Roland's software page programs, scripts, libraries etc.

Location: homepage > software

Introduction

some old packages on ftp sites might still contain my old e-mail address, rsmit06@ibm.net. This has been discontinued a long time ago. You can mail me at rsmith@xs4all.nl. Due to spam I am now filtering my mail. If your message does not reach me, check out my spam blocking page.

security

Tampering with software distributions is one of the ways to compromise the security of a server/workstation, and destroy the trust upon which the free software community is built. Therefore it is vital to check the integrity of software that you download. Since most people are not able to audit every piece of software source that they download (let alone binary packages), we must find other ways to verify software integrity.

That is why you'll find a digital signature, generated by gnupg(1) with my secret key, with all these packages. By using my public key with gpg's --verify command you can check if the packet has been damaged or tampered with. If you get a "good signature" message, that means that you have the package you downloaded is identical to the one I put together [That does not mean that it does not have bugs. It just means nobody has been able to put in a backdoor or trojan].

you can ignore the warning messages concerning a "valid trust path" or the key not being certified with a trusted signature. It just means that my public key has not been countersigned by someone in your trust ring.

This website is often synchronised with the mother copy on my workstation, using rsync(1) over a ssh(1) connection. So any tampering would be fixed quickly. AFAIK the contents of my workstation are relatively secure, since it doesn't allow incoming connections, and it's kept under lock and key.

If checking gpg signature seems too much work, or if you don't have gpg installed, at the very least check the also provided checksum value, produced by the md5sum(1) program. By running md5sum or md5 on the package you downloaded, and comparing its output with the listed checksum value, you can check if the package is undamaged and hasn't been tampered with. If the generated checksum does not match the one given on this page, there is something wrong.

platform

I have developed this software on a PC running the Linux or FreeBSD operating systems. It should be usable on other UN*X-like platforms, unless otherwise stated.

Programs

generic installation instructions for programs

• Check the package's digital signature and/or checksum!
• Unpack the source code archive with 'gtar -xzf <filename>'
• Now move into the newly created directory (with the name of the package).
• Read the README file, and adapt the paths in the Makefile if necessary.
• Give the command 'gmake'.
• If the make process doesn't produce errors, become root (with su), and do 'gmake install'. (If you don't like the program, you can still remove it with 'gmake uninstall')
• Remove the build directory, to save disk space.

xnetload

This application, that runs under the X Window System, displays a count and a graph of the traffic over a specified network connection. I used it to monitor my PPP connection to the Internet. I've switched to conky. And since I'm not running Linux anymore the amount of maintenance I can do on it now is limited to bug-fixing.

The picture to the left shows the xnetload window. It shows the network connection that it is monitoring: ppp0. Next to that is the time elapsed since the program was started. The line below that displays the current packets/second average and maximum number of incoming packets. This is also depicted in the graph below it. Under that the same is showed for outgoing packets. The graphs are logarithmic. So 1 line = 10 packets/s, 2 lines = 100 packets/s etc.

It either displays bytes/second or packets/second, based on the capabilities of the kernel. On 2.1.x and later kernels (including the 2.2.x and 2.4.x series) it displays bytes/s. It requires the /proc file system, or rather /proc/net/dev which is only found in Linux. So AFAIK this program is Linux specific.

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The last version with ip-accounting support for 2.0.x kernels is also still available:

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xplanets

This program shows a simulation of a spacecraft flying through the solar system. With the controls next to the simulation screen you can control the simulation and steer the spacecraft's flight.

The picture to the left shows the xplanets window. In this picture the following planets are visible: the Sun (yellow) mercury (gray38) venus (burlywood2) earth (blue2) mars (LightSalmon3) The spaceship is also visible, centered in the picture. Note that the sizes of the sun and planets are not to scale, though their distances are. Showing the planets to scale would mean that they wouldn't be visible. The solar system is rather big, after all. :) The planet nearest to the spaceship is indicated with a red circle around it. It's relative speed and distance are shown in the data display.

The xplanets program uses the GTK+ toolkit. It has been built with version 2.2.1, so it should work with any version >2.0.0. It does not work with GTK+ 1.x anymore.

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yamp

"YAMP" is an abbreviation of "Yet Another Mixer Program". It is a program, running in an X window, to control your soundcard via the OSS kernel sound driver. This program is specific to Linux. It queries the soundcard which variables can be influenced, and sets up a notebook control with a page for every variable. Usually you can set the volume of the speakers, bass and treble, volume of the CD player and other input sources. With the sliders on the page, you can set that particular variable for the left and right channel separately. It uses version 2 of the GTK+ toolkit.

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To build it, unpack the tar-file with "tar -xzf yamp-1.0.0.tar.gz". Enter the yamp-1.0.0 directory and give the "make" command. If that works, log in as root and give the command "make install".

lamprop

The purpose of this program is to calculate some properties of fiber-reinforced composite laminates. It calculates:

• engineering properties like Ex, Ey, Gxy
• thermal properties CTE_x and CTE_y
• physical properties like density and laminate thickness
• stiffness and compliance matrices (ABD and abd)

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cost

This program measures the cost (in clock cycles and nanoseconds) of fundamental operations in computer programs. The operations range from simple integer mathematics to C library functions. It is relatively simple to add new tests, even for programmers new to C.

It was inspired by §7.6 of The Practice of Programming (ISBN 0-201-61586-X), by Kernighan & Pike.

To build it, unpack the tar-file with "tar -xzf cost-1.0.2.tar.gz". Enter the cost directory and give the "make" command. If that works, give the command "./cost" to run the program.

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onepad

This is a set of programs to encrypt files using one-time-pad encryption. This is an old but theoretically impossible to easily break way of encryption. I came across this method in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

It works by XOR-ing every byte in the cleartext message with a byte in the key. As long as every key is only used once, and the key is random, this is supposed to be unbreakable.

However, you need a secure way to exchange keys with the intended recipient. If a third party intercepts the key, it can read the messages.

These programs work, but the genpad program relies on the /dev/random device to generate random keys. So the quality of the key and therefore the safety of this encryption method depends on the randomness of the /dev/random device on your system. So I cannot guarantee that the generated keys are totally random. Therefore, if you need really good encryption, use something like ccrypt or GNU Privacy Guard. These have been written, tested and pounded on by a lot of people, probably smarter than I am. :)

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dosrestore

This program extracts the contents of backups made with the old DOS backup program.

I wrote it to save some files from a couple of old backups I had laying around. It has been tested to work correctly on those backups, which have been made with DOS 5 or thereabouts.

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gfontsel

This program is a simple wrapper around the GTK+ 2 font selection dialog. It allows you to select a font. The font name is written to the standard output in the GTK+ 2 font naming scheme.

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gcolorsel

This program is a simple wrapper around the GTK+ 2 color selection dialog. It allows you to select a color. The color is written to the standard output in hexadecimal RGB triplet, e.g. #FF8F00.

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rrm

The purpose of this program is to really remove files. It overwrites the file's contents with zeros, renames the file to a random name and unlinks the file.

Although claims have been made that overwritten (as opposed to deleted) files can be easily retrieved, based on Guttman's 1996 USENIX paper, that doesn't really hold true for modern drives. In an epilogue to his abovementioned paper Guttman states that:

Any modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I don't see how MFM would even get a usable image, and then the use of EPRML will mean that even if you could magically transfer some sort of image into a file, the ability to decode that to recover the original data would be quite challenging.

Therefore I think that overwriting a file with zeroes will destroy it beyond practical retrieval.

I would like to point out that using on-disk encryption to protect your data would defeat the most advanced data retrieval procedures because even successfully retrieved encrypted data cannot be read without the encryption key. On FreeBSD I use geom_eli for disk encryption. Linux and windows users could try truecrypt.

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Libraries

These libraries listed here are source distributions, which you'll have to compile yourself. This shouldn't be very difficult since every library comes with a Makefile. Note though, that you have to have your distribution's C development packages installed. Simply unpack the packages with "tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz". Change into the directory which is created by the unpacking process, read the README file and type "make". These libraries can be built as static or shared libraries. The Makefile can also install the libraries for you, if you invoke it as "make install".

liblauch

This simple library enables you you launch another program from within a program. It handles the intricacies of fork(2) and execve(2) for you. It returns a couple of pipes that are connected to the launched program's stdin and stdout. It also contains a function to terminate the launched program.

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libcomm

The purpose of this library is to facilitate handling structured messages between programs. The messages consist of three parts: a keyword, a body and a delimiter.

• The delimiter denotes the end of the message. Examples of a delimiter can be a simple newline ("\n") for single line messages, or a double ("\n\n") newline for multi-line messages.
• The keyword is used to identify the message. In the receiving program, it is used to dispatch the body to a handler function.
• The body is everything between the keyword and the delimiter.

An example of the usage of this library might be to facilitate the communication between a GUI front end and a program doing calculations in the background (the "back end").

Since the messages are human-readable (as opposed to shared memory or binary messages), it would enable the back end to be tested separately from the front end, either by a human or by a testing script.

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The following libraries contain implementations of generic data structures. They are small enough to link into your program.

libdlist

This library implements a generic double linked list. This is a flexible data structure for storing information of different sizes. Since it is possible to add to and remove from the list at both ends, it can also function as a stack or a queue.

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libar

This is a generic array implementation. It is suitable for storing different bits of information of the same size. It grows as necessary. The whole array is contained in a single memory block for easy access and efficient memory usage.

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Miscellaneous

This contains everything that does not fit into the other categories.

Symbols for labeling chemicals

This package contains Encapsulated PostScript versions of the symbols used to label chemicals, according to EU directive 67/548/EEC Annex II.

It also contains a LaTeX template for printing 8 105x74 mm stickers, suitable for labelling chemicals, on an A4.

I wrote these symbols because he wanted to print some labels for chemicals, and the GIF's I found on the Internet did not scale very well to the required size.

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Lua definitions for listings.sty

The listings package is a macro package for the LaTeX document preparation system that makes it easy to include software listings in a LaTeX document. It comes with built-in definitions for a lot of languages, and I'm using it extensively to show and include programs in my documents.

One of the languages that version 1.3c does not handle by default is Lua, a great little programming language that I discovered because it was chosen to extend pdfTeX into LuaTeX. Since Lua is easy to learn and quite fast, I find myself using it more and more. And since I wanted to list Lua code in some of my LaTeX documents I wrote a language definition file for Lua and placed it in the public domain:

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I have submitted it to the maintainer and it will eventually be included in future versions. You will need to download it to use it with version 1.3c or older.

Back to my homepage

Copyright © 1998-2009 R.F. Smith <rsmith@xs4all.nl>
All pictures have been adapted or made with the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).

Last update: 2010-01-10 17:50 CET