Reid’s Software

I do a lot of tinkering and hacking, and this is a small subset of the utilities that I've created which make my life easier. I thought they might be interesting to others. They are all open source, so you are welcome to modify them and distribute your modifications.

If you find any of these useful, send me an email. I’d be curious. Patches and bug reports are also welcome, though as I maintain these for my own use, I don’t guarantee any action. :)

Note that this list doesn't include bigger projects that have their own home: Cyclopath, Yabman, and Lambda.

Finally, while I don’t take any special pride in their non-portability, I’ve only tested them on Debian Linux, and results may vary on other platforms.

• bal, a pipe which balances a simple text-based ledger. I use it in Emacs with a short wrapper to balance my checkbook.
• battman manages a collection of battery cells and their groupings.
• bibbleblog lets you create Blogger draft posts directly from a Bibble 5 batch output queue.
• burn, a shell script wrapper around cdrecord to facilitate burning arbitrary files to CDR, which might be pre-mastered ISO filesystem images or whatever.
• epsfixbbox corrects the bounding box in an EPS file (since so much software gets this wrong).
• exit-fl-hist generates a histogram of focal lengths from a collection of photos.
• equipment.pl is an outdoor adventure equipment checklist which is a LaTeX document embedded in a Perl program that produces customized lists depending on the type of trip.
• falloff-analyze visualizes light falloff in test images, to help characterize problems in camera lenses.
• ptp-acquire downloads and organizes photos from a PTP-based camera.
• rlog, a collection of Perl scripts that store log data (e.g. bike rides, books read) in PostgreSQL and turn them into nifty tables and graphs. This is the software that drives the lists and logs section of this site.
• superbackup and backup-to-dvd, a backup system which I have been using for many years.