Free alphaville forever young software for linux

libvarexp is a C++ library that allows its users to detach any kind of information from the representation of that information by providing a simple-to-use but powerful text-template mechanism.

Similar mechanisms have been available in tools like sh(1), make(1), or perl(1) forever and have proven to be very useful.

The basic idea is that the relevant information is made available in variables, which the author of the template can than use within the text itself as he or she sees fit.

Consider, for example, a tool that will calculate the monthly financial reports of a small company.

Such a program should only calculate the required values, it should not worry about writing the resulting reports into an HTML file, a CSV file, or whatever format is desired. Instead, it should make the results of the calculation available in the variables "$TURNOVER", "$PROFIT", and "$INCREASE".

Then, using libvarexp, it could load an arbitrary template file and have the actual values inserted at the apropriate positions. Without changing a single line of code, one could generate the monthly report in HTML

Hanihani Operation Sanctuary project is an English adaptation of a Japanese visual novel game.
The girl that fell out of the blue.
And the protagonists life, which began to take a turn little by little into the realm of the extraordinary starting from that very day.
- Nao-kun, if you dont get up soon, youre going to be late.
The new school term started today. The protagonists childhood friend, Honami, has kept telling him that hes not a child anymore, and yet continues to come to wake him up. They proceed as they always have to "Hasumidai Academy", which stands atop a hill ... but this time around, as second-year students.
- Naoki, Im going on ahead of you!
And the protagonists cousin, Matsuri, zips past the two of them. After having lost both parents in a terrible accident 5 years ago, the protagonist Naoki Kuzumi was taken in by Matsuris parents. And now, Matsuri herself -- who had been so opposed to Naokis moving in back then -- has become a freshman at Hasumidai Academy.
These ordinary, ordinary days, stretching on forever.
... but then, one day, up on the roof of school ...
Enhancements:
- RTM, all platforms.
- Initial page release. Currently in QC. Expect RTM for all platforms this weekend.

Fast Video Download enables you to save embedded video files from various video-hosting servers.
Fast Video Download can save embedded video files from following video-hosting servers:
Angry Alien, Anime Episodes, Anime Forever, Bad Jojo, Blip.TV, Bo-Funk, Bolt, Break.com, Bubblare.dk, CollegeHumor.com, Current.TV, Daily Motion, Danerd.com, eVideo Share, Google Video, Grinvi, iFilm, Libero.IT Video, HI5 (VideoEgg), My Space, MetaCafe, News.NTV.ru, PornoTube, Put File, Streetfire, Totally Crap, You Tube, V-Social and Vidiac.
Main features:
- Just in ONE click on the status-bar or custom toolbar icon, FVD immediately open the regular "Save As" dialog with already placed video title and extension.
- FVD supports additional video formats at Video, Break.com, Blip.TV. You can choose desired format via Preferences.
- FVD is able to pick any multimedia links from embeded objects on ordinary pages
- If theres only single link, standard dialog open immediately. Otherwise, links are listed in pop-up window.
- Processing of embedded YouTube video objects: Special download link will appear under every embedded YouTube Flash-Player posted on common pages such as blogs and web-boards.
- At last, FVD supports DownThemAll and FlashGot: You can turn on interaction with your desired download manager in preferences.

Webalizer is a fast, free web server log file analysis program. The project produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser.
It was written to solve several problems that I had with currently available analysis packages. A vast majority of them were written in Perl or some other scripting language, and took forever to run. Some were not free. Some even produced wrong results, or results that were not in a format I found very useful.
In order to get the stats I wanted, in a format that I liked, I wrote The Webalizer, and have made it available here, to anyone who wants it, for any purpose. Starting as a simple Perl script with limited capabilities, it has grown into a full featured, robust and fast analysis tool, being used by thousands of systems around the globe.
Main features:
- Is written in C to be extremely fast and highly portable. On a 200Mhz pentium machine, over 10,000 records can be processed in one second, with a 40 Megabyte file taking roughly 15 seconds (over 150,000 records).
- Supports standard Common Logfile Format server logs. In addition, several variations of the Combined Logfile Format are supported, allowing statistics to be generated for referring sites and browser types as well. Now also has native support for wu-ftpd xferlog FTP and squid log formats as well.
- Generated reports can be configured from the command line, or by use of one or more configuration files. Detailed information on configuration options can be found in the README file, supplied with all distributions.
- Supports multiple languages. Currently, Catalan, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian are available.
- Unlimited log file sizes and partial logs are supported, allowing logs to be rotated as often as needed, and eliminating the need to keep huge monthly files on the system.
- Distributed under the GNU General Public License, complete source code is available, as well as binary distributions for some of the more popular platforms.

The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer creates three-dimensional, photo-realistic images using a rendering technique called ray-tracing. It reads in a text file containing information describing the objects and lighting in a scene and generates an image of that scene from the view point of a camera also described in the text file.
The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer(tm) was developed from DKBTrace 2.12 (written by David K. Buck and Aaron A. Collins) by a bunch of people (called the POV-Team?) in their spare time. The headquarters of the POV-Team is on the internet (see "Where to Find POV-Ray Files" for more details).
The POV-Ray package includes detailed instructions on using the ray-tracer and creating scenes. Many stunning scenes are included with POV-Ray so you can start creating images immediately when you get the package. These scenes can be modified so you do not have to start from scratch.
In addition to the pre-defined scenes, a large library of pre-defined shapes and materials is provided. You can include these shapes and materials in your own scenes by just including the library file name at the top of your scene file, and by using the shape or material name in your scene.
Ray-tracing is not a fast process by any means, but it produces very high quality images with realistic reflections, shading, perspective and other effects.
Ray-tracing is a rendering technique that calculates an image of a scene by simulating the way rays of light travel in the real world. However it does its job backwards. In the real world, rays of light are emitted from a light source and illuminate objects. The light reflects off of the objects or passes through transparent objects. This reflected light hits our eyes or perhaps a camera lens. Because the vast majority of rays never hit an observer, it would take forever to trace a scene.
Ray-tracing programs like POV-Ray start with their simulated camera and trace rays backwards out into the scene. The user specifies the location of the camera, light sources, and objects as well as the surface texture properties of objects, their interiors (if transparent) and any atmospheric media such as fog, haze, or fire.
For every pixel in the final image one or more viewing rays are shot from the camera, into the scene to see if it intersects with any of the objects in the scene. These "viewing rays" originate from the viewer, represented by the camera, and pass through the viewing window (representing the final image).
Every time an object is hit, the color of the surface at that point is calculated. For this purpose rays are sent backwards to each light source to determine the amount of light coming from the source. These "shadow rays" are tested to tell whether the surface point lies in shadow or not. If the surface is reflective or transparent new rays are set up and traced in order to determine the contribution of the reflected and refracted light to the final surface color.
Special features like inter-diffuse reflection (radiosity), atmospheric effects and area lights make it necessary to shoot a lot of additional rays into the scene for every pixel.
Main features:
- Easy to use scene description language.
- Large library of stunning example scene files.
- Standard include files that pre-define many shapes, colors and textures.
- Very high quality output image files (up to 48-bit color).
- 16 and 24 bit color display on many computer platforms using appropriate hardware.
- Create landscapes using smoothed height fields.
- Many camera types, including perspective, orthographic, fisheye, etc.
- Spotlights, cylindrical lights and area lights for sophisticated lighting.
- Photons for realistic, reflected and refracted, caustics. Photons also interact with media.
- Phong and specular highlighting for more realistic-looking surfaces.
- Inter-diffuse reflection (radiosity) for more realistic lighting.
- Atmospheric effects like atmosphere, ground-fog and rainbow.
- Particle media to model effects like clouds, dust, fire and steam.
- Several image file output formats including Targa, BMP (Windows only), PNG and PPM.
- Basic shape primitives such as ... spheres, boxes, quadrics, cylinders, cones, triangle and planes.
- Advanced shape primitives such as ... Tori (donuts), bezier patches, height fields (mountains), blobs, quartics, smooth triangles, text, superquadrics, surfaces of revolution, prisms, polygons, lathes, fractals, isosurfaces and the parametric object.
- Shapes can easily be combined to create new complex shapes using Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). POV-Ray supports unions, merges, intersections and differences.
- Objects are assigned materials called textures (a texture describes the coloring and surface properties of a shape) and interior properties such as index of refraction and particle media (formerly known as "halos").
- Built-in color and normal patterns: Agate, Bozo, Bumps, Checker, Crackle, Dents, Granite, Gradient, Hexagon, Leopard, Mandel, Marble, Onion, Quilted, Ripples, Spotted, Spiral, Radial, Waves, Wood, Wrinkles and image file mapping. Or build your own pattern using functions.
- Users can create their own textures or use pre-defined textures such as ... Brass, Chrome, Copper, Gold, Silver, Stone, Wood.
- Combine textures using layering of semi-transparent textures or tiles of textures or material map files.
- Display preview of image while rendering (not available on all platforms).
- Halt and save a render part way through, and continue rendering the halted partial render later.

IVJLogger project is a small library of classes and functions written in Java designed to assist you with your logging needs. "Why another logger?" you may ask. Well, the main purpose of it is keeping it simple.
Simplicity means less bugs, more extensibility, better performance, and happier users. Many loggers Ive seen out therer take forever to set up, I am not even talking about all the initialization code, and all the clean-up you have to do just to get them to log one line of code.
With IVJLogger you dont need any external files, no clean-up, and initialization code is as simple as instantiating an object.
Main features:
- Simplicity
- High performance - thanks to very efficient thread pool
- Less coding - one line to initialize, one line to log, no clean-up
- No external objects used - include the source with your project and youre ready to go
- Most recent JVM friendly - created and tested on Java 1.4.2 SE
- Cross-platform - well, Java kind of took care of that :)
- Thread-safe - multiple threads may use the same logger to log data simultaneously.

wmpower is a Window Maker dock application allowing the user to graphically see (and set) the power management status of his laptop.
Main features:
- Battery status display (you choose the battery);
- Both APM and ACPI kernels are supported;
- On ACPI kernels you get fan status and a thermal sensor;
- Direct access to Toshiba hardware: you get fan status and LCD brightness management even without an APCI kernel;
- While on battery, it can stop your fan, HD, lin-seti service to make the battery last longer; if you have a Toshiba Laptop, it can also adjust your LCD brightness;
- Fast battery charge mode: you can keep on battery settings until your battery reaches 100%: this will make it recharge much faster;
- no-meddling option: if you want the program to display power manamenegt status, but not to take any action.
- On Toshiba laptops you can use your mouse wheel to adjust the brightness of your lcd screen.
- Support for Dell laptops for temperature and fan status
- Support for Compal hardware
- CPU frequency scaling support
Installation:
./configure
make
su root (if you are not root already)
make install
Enhancements:
- Fixed a memory allocation issue that on rare occasions could make wmpower crash.
- Fixed small bug that made wmpower print forever that it would not fast charge the battery as it was already at maximum capacity.
- When calculating battery time, and battery is charging, now wmpower displays time remaining until battery is fully charged instead of how much time would left if we were running on battery power.

Acme::OneHundredNotOut is a raise of the bat, a tip of the hat.

I have just released my 100th module to CPAN, the first time that anyone has reached that target. As some of you may know, I am getting ready to go back to college and reinvent myself from being a programmer into being a missionary. I dont forsee that many more Perl modules coming out of this.

Of course, this doesnt mean that Im going to abjure usage of Perl forever; any time theres a computer and something I need automated, out will come the Swiss Army Chainsaw and the job will get done. In fact, we recently needed to manipulate some text from a mission handbook to translate it into Japanese, and Perl was there handling and collating all that.

But 100 modules is a convenient place to stop and take stock, and I hope that those of you who have benefitted from my modules, programs or writing about Perl will forgive me a certain spot of self-indulgence as I look back over my CPAN career, especially since I feel that the diversity of modules that Ive produced is a good indication of the diversity of what can be done with Perl.

Lets begin, then, with some humble beginnings, and then catch up on recent history.
The Embarrassing Past

Contrary to popular belief, I was not always a CPAN author. I started writing modules in 1998, immediately after reading the first edition of the Perl Cookbook - yes, you can blame Nat and Tom for all this. The first module that I released was Tie::DiscoveryHash, since Id just learnt about tied hashes. As with many of my modules, it was an integral part of another software project which I actually never finished, and now cant find.

The first module that I ever wrote (but, by a curious quirk of fate, precisely the fiftieth module I released) was called String::Tokeniser, which is still a reasonably handy way of getting an iterator over tokenising a string. (Someone recently released String::Tokenizer, which makes me laugh.) This too was for an abortive project, webperl, an application of Don Knuths WEB system of structured documentation to Perl. However, given the code quality of these two modules, its perhaps just as well that the projects never saw the light of day.

There are a few other modules Id rather like to forget, too. Devel::Pointer was a sick joke that went badly wrong - it allowed people to use pointers in Perl. Some people failed to notice that referring to memory locations directly in an extremely high-level language was a dangerous and silly thing to do, and actually used the damned thing, and I started getting requests for support for it. Then at some point in 2001, when I should really have known better, I developed an interest in Microsofts .NET and the C# language, which I still think is pretty neat; but I decided it might be a good idea to translate the Mono projects tokenizer and parser into Perl, ending up with C::Sharp. I never got around to doing the parser part, or indeed anything else with it, and so it died a lonely death in a dark corner of CPAN. GTK::HandyClist was my foray into programming graphical applications, which started and ended there.

Bundle::SDK::SIMON was actually the slides from a talk on my top ten favourite CPAN modules - except that this changes so quickly over time, it doesnt really make much sense any more.

Finally, Array::FileReader was an attempt to optimize a file access process. Unfortunately, my "optimization" ended up introducing more overheads than the naive solution. It all goes to show. Since then, Mark-Jason Dominus, another huge influence in the development of my CPAN career, has written Tie::File, which not only has a better name but is actually efficient too.

The Internals Phase

1999-2000 were disastrous years for me personally but magnificent years Perl-sonally. Stuck in a boring job and a tiny flat in the middle of Tokyo, I had plenty of time to get stuck into more Perl development. I felt that getting involved with perl5-porters would be a good way of gettting to know more about Perl, and so I needed a hobby horse - an issue of Perls development that I cared about. Since I was in Japan and working a lot with non-Latin text, Unicode support seemed a good thing to work on, and so Unicode::Decompose appeared, while I fixed up a substantial part of the post-5.6 core Unicode support.

Id recommend this way to anyone who wants to get more involved in the Perl community, although I was very lucky in terms of who else happened to be around at the time: Gurusamy Sarathy was extremely gracious in helping me turn my fledgling C code into something fit for the Perl core, and he also helped me understand the perl5-porters etiquette (yes, there was some at the time) and what makes a good patch, while Jarkko Hietaniemi was always good for suggestions of interesting things for keen people to work on. Seriously, get involved. If I can do it, anyone can.
Anyway, this fixation with understanding the Perl 5 internals, and especially the Perl 5 compiler, (due to yet another of my Perl influences, the great Malcolm Beattie) led to quite a torrent of modules, from ByteCache, an implementation of just-in-time compilation for Perl modules, through B::Flags and B::Tree to help visualising the Perl op tree, to uninit, B::Generate, optimizer and B::Utils for modifying it.

Perl About The House

Now we abandon chronological order somewhat and take a look at the various areas in which Ive used Perl. One of these areas has been the automation of everyday life: checking my bank balance with Finance::Bank::LloydsTSB (the first Perl module to interface to personal internet banking, no less) and my phone bill with a release of Tony Bowdens Data::BT::PhoneBill.

Finance::Bank::LloydsTSB was meant to go with Finance::QIF, my Quicken file parser, to produce another now-abandoned idea, a Perl finances manager. It seemed that Im only capable of producing modules, not full standalone applications - or at least, it seemed that way until I produced Bryar, my blogging software, based on the concepts from Rael Dornfests blosxom and beginning my adventures with Andy Wardleys Template Toolkit. Bryar also tuned me in to the Model-View-Controller framework idea, of which more later.

Another project I briefly played with was a personal robot, using the Sphinx/Festival speech handling and recognition modules from Cepstral and Kevin Lenzo. I didnt have X10, so I couldnt shout "lights" into the air in a wonderfully scifi way, but I could shout "mail" and have a summary of my inbox read to me, "news" to get the latest BBC news headlines, and "time" to hear the time. Of course, getting computers to tell the time nicely takes a little bit of work. I dont like "Its eleven oh-three pee em", since thats not what someone would say if you asked them the time. I wanted my robot to say "Its just after eleven", and thats what Time::Human does. Shame about the localisation.