f/oss projects : f/oss projects

This page is a nexus for the various free/open-source software (F/OSS) projects I'm engaged in, ranging from seldom used Perl modules to full-fledged applications. Some projects are complete while others are still at the idea stage, some have been released to the F/OSS community some some are still waiting to be released. Most projects are released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) or the Perl Artistic License; see the individual projects for specifics.

F/OSS Weblog

There's also a blog that charts my meandering thoughts as I work on these projects. Don't expect anything too novel there, but it might be of interest to developers in general or to anyone interested in the projects themselves.

Paperboy

Paperboy RSS —: A powerful, lightweight RSS feed reader utility. The main paperboy utility downloads feeds with libcurl, parses them with libxml2, and converts the information into a presentation form with libxslt. The project also includes a daemon/batch program for automating multiple calls to the main utility.
Paperboy WDM —: A web development framework built around the concept of separating logic, content, and presentation. The main component of the project is Titania which is driven by the XML family of technologies and uses Paperboy RSS to do the heavy lifting. (For more see the proposal submitted for Google's Summer of Code program.)
Paperboy GUI-CB (forthcoming) —: A graphical user interface for Paperboy RSS using the CamelBones framework. The interface would resemble an email client letting you sort, archive, and search news posts. Other similar UI projects are Paperboy PyGUI (in Python) and Paperboy-sh (a shell client) both also forthcoming.

3k of the Past, 3k of the Future

Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100 — product page (Japanese): Elsamalys is a PDA on crack. Running linux with a 4GB harddrive and a built-in keyboard, she's more of a palmtop computer than a mere electronic PIM.
Dell Inspiron 3000 (cancelled) —: Processor: Intel Pentium-MMX 133MHz; Memory: 63MB RAM; HDD: 3.25GB; OS: ?

Macintosh OS X

Polytonic Greek Keyboard Layout — tarball: Unsatisfied with the few polytonic Greek keyboard layout options out there, I decided to make my own. This one uses US English qwerty layout instead of the Greek keyboard layout; it lets you enter letters by their standard transliterations (e.g. ph (as well as f) will generate φ); it uses the standard Alt+Key combinations for the diacritics; it automatically converts to word-final sigma and makes word-initial vowels have the smooth breathing mark;... In short, I aim for it to be the most sophisticated and easy to use keyboard layout for polytonic Greek.; Note, the README file included in the tarball is in UTF-8. If you open it in TextEdit you'll get mojibake because it assumes it's Mac OS Roman. I'll work on fixing that, but until then you can open it in a web browser and instruct it to use UFT-8 to display it.

Perl Modules

XML::Handler::EasyTree::Generator (complete) —: A Perl module for creating "EasyTree" data structures on the fly. EasyTree structures are a representation of parsed XML created normally by XML::Parser::EasyTree (deprecated) or XML::Handler::Trees which use libexpat.
Time::TimeF (unreleased) —: Yet another Perl module for formatting time. TimeF allows using a number of different format styles for the formatting string (one I designed, and a few other ones used in similar modules), and provides some internationalization. This module is used extensively in my own projects but isn't really unique/complete enough right now to hold its own in the wild world of time formatting modules. As with all my unreleased projects, if you're interested in seeing the code contact me.

Other Applications

Tsukuru (forthcoming) —: An ontology for project building, and an accompanying project building tool using that ontology. See the proposal submitted for Google's Summer of Code program. (For more on what an "ontology" is, see Mark Heller's Virtual World Ontology thesis.)
Eng (forthcoming) —: A new general-purpose systems-level programming language with high-level features like namespaces, lexical aliasing, and tensor operations, intended to obviate C and C++. I'm still working on the complete spec for the language before I start implementing it. But if you're interested, then do check out my F/OSS blog where I ramble on about Eng every so often.