www.jmglov.net - Open Source

My own contributions to Open Source, in roughly cronological order:

• Wrote ebuilds for Greenhouse. See ~jmglov for details.
• Wrote a quick search proxy script (pretty-printed version here), designed for people who are behind firewalls that only allow them to view arbitrary TLDs (e.g. .net, .org, etc.).
• Ported rikaichan, a Firefox extension that offers inline dictionary lookups for Japanese text, to Thunderbird. I have contacted the author of rikaichan to see about getting my changes incorporated with the offical distribution of the plugin, but until that happens, you can install the pre-patched extension from here. Or, if you prefer the version of rikaichan that is bundled with the Japanese names dictionary, download the extension from mozdev.org, download my patch tarball, uncompress it, and run the included rikaichan-patch.sh file to patch the extension.
• Wrote another Firefox search plugin: PGP-MIT-EDU, which searches the MIT PGP Public Key Server for public keys. You probably want to grab it from Mycroft, since you can do an automatic install, but I also keep a local copy (see the README for installation instructions). Alternatively, you can just download the XML source and the icon of the plugin.
• Got my Gentoo developer's spurs back! Now that I have CVS access, expect the quality of Gentoo Linux to suffer appreciably. ;)
• Patched Gmail Notifier, an extension for Firefox that notifies you when new mail hits your Gmail inbox. I modified it so that clicking on the Gmail Notifier icon can be configured to just re-check Gmail, instead of opening Gmail in a new window or tab. I keep Gmail open all the time, so this made sense for me. You can grab the patch, or you can just install the patched extension (you will have to instruct Firefox that it is OK to install extensions from jmglov.net).
• Wrote a quick little Perl script, timeconv.pl, for converting times between one timezone and another. See the README file for installation instructions. Here's some sample usage:

  : jglover@jglover; timeconv.pl tokyo los_angeles 2005/12/19 16:30
                     Asia/Tokyo: 2005/12/19 16:30
            America/Los_Angeles: 2005/12/18 23:30
  : jglover@jglover; which timeconv.pl
  /home/jglover/bin/timeconv.pl
  : jglover@jglover; cd bin
  : jglover@jglover; ln -s timeconv.pl tokyo2los_angeles
  : jglover@jglover; ln -s timeconv.pl los_angeles2tokyo
  : jglover@jglover; cd
  : jglover@jglover; tokyo2los_angeles 2005/12/19 16:30
                     Asia/Tokyo: 2005/12/19 16:30
            America/Los_Angeles: 2005/12/18 23:30
  : jglover@jglover; los_angeles2tokyo 2005/12/19 16:30
            America/Los_Angeles: 2005/12/19 16:30
                     Asia/Tokyo: 2005/12/20 09:30
  

• I wrote my first Firefox search plugin: kobesearch_cpan, which searches the Perl core and CPAN modules documentation, using Randy Kobes's CPAN Search. You probably want to grab it from Mycroft, since you can do an automatic install, but I also keep a local copy (see the README for installation instructions). Alternatively, you can just download the XML source and the icon of the plugin.
• I finally made the initial public release of Virtual BookShelf (VBS), a web application written by Ed Beranek back at TFCC. VBS was designed to let the developers at TFCC list the books they had on their physical shelves, so that useful books could be easily located and borrowed, with full accounting. Now, we are going to try using it at TLUG.
• I did some Google Maps hacking to turn out "A Gaijin's Guide to Central Yokohama". Help yourself to the source, released under the BSD licence, as ever.
• I wrote a patch for Jean Tourrilhes's iwevent tool, included in the Wireless Tools for Linux, version 27 package, that prints timestamps for events from wireless interfaces in the user's local timezone, instead of GMT. I heard back from Jean, and he had already fixed this in the pre-release version of 28. So this patch is just here for people using wireless-tools.27 and for historical interest.
• I am the author of OSDT (the Open Source Distribution Toolkit) , a collection of tools that, as ESR put it, "lowers the friction costs of development". The initial release has been made, and I hope to add more functionality as time allows.
• I am the author of dclog, a C logging library.
• bash-completion: takes advantage of bash(1)'s programmable completion hooks to enable tab-completion of hostnames, command-line options to common programs, and so on. I have submitted two patches thus far:
  • I wrote a Perl script that uses the svn help command to generate the necessary Bourne shell code for Subversion completion. You can find the Perl script here, or the patch against bash-completion-20040711 that was generated from Subversion 1.0.5.
  • bash-completion has completed Makefile targets for some time; I submitted a patch that adds completion of Makefile macros as well. This patch has been submitted to the author of bash-completion.
  • A trivial patch that completes hostnames for ssh-installkeys, grab it here. This patch has been included in bash-completion.
• Natural Docs: an open-source, extensible, multi-language documentation generator. I added Makefile support. You can grab my patch here.
• I am now a Gentoo developer. I belong to the webapp and CJK herds, which means that I am especially interested in Web applications (i.e. stuff that requires a webserver such as Apache) and Asian language support (CJK == Chinese, Japanese, Korean). In addition to my herd memberships, I maintain the following ebuilds:
  • BugPort - a web-based system for managing tasks and defects throughout the software development process (developed at INCOGEN, Inc., where I used to work)
  • freshmeat-submit - a tool to submit version updates to freshmeat.net; designed to run from within a project release script; uses freshmeat.net's XML-RPC interface
  • mkDoxy - generates Doxygen-compatible HTML documentation for makefiles (developed by Carey Hall, a co-worker of mine at Twenty First Century Communications, Inc. , where I currently work)
  • libsqlora8 - a simple C library for accessing Oracle databases via the OCI interfaces
  • LXR - a general purpose source code indexer and cross-referencer that provides web-based browsing of source code with links to the definition and usage of any identifier
  • Natural Docs - an extensible, multi-language source code documentation generator
  • online-bookmarks - a Bookmark management system to store your Bookmarks, Favorites and Links right in the WWW where they actually belong
  • ssh-installkeys - a script tries for exporting ssh public keys to a specified site, walks you through generating key pairs if it doesn't find any to export
  • VMware Console - VMware Remote Console for Linux (lets you connect to virtual machines managed by a VMware GSX or ESX server)
• e2fsprogs: all of the standard utilities for creating, fixing, configuring, and debugging ext2 filesystems. My patch adds the '-b superblock' flag to tune2fs. The flag works exactly like the '-b superblock' flag to e2fsck:

  -b superblock
  Instead  of  using  the  normal  superblock,  use an alternative
  superblock specified by superblock.   This  option  is  normally
  used  when the primary superblock has been corrupted.  The loca-
  tion of the backup superblock is dependent on  the  filesystem's
  blocksize.    For  filesystems  with  1k  blocksizes,  a  backup
  superblock can be found at block 8193; for filesystems  with  2k
  blocksizes,  at  block  16384;  and  for 4k blocksizes, at block
  32768.
  
  Additional backup superblocks can be  determined  by  using  the
  mke2fs  program  using  the  -n  option  to  print out where the
  superblocks were created.   The -b option to mke2fs, which spec-
  ifies blocksize of the filesystem must be specified in order for
  the superblock locations that are printed out to be accurate.
  
  If an alternative superblock is specified and the filesystem  is
  not  opened  read-only,  e2fsck  will make sure that the primary
  superblock is  updated  appropriately  upon  completion  of  the
  filesystem check.
          

  You can snag my patch here .


• qpkg: a flexible tool for determining information about Gentoo ebuilds. I fixed one bug (at least, I consider it a bug) and added a feature that INCnotify relies on:
  • When using the -I flag to query installed ebuilds, qpkg will now return 1 (failure) if the ebuild is not installed. Before, qpkg always returned 0 (success).
  • qpkg now accepts a '-ci, --case-insens' option, which performs the requested search in case-insensitive mode. (e.g. a search for the installed package 'foobar' like this: qpkg -I -ci FoObAr would succeed.)
  You can grab my patch here.


• mod_auth_pam: an Apache module for authenticating against a PAM stack instead of an Apache password file. I added two options that can be turned on and off in the Apache config file:
  
  
  • AuthPAM_Debug - off|on; spews debuggery using syslog's AUTHPRIV facility
  • AuthPAM_NoLocal - off|on; modelled and named after the pam_smb_auth PAM module's 'nolocal' command line option, when turned on, it forgoes checking whether the account is expired, thus allowing usernames without a local account to authenticate. This is useful in conjunction with the aforementioned pam_smb_auth or other PAM modules that authenticate against a remote host.
  
  My patch can be obtained from here.
  
  Note that I am planning to make the following changes, and see if I can get my code into the main branch:
  • Change my debug code to use Apache's logging API instead of syslog
  • Get rid of the nolocal option, as it turned out to be unnecessary. Instead, you can use the stock version of mod_auth_pam, and make sure the account line in /etc/pam.d/httpd looks like:

    account required /lib/security/pam_permit.so



• arpwatch: arpwatch is an excellent little tool written by the Network Research Lab at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that monitors a LAN for ARP broadcasts. A network admin can use it to detect new MAC addresses showing up on his watch, usually a suspicious thing. I simply added an option to the arpwatch program, a [-a address] flag that allows one to specify the email address of the "watcher" (i.e. the address that receives reports from arpwatch) at run-time. You can grab a tarball containing my patch from here (make sure to check out the README file which is included in the tarball).


• prtdiag: no, not the ever-so-kewl Solaris utility, but a Bash script version for Linux that uses utilities like lspci, lm_sensors, and dmidecode to emulate prtdiag's output. A neat script, all in all. I wanted to use it on a Gentoo box, but it was developed for Red Hat (the author is a Red Hat employee), and a few things had to be cleaned up. I said cleaning, submitted a patch, and my name is in the changelog now!


• Adonthell: an Open Source Role-Playing Game. I wrote some code a few releases back, and wrote some of the dialogue for our "Waste's Edge" technology preview release. Wish I had more free time, as I would like to write some code and head up the effort to have a Japanese language version of Adonthell!