as population is included. Charts of the relative strength of Autodesk stock compared to shares of Borland, IBM, Intergraph, Microsoft, and the Dow Jones 30 Industrials are available, as well as a chart which compares stock performance under each "administration"--chairbeing and president--since Autodesk's initial public stock offering in 1985. Requires Microsoft Excel 5.0 or above.

    babbage

    In 1837, Charles Babbage invented The Analytical Engine, a mechanical card-programmed digital computer which anticipated almost every aspect of the electronic computers which would not appear for more than a century afterward. These pages are a virtual museum where you can explore the Engine both through historical documents and a Java-based emulator which allows you to experience for yourself what it would have been like to program a steam-powered computer.

    basket

    This directory contains the file basket.zip, a PKZIP archive which extracts into the file basket.xls. This is a Microsoft Excel 5.0 (or above) workbook which allows you to compose baskets of the major trading currencies: Swiss Franc, German Mark, British Pound, Japanese Yen, and U.S. Dollar and evaluate their performance over the period 1984-1994 in terms of overall gain or loss, yearly volatility, and maximum gain and/or loss from the initial position. Results are presented both for investors who "keep score" in US$ and Swiss Francs. A monthly database of currency values is included.

    bget

    The BGET Memory allocation package. Useful for stand-alone (embedded systems) use and as a replacement for malloc and other system-provided allocators which may be too slow or otherwise unattractive. Layering this package under the Microsoft Windows 3.1 allocator, for example, sped up some programs by a factor of 10. Extensive diagnostic and debugging support is provided, to help find memory leaks, clobbered buffers, use of pointers to released buffers, etc. In portable C.

    bullets

    The Bullets Screen Saver extends the life of your monitor by riddling it with indiscriminate gunfire, complete with (optional) sound effects. Both a ready-to-install screen saver for Windows 95 and source code are available.

    cellab

    Cellular Automata Laboratory invites you to explore the world of cellular automata with the aid of high-speed programmable simulators for both MS-DOS and Windows. Cellular automata rules are defined by short programs written in Java, C, Pascal, or BASIC; rule definitions in Java can be compiled even if you don't have a Java compiler by using a Web-based compilation server. The accompanying on-line laboratory manual, equivalent to more than 250 printed pages, explains the theory of cellular automata, how to use the simulator programs, documents the many ready-to-run rules included, describes how to create your own original experiments, and contains a comprehensive bibliography.

    codegroup

    Utility which encodes and decodes binary files into five-letter code groups just like secret agents use. Handy for sending small binary messages by telephone, radio, or telegraph.

    craters

    What better way to protect your monitor's phosphor than by smashing rocks into it at dozens of kilometres per second? This directory contains a Windows screen saver named "Craters" which simulates cratering of initially flat terrain, obeying the same power-law relating crater size to number observed on airless solar system bodies. Ready-to-use screen savers for both Windows 3.x and Windows 95 and complete source code are available for downloading.

    cship

    The only reason Einstein's special theory of relativity seems weird to those learning it is that the velocities we're familiar with are such a tiny fraction of the speed of light we've never had a chance to gain an intuitive sense of relativistic effects. If the speed of light were 100 kilometres per hour, footballers would have no trouble dealing with relativistic goal shots. C-ship uses computer image synthesis to put you aboard a starship entirely consistent with the laws of physics and lets you look out the window to experience special relativity with your own eyes.

    dictool

    OpenWindows tool for accessing the "Languages of the World" CD-ROM of language dictionaries. Provides pop-up language dictionary tools with an inverted index that allows near-instantaneous access to dictionaries on the CD-ROM.

    diesel

    Dumb Interpretively Executed String Expression Language in portable C. This is the kernel of a tiny string language you can embed in applications which need limited macro facilities. You can extend the function set by supplying C code. DIESEL is used in AutoCAD for menu macro processing, and has been released into the public domain by Autodesk, Inc.

    documents

    Assorted documents:

    rocketaday
    A Rocket A Day Keeps the High Costs Away asks why it is, considering that the V2 cost about US$13,000 each (1945 dollars) and could be launched at rates approaching 100 a week, that today's launchers cost 1000 times as much. A market-oriented approach to overcome the current cost barrier to space development is suggested.

    c64neural
    A neural network simulator associative memory demonstration for the Commodore 64--really! Includes complete source code in BASIC.

    cites
    Citations of this site by Web critics.

    eht
    Three great twentieth-century physicists: Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Frank Tipler stand before the Throne of God on Judgement Day. Original science fiction story.

    hackants13
    Rudy Rucker's recent science fiction novel The Hacker and the Ants (reprint: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003: ISBN 1-56858-247-1) concludes with all the loose ends tied up. Or does it? Here's a chapter that starts at the end of Rudy's book and puts a somewhat different spin on the events that precede it. SPOILER WARNING!! Don't read this until you've finished Rudy's book. Being a conclusion, it gives away many of the plot twists in the earlier chapters.

    hacklinks
    A proposal (not yet implemented) for hacking Xanadu-like (but with less functionality) back links into the Web without requiring browser, server, or HTML support.

    How to Play DVDs with any Region Code on Windows 98
    Digital Video Discs (DVDs) bear a "region code" intended to block their being viewed on players sold in a different geographical area. Many computer-based DVD decoders are not hardware region locked and are physically capable of playing discs from any region. Microsoft, however, have blocked this in the DVD Player shipped with Windows 98 by a crude software kludge. This document explains how to circumvent the region lock and play any DVD on Windows 98.

    il14.ps.gz
    Autodesk Information Letter 14, perhaps the most widely-disseminated and discussed "internal memo" in the recent history of the computer industry. In PostScript; also included in The Autodesk File; see "autofile".

    K40
    The radiation dose to a living organism from naturally radioactive atoms within its body, principally Potassium 40, is roughly equal to the background radiation at sea level--today. But Potassium 40 has a half-life of 1260 million years, so the first living organisms on Earth experienced endogenous irradiation almost 7 times higher than living things today. Could this explain the long delay between the origin of life and the emergence of complex multicellular organisms?

    Microsoft at Apogee
    I hereby predict that, in retrospect, early 1997 will be seen as the high point in Microsoft's domination of the personal computer software industry. Will they be blown away by Java, Oracle, or IBM? No...I think not; the situation is more complicated that that, yet has clear precedents in the mainframe and minicomputer eras.

    nanotech
    What's Next: Nanotechnology in Manufacturing. An Autodesk Technology Forum presentation, since reprinted in numerous publications. This is a flat ASCII text version, without illustrations. An illustrated version is included in The Autodesk File; see "autofile".

    newtech.ps.gz
    The New Technological Corporation. Why technological companies are different. In PostScript; included in The Autodesk File; see "autofile".

    ohmygodpart
    The Oh-My-God Particle. On October 15th, 1991 a proton with an energy of 3×1020 electron volts slammed into in the Earth's atmosphere. Let's crunch some numbers.... A performance comparison with 24th century Galaxy Class starship technology is presented.

    The Power Switch
    A very short parody of the style of computer user manual writing which reminds me of beating a moose to death with an aluminium baseball bat.

    ProgramsArePrograms
    Programs Are Programs: How to Make Money In the Software Business discusses the rapid evolution in the distribution channels for software over the short history of the personal computer industry and suggests that the next few years may see software moving from a sales oriented model to a subscription model, much like cable television and perhaps technologically linked. This paper is strongly related to the "Unicard" paper and is best read in conjunction with it. This document is included in The Autodesk File; see "autofile".

    How to Mount a Lens on a Linhof Technika Recessed Lensboard
    All right, I'll admit it: this document is a little specialised. A recessed lensboard allows a large format camera to use short focal length lenses which would otherwise not be able to focus at infinity due to the minimum extension of the bellows. The Linhof Technika recessed lensboard is supplied with a mechanism to permit a cable release to operate the shutter, whose own cable socket is buried within the recess, but with no instructions on how to install it. This document walks you step by step through the installation of a Schneider Super Angulon 47mm lens on the recessed lensboard, and explains how the curious collection of parts supplied with the lensboard are assembled to operate the shutter.

    spacedrive
    Thermodynamics confronts special relativity in this physics puzzle which explains why intergalactic spacecraft will be streamlined just like in the movies.

    spaceguns
    Blazing Satellites: Guns in Space. Manned orbiting battle stations, armed with rapid-fire machine guns! Bad science fiction? Well, actually, space age history, just recently revealed. Read all about it, and explore guns in space: yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

    sftriple
    Three original science fiction stories, Free Electrons, We'll Return After This Message, and Not With a Bang, plus a wild-ass speculation regarding nanotechnology and cold fusion. These have been published in various places such as Micro-Times, CAD++, etc.

    specrend
    Colour Rendering of Spectra explains how to calculate, given the spectral composition of a light source, what colour it will be perceived as by the human eye, and which red, green, and blue intensities best approximate it on a computer monitor. C source code which implements the technique is included.

    threeyears
    What can you learn, in three years of computer time, about an obscure problem in recreational mathematics? Not very much, at least in this case. But hey, negative results are still results, right? And still the Quest beckons to your idle loop. In 1995, Tim Irvin continued the Quest to two million digits. His story illustrates both how fast computers have gotten in the the last five years, and how much of that power is often devoted to the idle loop.

    tipler
    A review/rant about Frank Tipler's 1994 book, The Physics of Immortality.

    titanium
    The Titanium Cranium Awards: a collection of genuine, breathtakingly clueless E-mail sent by visitors to this site.

    top10
    Yo! Windows application developers...it could be worse--you could be damned to Hell forever! But would that really be worse?

    unicard
    Unicard: Ubiquitous Computation, Global Connectivity, and the End of Privacy discusses how a variety of technological trends are converging to make possible a world in which privacy no longer exists. It argues that in most cases privacy is not taken away from individuals by governments and corporations, but is rather willingly relinquished in exchange for convenience and/or perceived security, and that the apparent benefits of these new technologies will be so compelling that resisting their adoption, or demanding that they are implemented in an inherently secure manner, will be a difficult challenge.

    univac
    UNIVAC Memories returns to the 1960's and early 70's to explore the room-sized UNIVAC mainframe computers I programmed in those days. Discover million-dollar memory, two and a quarter ton 100 megabyte hard drives, minus zero, and other curiosities from the brash adolescence of the second generation of computers.

    Vacuum Propellers
    Fast interstellar travel will never be possible with any kind of rocket, regardless of the energy source (be it chemical, nuclear, or antimatter), due to the need to carry the rocket's reaction mass on board. How can a person who coined the maxim "Never invest in something that violates a conservation law" seriously entertain the possibility of "propellantless propulsion"? This brief document speculates on how a "Vacuum Propeller" might be built which violates no law of physics.

    earthscr

    This directory contains a Windows screen saver (for 32-bit systems such as Windows 95 only) that shows the Earth with the correct illumination based on the date and time. You can view the Earth from the Sun (day side), Moon, night side, or at a given altitude above any location specified by latitude and longitude.

    earthview

    Interactive server which lets you view the Earth and Moon, as illuminated by the Sun at the time of your request, from a variety of viewpoints. Inconstant Moon explores a universally seen but seldom observed phenomenon: the different appearance of the Moon at perigee and apogee.

    etexts

    Electronic texts, all in ISO-8859 Latin 1 (superset of ASCII used by most Unix X Window systems and Microsoft Windows), in Unix end of line convention. All of these Etexts can be typeset using LaTeX and an embedded C translation program. World-Wide Web editions which may be read on-line may be found in the subdirectory www.
    World-Wide Web editions of electronic texts.

    Art of Money Getting
    Here is Wisdom. One of the greatest entrepreneurs of the 19th century, P.T. Barnum, presents his 20 "Golden Rules for Making Money" in this pithy, succinct, and witty document penned in 1880. A Web edition and plain ASCII electronic text are available, both in the public domain.

    Autour de la Lune
    Jules Verne's Autour de la Lune, original French-language 1870 edition, fully illustrated.

    Bible
    King James Version of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments. Includes anchor labels for every chapter and verse, permitting easy citation from other documents in the conventional form. For example the parable of the Good Samaritan may be cited as:
    <a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/Bible/Luke.html#10:27>.

    De la Terre à la Lune
    Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune, the original French-language 1865 edition, fully illustrated.

    From the Earth to the Moon
    English translation of Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune, fully illustrated with figures from the original 1865 French-language edition.

    The Hebrew Bible
    If your browser supports dynamic fonts and cascading style sheets, you can read this on-line Hebrew (Koren) Bible without installing any special fonts, applications, or plug-ins. A companion document describes the public domain Hebrew font used to produce this text.

    Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
    Jules Verne's Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, the original French-language 1873 edition, fully illustrated.

    No Treason
    Lysander Spooner's No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority. Written in 1870 and published by the author, No Treason remains one of the greatest flat-out anarcho-libertarian rants ever penned.

    On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies
    An English language translation Albert Einstein's 1905 paper which introduced Special Relativity, as published in the 1923 book The Principle of Relativity. This document is is both a monument of twentieth century physics and a masterpiece of scientific communication. In addition to the Web edition, a ready-to-print PostScript file and LaTeX source code of this document may be downloaded.

    Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy-Content?
    An English language translation of Albert Einstein's 1905 paper which first derived the equivalence of mass and energy, as published in the 1923 book The Principle of Relativity. Starting solely from the principle of relativity for observers in uniform motion and the constancy of the speed of light, Einstein employs an elegant kinematical argument to deduce the most famous equation of twentieth century physics: the equivalence of mass and energy. In addition to the Web edition, ready-to-print PostScript and Adobe Acrobat PDF files as well as LaTeX source code of this document are available.

    The Time Machine
    H. G. Wells' The Time Machine.

    Universal Declaration of Human Rights
    The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    Vulgate
    Saint Jerome's A.D. 405 Latin translation of the Bible. Includes anchor labels for every chapter and verse, permitting easy citation from other documents in the conventional form. For example the parable of the Good Samaritan may be cited as:
    <a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/Vulgate/Luke.html#10:27>.

    The War of the Worlds
    H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.

    Plain text files are available for the following documents.

    adlune.txt
    Jules Verne's Autour de la Lune, original French-language 1870 edition.

    DeLaTerreALaLune.txt
    Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune, the original French-language 1865 edition.

    tdm80j.txt
    Jules Verne's Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, the original French-language 1873 edition.

    NoTreason.txt
    Lysander Spooner's No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.

    Utility programs for processing electronic texts are available as follows:

    etset
    C program which automatically translates electronic texts prepared in the format used at this site into LaTeX for typeset output, HTML for Web publication, or 7-bit ASCII for readers unable to display 8-bit ISO characters. Available as a zipped archive or as a gzipped TAR file. See the manual page for details, including how to prepare compatible texts.

    evilempire

    Impress your friends! Persuade the undecided! Meet new and interesting people! Get your car shot up by right-wing yahoos! Be smeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal! Yes, it's the one, the only, the original "Evil Empires: One down, one to go..." bumper sticker, in both PostScript and PNG image formats in a variety of resolutions.

    fist

    Nerds weren't held in the highest esteem in the tempestuous times of the late sixties, but if you had access to a mainframe computer with a fast line printer, a great way to make new friends and meet radical chicks was cranking out banners for the cause du jour on the graveyard shift when the Man wasn't looking. The FIST program traces its lineage directly back to a program I punched onto Hollerith cards for a UNIVAC 1108 in September 1969. It prints banners with a clenched fist and block-letter slogan of your choice. Various silly options let you choose a right- or left-handed fist according to your political persuasion and to adjust the size of the fist commensurate with the vehemence of your movement and your printer's paper size.

    français

    Resources for learning French. Includes a document describing various tools and techniques I've found useful in learning French, a one-page reference-card in PostScript, LaTeX, and an on-line Web document which translates 230 thorny "glue words", and a list of 40 word-endings developed from a study of more than 18,000 French nouns which allow you to predict the gender of 75% of French nouns with an accuracy of about 95%.

    ftpreport

    This program allows you convert either transfer log files from wu-ftpd or Netcom FTP access reports in folders of electronic mail into either HTTP daemon common log file format or a Comma Separated Value (CSV) database suitable for analysis with Microsoft Excel or other packages which accept this format. A manual page and Makefile are included.

    gravitation

    Documents and interactive Java applets which explore Newtonian Gravitation and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

    hackdiet

    The Hacker's Diet: How to Lose Weight and Hair through Stress and Poor Nutrition book plus associated computer tools. You can read the book on-line on the World-Wide Web, or download a copy to read or print off-line in either PostScript or Adobe Acrobat PDF format. (Free Adobe Acrobat Reader software for the Macintosh, Windows, DOS, and various Unix workstations is available directly from Adobe Systems.) The WWW and Adobe Acrobat versions have hot-links for all table of contents items, cross-references, and index entries. A set of Excel spreadsheets which accompany the book (but are not necessary to use it) is also available for downloading, and the weight logging and management tools described in the book are also available for the Palm Computing Platform.

    homeplanet

    Home Planet is a Microsoft Windows 3.1, 95, and NT application which puts a somewhat different spin on the usual astronomical or planetarium program. Home Planet places the Earth in its place in the universe, allowing one to look up toward the stars or down upon the Earth from a variety of perspectives. Comprehensive documentation is included in a hypertext help file. For additional information and instructions on how to download and install the software, please see the online documentation. Home Planet Release 3, a 32-bit version which runs in native mode on Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 is now available.

    hotbits

    Quantum mechanics teaches us that, at the deepest level, uncertainty rules the universe: there are things we cannot predict, even in principle. HotBits harnesses this fundamental uncertainty of nature to generate truly random bits, unlike the pseudorandom sequences created by an algorithm on a computer. Along the way, you'll find a discussion of the hardware and software used to generate the random bytes comprehensive enough to build your own, and peek under the hood of quantum mechanics to see why the data are genuinely random, and some of the implications of all this.

    md5

    Command-line utility which computes and checks message digests (digital signatures) generated by the MD5 algorithm as defined by RFC 1321. This program is handy for software installation, file verification, and other system administration shell scripts and Perl programs. Includes complete C source code for Unix and a ready to run Win32 executable.

    milscrsv

    Inspired by the Chris Carter drama series, the Millennium Screen Saver counts down the days remaining until the Big Round Number--perfect for Millennium fans and programmers engaged in the struggle against the forces of idiocy to avert apocalyptic events when the date rolls over to "1/1/00". Both a ready-to-install 32-bit screen saver for Windows 95 and NT and source code are available.

    minerats

    Anti-personnel land mines are the predominant terror weapon of our time. With more than 100 million in the ground in more than 40 countries, they have killed and maimed more people in the last 50 years than nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles combined. Can we deploy high technology in the form of advanced sensors and semi-autonomous robots to close the gap between the cost to lay a mine (about US$3) and the cost to remove it (about US$1000) and thereby rid the world of this plague? This directory contains a growing collection of documents describing the land mine problem and clearance technologies. You can go directly to the Minerats index with the URL http://www.fourmilab.ch/minerats/.

    moontool

    Displays an icon with the current phase of the Moon on an OpenLook or SunView screen. When opened, up-to-date information is displayed about the Sun and Moon.

    moontoolw

    Microsoft Windows tool which displays the current phase of the Moon in an icon and other information when opened. The program is in the public domain and complete source code is available. New 1999 release includes a 32-bit version which supports the Windows 95/98/NT time zone setting, works for all non-negative Julian day numbers, minimises to the system tray, and includes a Help file. For old time's sake, an updated 16-bit version compatible with Windows 3.0 and above is also available.

    netpbm

    Additions to the NETPBM package. Currently contains ppm.shar.gz which (extracted into the ppm subdirectory), contains additions to the ppmdraw library to implement drawing ASCII text in a pixmap, using a stroke font which can be scaled and rotated. There's a test/demo program included, as well as two new PPM applications, cietoppm and ppmlabel. Cietoppm makes a portable pixmap containing a plot of the CIE "tongue" diagram, optionally showing the colour gamut of various display systems (NTSC, PAL/SECAM, SMPTE, HDTV, etc.). Ppmlabel draws ASCII text, specified either on the command line or from a file, into a portable pixmap. Both cietoppm and ppmlabel require the text drawing extensions to ppmdraw. The archive pnm.shar.gz contains a new PNM filter, pnmhisteq, which performs contrast enhancement through the technique of histogram equalisation. See the README file for details.

    A Perl script which mobilises standard PBMplus/NetPBM utilities to add simulated shadows to bitmap images is available. Visit the pnmshadow page for details, sample images, and download instructions.

    Windex is a Perl script which prepares an HTML document containing a graphical index for a collection of image files, with each small thumbnail image linked to the corresponding full-size image.

    sbigtopgm is a filter which translates image files produced by the Santa Barbara Instrument Group's astronomical CCD cameras into PBMplus portable graymaps.

    onetime

    Utilities for generating one-time key or password pads in a variety of formats. Options allow you to select key length, whether digits or letters are used, and whether alphabetic keys are truly random or obey the digraph statistics of English text (less secure, but easier to remember and transcribe). Both a C language program and a Web page with an embedded generator program in JavaScript are available.

    poss

    This directory contains the file poss.zip, a PKZIP archive which extracts into the file poss.xls. This is a Microsoft Excel 5.0 (or above) workbook which contains a catalogue of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey plates, including the mapping between the original plates and the MicroSky microfiche edition published by Deen Publications, Inc. (for information E-mail glen@metronet.com).

    pstampr

    The "Postage Stamp Rasteriser", a small, highly portable and Reality Hardened rasteriser which scan converts lines and filled concave or convex polygons. Polygon scan conversion contains compensation for almost a dozen problems of singularities and numerical instabilities which cause incorrect results in the simple algorithms you find in textbooks. Optional TIFF output is available to aid in the inclusion of preview images in DOS and Windows PostScript files. Written in portable C; public domain.

    random

    A program for the analysis (not generation) of random and pseudorandom sequences. A variety of tests, including many from Knuth, are applied to the contents of a file and the results reported on standard output. In portable C; public domain.

    serverstats

    Access and browser statistics for this server, updated daily.

    settime

    A Unix utility which, run by root as a cron job, calls the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder Colorado in the U.S. and sets the system time from their bank of atomic clocks. This was written for a Sun running SunOS. Due to the variety of schemes for port locking, serial I/O ioctl's, etc. you may have some difficulty getting this to work on your system. Note: if you're connected to the Internet, you don't need this program; you can set your system's clock directly across the net using the daytime utilities available from the NIST.

    skyscrsv

    Now you never need to go outside again! This directory contains a Windows screen saver that shows the sky as it presently appears including stars from the more than 9000 star Yale Bright Star Catalogue, the Sun, Moon (with the correct phase), and planets, deep sky objects drawn from a database of more than 500 prominent objects including all Messier objects, constellation names, boundaries, and outlines, and ecliptic and equatorial co-ordinates. All of these items can be individually selected to customise the display. The screen saver can be configured for any time zone and any location on Earth. This program is based on the more comprehensive star map window of Home Planet (see homeplanet), adapted to be a self-contained and well-behaved screen saver. Like Home Planet, this program is in the public domain.

    slidescr

    The Slide Show Screen Saver shows images (in JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP format) and plays sound files (WAV and MIDI) from a designated directory, either in random order or alphabetically by file name. A variety of options allow scripting slide shows and an accompanying sound track. Both a ready-to-install 32-bit screen saver for Windows 95 and NT and source code are available.

    smartall

    SMARTALLOC, a portable C package based on the standard malloc()/free() functions, which detects many common memory allocation errors such as memory leaks, releases of bad pointers, use of buffers after freeing them, and counting on the initial contents of allocated buffers. Most programs can use SMARTALLOC simply by recompiling with its header file and including the code. SMARTALLOC can be disabled for production use with a simple #define.

    solar

    Solar System Live, an interactive orrery for the Web, lets you view the solar system in a variety of ways for any date between 4713 B.C. and A.D. 8000. An ephemeris can be displayed for any location on Earth and, given orbital elements in the form published in the IAU Circulars, the orbit and position of asteroids and comets can be plotted.

    splits

    Dumb little utility which splits a binary file into pieces which you can reassemble with cat. Yes, I know there are 100 other programs which do this, but the system I was using when I wrote it didn't seem to have any of them available.

    stego

    Steganosaurus is a plain text steganography (secret writing) utility which encodes a (usually encrypted) binary file as gibberish text, based on either a spelling dictionary or words taken from a text document. In portable C; public domain.

    terranova

    As life inexorably expands from the home planet throughout the galaxy and beyond, there will come a time when our descendents render a new planet habitable every day. Terranova invites you to visit the terraformed planet of the day.

    uscode

    The entire U.S. Internal Revenue (26 USC), and Immigration and Nationality (8 USC) Codes compiled into Web documents. Cross-references within sections are hyperlinked so they can be followed by clicking on them. You can search the full text of the Code for occurrences of words and phrases and view matching sections.

    webtools

    Tools for World-Wide Web authors and site managers.

    base64
    Portable C program which encodes and decodes files in MIME "Base64" encoding; this comes in handy when developing E-mail and Web servers which accept and deliver embedded binary files.

    BLITZ
    Perl utility used in conjunction with the Majordomo mailing list manager to remove bounced addresses from mailing lists.

    Demoroniser
    Using Microsoft applications to create Web pages runs the risk of publishing pages which appear to be the product of a semi-literate moron when read on non-Microsoft platforms. Demoroniser corrects a number of errors and gratuitous incompatibilities in Microsoft-generated HTML, both generic and specific to PowerPoint.

    Flashback
    Ever lost a day's worth of editing on Unix by fat-fingering something like "rm * .o"? Flashback makes a gzipped tar snapshot of the directory you're working in (and any subdirectories) to a common backup directory from which you can restore clobbered files when needed. Flashback reports the size of the backup directory after adding the new backup so you'll know when it's time to clean up old backups.

    logtail
    Perl utility which allows a system administrator to watch, in real time, items added to any number of log files on any number of hosts on a network.

    pnmshadow
    Web authors with access to Unix systems equipped with Perl and the PBMplus or NetPBM image processing utilities may be interested in pnmshadow, which adds simulated shadows to bitmaps, creating the popular special effect where the content of a bitmap appears to float above the page, casting a shadow on the background.

    qprint
    Portable C program which encodes and decodes files in RFC 1521 MIME "Quoted-Printable" encoding. You can use this developing E-mail and Web servers which accept and deliver text files containing characters not present in the 7-bit ASCII printable set.

    redirex
    Isn't it irritating when you change the IP address of a Web server and discover that, months later, requests still rain in from search engines and other sites which have linked to the absolute IP address rather than your site name? Redirex is a small, lightweight Perl server which intercepts HTTP requests sent to the old address and redirects them to the site's new home.

    rpmsize
    "Yikes! Who ate my hard drive?", you exclaim, having installed a Linux distribution update and discovered your 4 Gb root partition is now 98% full. RPMSIZE provides two Perl programs to compute the size of files belonging to a given RPM software package, and prepare a list of all packages installed on a system and their sizes, sorted by size, to point out promising candidates for banishment.

    Shadow Server
    Web server which adds cool-looking simulated shadows to images submitted in GIF, JPEG, and a variety of other formats. Allows folks who can't run pnmshadow on their own computers to generate images with shadows.

    textogif
    Perl program which transforms equations written in LaTeX into GIF files suitable for inclusion as inline images in Web HTML documents.

    Windex
    Perl script for Unix systems which uses PBMplus and JPEG utilities to prepare an HTML document containing a graphical index for a collection of image files, with each small thumbnail image linked to the corresponding full-size image.

    xd

    Extended file dump and load utility for Unix and 32-bit Windows. Lets you dump a file in hex, decimal, or octal (with optional side-by-side ASCII/ISO-8859), then use whatever text editor you like to edit the data, even inserting and/or deleting bytes, then reload the edited dump to create a modified binary file. No need to learn a different editor to edit binary files!

    xsunclock

    OpenWindows utility which shows you, as an icon or resizeable window, the portion of the Earth currently day and night. In conjunction with the "Two Line Elements" posted to the space newsgroups periodically or obtained by FTP, lets you track Earth satellites, with the current satellite position shown on the map.

    yoursky

    Your Sky makes custom maps of the sky for any location on Earth and any date from 4713 B.C. into the distant future. Maps can include stars as faint as magnitude 6.5, constellation names, outlines, and boundaries, the Moon and planets, deep sky objects from a database of more than 500, and a comet or asteroid whose position is calculated from its orbital elements. A variety of display options allow customising the map for its intended use.

    By topic...

    Items which span multiple categories appear in all applicable categories.

    Astronomy and space:

  • A Rocket A Day Keeps the High Costs Away.
  • Blazing Satellites: Guns in Space. Manned orbiting battle stations, armed with rapid-fire machine guns! Really!
  • c1995o1: Images of Comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp), the Great Comet of 1997.
  • c1996b2: Images of Comet C/1996 B2 (Hyakutake) from its 1996 close encounter with Earth.
  • craters: Windows screen saver that simulates cratering of planets.
  • cship: Explore special relativity through starship flight simulation.
  • earthscr: Windows 32-bit screen saver that shows the Earth from a variety of viewpoints.
  • earthview: Interactive server lets you view the Earth and Moon.
  • eclipse99: Images of the total solar eclipse of August 11th, 1999 from Esfahan, Iran.
  • gravitation: Documents and interactive applets illustrating aspects of General Relativity.
  • homeplanet: Home Planet: free Earth/Planetarium/Satellite for Windows 3.1, 95, and NT.
  • Inconstant Moon explores a phenomenon almost everybody sees but few ever observe: the difference in the appearance of the Moon at perigee and apogee.
  • In Darkness: Africa--Eclipse 2001. Images of the total solar eclipse of June 21st, 2001, observed near Lusaka, Zambia.
  • moontool: OpenWindows tool to display phase of moon and other info.
  • moontoolw: Microsoft Windows tool to display phase of moon and other info.
  • Naked Eye Sun-Spotting: On rare occasions near the peak in solar activity, a sunspot group large enough to be glimpsed without optical assistance (other than a safe solar filter) traverses the Sun's disc. The document chronicles the extraordinary sunspot group of late September 2000 and provides tips for observing the next such event.
  • poss: Excel catalogue of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.
  • skyscrsv: Windows screen saver that shows the sky: stars, planets, etc.
  • solar: Solar System Live: interactive orrery on the Web.
  • Switzerland from Space fuses Space Shuttle imagery and Web navigation to let you explore the home of the www.fourmilab.ch server from orbit.
  • terranova: Visit a new terraformed planet every day.
  • The Three Inner Planets: Have you seen ever Mercury? Here's how.
  • Vacuum Propellers speculates on "propellantless propulsion" which violates no law of physics.
  • Viewing Venus in Broad Daylight: When Venus is bright and far from the Sun you can see it in broad daylight with the unaided eye.
  • Your Sky makes star maps for any location on Earth at any date and time.
  • xsunclock: OpenWindows program to show day and night; tracks satellites.
  • Autodesk and AutoCAD:

  • autofile: The Autodesk File, a 1994 history of Autodesk in documents.
  • autostock: Annotated database and chart of Autodesk stock from IPO to present.
  • Books on-line:

  • Art of Money Getting: P.T. Barnum's Art of Money Getting.
  • autofile: The Autodesk File, a 1994 history of Autodesk in documents.
  • hackdiet: The Hacker's Diet book and support software.
  • Bible: King James Version of the Bible.
  • Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune, Autour de la Lune, and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours. An English translation of From the Earth to the Moon is also available.
  • The Hebrew Bible can be read without installing any fonts or applications as long as your browser supports dynamic fonts and cascading style sheets.
  • Lysander Spooner's No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.
  • On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. Einstein's original 1905 paper introducing special relativity.
  • Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy-Content?. Einstein's 1905 paper which derived the equivalence of mass and energy.
  • The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
  • Vulgate: The Latin Vulgate Bible.
  • The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.
  • Business, economics, and politics:

  • Art of Money Getting: P.T. Barnum's Art of Money Getting.
  • autofile: The Autodesk File, a 1994 history of Autodesk in documents.
  • autostock: Annotated database and chart of Autodesk stock from IPO to present.
  • basket: Excel spreadsheet for evaluating performance of currency baskets.
  • Evil Empires: One Down, One to Go bumper sticker.
  • fist: Program, dating from 1969, which prints a clenched fist along with the slogan of your choice.
  • The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition--in Your Palm: a Palm Memo Pad document rendering portable the wisdom of the Ferengi.
  • Microsoft at Apogee: Has Microsoft's dominance of the PC software market peaked?
  • minerats: Can low-cost semi-autonomous robots help rid the world of land mines?
  • Lysander Spooner's No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.
  • Programs Are Programs: How to Make Money In the Software Business.
  • Unicard: Ubiquitous Computation, Global Connectivity, and the End of Privacy.
  • The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
  • uscode: Complete U.S. Internal Revenue and Immigration and Nationality Codes, hyperlinked with full-text search.
  • Cryptography and steganography:

  • codegroup: Encode/decode binary file as five-letter code groups.
  • hotbits: Radioactively-generated random bytes, now with direct access from Java.
  • md5: Command line utility computes MD5 digital signatures on Unix and Windows.
  • onetime: Generates one-time key pads or password lists.
  • random: A program to test the randomness of data streams.
  • stego: Steganosaurus: Plain text steganography.
  • Diet and nutrition:

  • hackdiet: The Hacker's Diet book and support software.
  • History and nostalgia:

  • autofile: The Autodesk File, a 1994 history of Autodesk in documents.
  • babbage: Explore The Analytical Engine through historical documents and a Java-based emulator.
  • univac: UNIVAC Memories relives the days of room-sized mainframes when mass storage was massive and RAM cost more than a buck a byte.
  • Humour:

  • The Bullets Screen Saver for Windows.
  • Einstein, Heisenberg, and Tipler, an original story.
  • Evil Empires: One Down, One to Go bumper sticker.
  • The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition--in Your Palm: a Palm Memo Pad document rendering portable the wisdom of the Ferengi.
  • The Power Switch.
  • Blazing Satellites: Guns in Space. Manned orbiting battle stations, armed with rapid-fire machine guns! Really!
  • Free Electrons, an original story.
  • fist: Program, dating from 1969, which prints a clenched fist along with the slogan of your choice.
  • Palindrome Quest: Three Years of Computing.
  • Ski Marin! It never snows in San Francisco. Well, almost never.
  • The Titanium Cranium Awards, a collection of genuine (identities of senders have been obscured), breathtakingly clueless E-mail sent by visitors to this site.
  • Top 10 reasons eternal damnation beats Windows software development.
  • Language learning:

  • dictool: OpenWindows access tool for "Languages of the World" CD-ROM.
  • français: Resources for learning French.
  • Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune, Autour de la Lune, and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours.
  • The Hebrew Bible can be read without installing any fonts or applications as long as your browser supports dynamic fonts and cascading style sheets.
  • Vulgate: The Latin Vulgate Bible.
  • Nanotechnology and eschatology:

  • Nanotechnology in Manufacturing, from The Autodesk File.
  • Nanomechanical Fusion Machines.
  • A review/rant about Frank Tipler's book, The Physics of Immortality.
  • Millennium Screen Saver counts down to doomsday for ill-conceived software.
  • Palm Computing utilities:

  • Eat Watch for The Hacker's Diet.
  • The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition--in Your Palm: a Palm Memo Pad document rendering portable the wisdom of the Ferengi.
  • Palmdump: Desktop utility which dumps Palm .prc and .pdb files.
  • PDBMake: Desktop utility which embeds arbitrary text or binary files in Palm .pdb files.
  • Physics:

  • cellab: CelLab: programmable cellular automata simulator
  • cship: Explore special relativity through starship flight simulation.
  • On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. Einstein's original 1905 paper introducing special relativity.
  • Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy-Content?. Einstein's 1905 paper which derived the equivalence of mass and energy.
  • gravitation: Documents and interactive applets illustrating aspects of General Relativity.
  • hotbits: Radioactively-generated random bytes, now with direct access from Java.
  • The Oh-My-God Particle.
  • Cosmic Background Radiation Space Drive.
  • A review/rant about Frank Tipler's book, The Physics of Immortality.
  • Vacuum Propellers speculates on "propellantless propulsion" which violates no law of physics.
  • Science fiction:

  • Free Electrons, an original story.
  • Einstein, Heisenberg, and Tipler, an original story.
  • The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition--in Your Palm: a Palm Memo Pad document rendering portable the wisdom of the Ferengi.
  • hackants13: A new ending for Rudy Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants.
  • Not With a Bang, an original story.
  • Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune, an English translation From the Earth to the Moon, Autour de la Lune, and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours.
  • terranova: Visit a new terraformed planet every day.
  • Vacuum Propellers speculates on "propellantless propulsion" which violates no law of physics.
  • We'll Return After This Message, an original story.
  • The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
  • The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.
  • Software components / embedded systems:

  • atlast: Embeddable FORTH-like language kernel in C.
  • bget: Memory allocation package for embedded systems in C.
  • c64neural: Neural network simulator for the Commodore 64.
  • cellab: CelLab: programmable cellular automata simulator
  • diesel: Tiny string macro language embeddable in applications. In C.
  • netpbm: Additions to the NETPBM portable bitmap toolkit.
  • pstampr: A small, robust rasteriser for lines and filled polygons.
  • smartall: Debugging layer for malloc()/free(), finds leaks, clobbers, etc.
  • specrend: Explains (including source code) how to calculate RGB values which best approximate a light spectrum.
  • Unix utilities:

  • base64: Encode/decode binary file in MIME Base64 encoding.
  • codegroup: Encode/decode binary file as five-letter code groups.
  • dictool: OpenWindows access tool for "Languages of the World" CD-ROM.
  • etset: Utility to translate human-readable electronic texts to LaTeX, HTML, or ASCII.
  • flashback: Flashback creates snapshot backups of directories you're working on to save yourself from fat finger incidents.
  • fist: Program, dating from 1969, which prints a clenched fist along with the slogan of your choice.
  • ftpreport: Reformat FTP activity report as Excel CSV database or HTTP log.
  • md5: Command line utility computes MD5 digital signatures on Unix and Windows.
  • moontool: OpenWindows tool to display phase of moon and other info.
  • netpbm: Additions to the NETPBM portable bitmap toolkit.
  • onetime: Generates one-time key pads or password lists.
  • pnmshadow: PBMplus/NetPBM Unix utility which adds simulated shadows to bitmap images.
  • qprint: Encode/decode files in MIME "Quoted-Printable" encoding.
  • random: A program to test the randomness of data streams.
  • rpmsize: Find packages clogging your hard drive in Linux distributions.
  • settime: Utility to set clock of Unix machine from U.S. time standard.
  • splits: Split a file into arbitrary-sized pieces.
  • stego: Steganosaurus: Plain text steganography.
  • webtools: Tools for World-Wide Web authors and site managers.
  • windex: PBMplus/NetPBM Unix utility to create an HTML clickable index for a collection of bitmap images.
  • xd: Extended dump and load program; use any text editor on binary files.
  • xsunclock: OpenWindows program to show day and night; tracks satellites.
  • Windows utilities:

  • base64: Encode/decode binary file in MIME Base64 encoding.
  • basket: Excel spreadsheet for evaluating performance of currency baskets.
  • bullets: Windows screen saver that riddles your screen with bullet holes.
  • cellab: CelLab: programmable cellular automata simulator
  • craters: Windows screen saver that simulates cratering of planets.
  • earthscr: Windows 32-bit screen saver that shows the Earth from a variety of viewpoints.
  • homeplanet: Home Planet: free Earth/Planetarium/Satellite for Windows 3.1, 95, and NT.
  • dvdregion:How to Play DVDs with any Region Code on Windows 98. Defeat region code locking in Microsoft's DVD Player and view DVDs from all around the world. (May not work with all DVD decoder cards.)
  • fist: Program, dating from 1969, which prints a clenched fist along with the slogan of your choice.
  • md5: Command line utility computes MD5 digital signatures on Unix and Windows.
  • milscrsv: Millennium Screen Saver counts down to doomsday for ill-conceived software.
  • moontoolw: Microsoft Windows tool to display phase of moon and other info.
  • poss: Excel catalogue of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.
  • qprint: Encode/decode files in MIME "Quoted-Printable" encoding.
  • skyscrsv: Windows screen saver that shows the sky: stars, planets, etc.
  • slidescr: Slide Show Screen Saver shows images and plays sound files from a directory.
  • xd: Extended dump and load program; use any text editor on binary files.

  • by John Walker