Free story software for linux

Winstone is a servlet container that was written out of a desire to provide servlet functionality. Winstone works without the bloat that full J2EE compliance introduces.
It is not intended to be a completely fully functional J2EE style servlet container (by this I mean supporting extraneous APIs unrelated to Servlets, such as JNDI, JavaMail, EJBs, etc) - this is left to Tomcat, Jetty, Resin, JRun, Weblogic et al.
Sometimes you want just a simple servlet container - without all the other junk - that just goes. This is where Winstone is best suited.
The short version (because the long version is way too politically incorrect) is as follows:
Winstone is the name of a rather large Jamaican man a friend of mine met one night, while he was out clubbing in the Roppongi area of Tokyo. He (my friend) was a little liquored up at the time, and when Winstone suggested they head to "this really cool club" he knew, he didnt think anything was wrong. It wasnt until Winstone led him down a dark stairwell and dropped his trousers that my friend clued in and ran like hell.
It was too good a story to let die, so I named this project Winstone so that said friend will continue to be reminded of it.
Main features:
- Supply fast, reliable servlet container functionality for a single webapp per server
- Keep the size of the core distribution jar as low as possible (currently 160KB)
- Keep configuration files to an absolute minimum, using command line options to optionally override sensible compiled in defaults.
- Eventually compile with GCJ to make a 3-4Meg windows exe for local development/deployment of servlets. This has not happened yet, because of some GCJ class loading problems.
- Optionally support JSP compilation using Apaches Jasper.
Usage:
If you want to build from source code, you will need to download and install Apache Maven. The following instructions assume you have already installed Maven and have the maven shell script in your path (to get Maven, see http://maven.apache.org/).
To build Winstone, unpack the tree:
tar zxf winstone-src-0.8.tar.gz
Then build it:
cd winstone
maven clean jar
The winstone.jar file will be in the target directory after the build is complete.
To run it:
java -jar target/winstone-0.8.jar --webroot= (+ other options)
- OR -
java -jar target/winstone-0.8.jar --warfile= (+ other options)
- OR -
java -jar target/winstone-0.8.jar --webappsDir= (+ other options)
- OR -
java -jar target/winstone-0.8.jar --hostsDir= (+ other options)

Olive is a totally sweet console mode RSS aggregator and newsreader written in Perl with Curses::UI as its toolkit.
The big difference between Olive and other newsreaders is that it takes a time-centric as opposed to site-centric view of newsfeeds.
Olive also tries to stay out of your way as much as possible by eating a minimum of screen real estate and streamlining operations to keep neccessary human interaction to a minimum.
Enhancements:
- A problem with starred story (un)selection was fixed.
- Standard --help and --version command-line arguments have been implemented.
- Licensing has been unified under the Perl license.

Monster Masher is an action game for the Gnome desktop environment.
In the old days, before man entered the world, the gnomes were abundant. Through centuries of hard labour, only slightly eased by the levitational powers provided to them by their god, they bored out shafts and caves in the mountains. Always seeking the precious stones and valuable ore...
But the gnomes dug too deep. So the story begins.
The basic idea is that you, as levitation worker gnome, has to clean the caves for monsters that want to roll over you. You do the cleaning by mashing the monsters with stone blocks. Take a look at the screenshots page to see how this looks like.
Main features:
- Mash your way through 30 levels (for hours of fun)
- Four kinds of monsters: stupid monsters, stupid-but-hard monsters, intelligent monsters, egg-laying monsters
- Power-up gems for invisibility, exploding the nearby monsters and freezing all monsters
- Easy, medium and hard difficulty levels (for even more hours of fun!)
- Support for two simultanous players (cooperative)
- Automatic support for large tiles for large displays

Worminator 3 is akin to many Apogee Software and ID Software classic action games such as Duke Nukem and Commander Keen.
In Worminator game, you play as The Worminator (or as several other optional characters) and fight your way through many levels of madness and mayhem.
It features nine unique weapons, visible character damage, multiple supported resolutions, full screen scrolling, sound and music, and more.
Original Worminator story...
The year is 2028, 14 years after the start of the deadliest war in the history of worm kind. Much has changed... In the year 2012; a brilliant American scientist discovered how to make W.O.R.M. (Wormborg Operated Remote Missile) Weaponry, and to work them, the "WormBorgs" cyborg fighting machines.
These so called "WormBorgs" were the elite fighting force and the pride of the United Worms of America. Their life-like roles soon became far too life-like. They thought on their own, and acted on their own whims, under their own leader "DirtNet." No one exactly knows who or what "DirtNet" is, but it soon began to take over.
First, it launched the W.O.R.M.s at the Woroviet Union, in the hopes that they would retaliate and initiate a war between the Woroviet Union and the UWA. However, "DirtNet" obviously had a few bugs to work out, and the W.S.S.R was obliterated into millions of radioactive hunks of mud and dirt. Despite the fact that no one liked Wormunism anyway, all of Wormurope retaliated against the UWA.
Soon, the world was turned into a nuclear wasteland. Nuke drops became daily ordeals, and the giant bombs turning whole forests into matchsticks was to be expected. As if the sewers werent loaded with enough mutated alligators as it was, the hunks of radioactive material combined with the primordial soup of the sewers are said to have created blobs of sewage ooze, powerful enough that they fed off the mutated alligators for lunch.
After what was left of Wormurope had realized what tricks had been played on them by "DirtNet," they began to rally and fight back. For 8 years, the WormBorgs dominated the lands, crushing the rebels... until one faithful day, when the now famous rebel hero emerged. It was Wrom Conner.
No longer acting as individual factions, countries or nations, the rebels struck quickly and fiercely under Wroms command, using tactics that even the powerful W-1000s processors could not predict. The tide of the war had turned.
Over the next 5 years, the rebels devastated the WormBorgs. Using guerilla tactics and reprogrammed WormBorgs to fight for them, the rebels were a resourceful army indeed. Now, in desperation, "DirtNet" has just brought its proto-type WormBorg online, equipped with the latest in armor and weaponry, in one last attempt to regain control...
Main features:
- Fast, fluid scrolling
- 12 unique weapons, and many types of ammo
- Lots of gibs and shrapnel (all cartoonish, though)
- Visible character damage (as you get hurt, the Worminator actually becomes bloody)
- Visible weapons (every weapon actually appears differently on the Worminator. Most platform games have a single weapon graphic that shoots every type of projectile)
- Over 12 fully animated enemies
- Comes with over 16 levels, and a level editor is included so you can make your own
- Keycards, doors, special items, switches, lever, extending bridges, floating platforms, and more!
- Earthquakes rip the ground apart, while snow and rain fall around you
- Great MIDI tunes by Garret Thomson (garret_t@sympatico.ca, www.sirsonic.com)
- Many sound effects (All from Internet sites such as Sound America and Meanrabbit. Let me know if there are any copyright problems, and I will deal with them immediately)
- Parallax scrolling, plus four data layers in every map. This makes the engine very flexible
- Game includes a campaign game with special scripted events, as well as an option to load custom maps
- Stereo sound effects (where available)
- Limited skins support; you can play as different characters!
- Built using Allegro + DJGPP. Source code may be made available if the demand is there
- If you wish to use the Worminator engine, contact me and we will discuss it (I would never charge any money for it, so if your interested, drop me an email. You have nothing to loose)
- Totally Freeware!
Enhancements:
- made worminator compile and run on Linux (Unix)
- made worminator yield the cpu when its idle
- save settings in textfile format under $HOME/.worm3.cfg instead of as binary blob in cwd
- save / load game to / from $HOME/.worm3.sav
- load datafile from DATADIR as defined during compilation instead of from cwd
- speedup: dont redraw borders and statuspanel unless nescesarry
- check all file accesses and give an error and continue when possible instead of just segfaulting
- fix a crash when changing audio options after loading a savegame of a custom-level or the tutorial
- fix a crash (unix only?) when changing video options and one similar on exit
- fix crash on exit caused by a few double frees on exit
- dont ask for confirmation on load/play_demo/exit when their is no game in progress
- show a message when trying to save when no game is in progress, instead of just silenty ignoring the request
- when clicking on another submenu when in one not only close the current one, but also open the new one
- fix map / savegame / demo read/write routines so that they work on Big Endian archs like PPC too

GDOC is a C Documentation Tool.
Main features:
- Keeps software and manual in sync.
- Improves source code readability by having extensive comments available directly.
- Improves manual as developers will more likely update the comments when they change source code.
- Support several output formats, such as Texinfo, MAN, DocBook, Doxygen, GTK-DOC tools, LaTeX, HTML.
- Only perl is required, and only for the developers (end-users do not need to have perl installed).
Then start to comment your source code. See the comments in gdoc for the full story, but here is an example:
/**
- stringprep_utf8_to_locale:
- @str: input zero terminated string.
*
- Convert string encoded in UTF-8 into the locales character set by
- using stringprep_convert().
*
- Return value: Returns newly allocated zero-terminated string which
- is @str transcoded into the locales character set.
**/
char *
stringprep_utf8_to_locale (const char *str)
{
return stringprep_convert (str, stringprep_locale_charset (), "UTF-8");
}
You can then extract Man pages, Texinfo fragments, etc, using gdoc as follows:
$ gdoc -texinfo file.c
@deftypefun {char *} {stringprep_utf8_to_locale} (const char * @var{str})
@var{str}: input zero terminated string.
Convert string encoded in UTF-8 into the locales character set by
using @code{stringprep_convert()}.
@strong{Return value:} Returns newly allocated zero-terminated string which
is @code{str} transcoded into the locales character set.
@end deftypefun
$
To simplify generating Texinfo fragments or Man pages for your entire project -- which might contain many files, each contain many functions, that would result in lots of boring Makefile rules to keep track of -- I use a Automake include file to simplify matters.
Enhancements:
- added -texinfo, -listfunc
- man page revamp
- various improvements

Polidori is a DVD Authoring System for Gnome and Linux.
Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel in several areas, it instead integrates several excellent tools like dvdauthor, dvdrtools, ogle, etc., already available for Linux, and bundled with most distributions.
At this time, there are no visual DVD authoring tools available for Linux, compared to the vast amount of similar tools available on Windows and Macintosh. The pieces are all available in Linux, they just need to be integrated into something easier to use.
Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel, Polidori will integrate several command-line tools available for Linux into a project-based workflow.
Main features:
- a Gnome-compliant GUI for creating projects
- visual development of navigation menus, sub-titles, backgrouunds, etc.
- integration with Kino for video editing and SMIL data for chapter/scene data
- integration with Ogle for ISO image preview before burning to media
- importing of images for backgrounds
- support for layered images created with the Gimp.
- creation of DVD ISO disk images
- writing disk images to media (DVD-R, DLT, etc)
Polidori is named after Dr. John Polidori, a writer of early 19th Century Gothic fiction. Many scholars feel that Dr. Polidori created the genre of vampire fiction with his short story The Vampyre (1819). This story marks the first time a vampire is portrayed as an aristocratic and romantic character, as seen in later vampire characters like Count Dracula and Lestat de Lioncourt. Why name a software application after this author?
Because the name sounded cool and distinctive.

Mathfun.py project s a rather small Python library that contains some of the more obscure (others would say less useful 8^) mathematical formula/functions that I have always found interesting/amusing.

These include primality tests, fibonacci sequences and turning characters into numbers, among other things. The next paragraph includes a little story about my strange habits as a teenager. The paragraph after that contains some ramblings about primes and formulas.

The paragraph after that hasnt been decided on yet, but you can be assured that it will be more stream-of- consciousness rambling about something mathematic by yours truly.

One of the reasons that this library exists is that, as a junior programmer in high school, I spent an insane amount of time writing BASIC programs on our IIgs that would calculate the first 100 primes or some other such nonsense. I would write it one way, get out a stop watch, run it, record the time it took, rewrite it, rerun it, retime it and calculate the difference as percentage decrease in time. Repeat the previous until you get BASIC that looked like an explosion in a type factory. All in some sort of quest to... well, I dont really know what I was shooting for. I just enjoyed it. Calculating if a number was prime, calculating the prime factorization, calculating the first N prime numbers... Yeah, I was a strange one.

But, in retrospect, all that solitary math kinda helped. While I reinvented many a prime wheel, I did it on my own, which was something of a personal fulfillment once I had learned more of a history of mathematics. And I never forgot most of those formulas that I worked out on that Apple. For instance, mathfun.isprime(number) utilizes most of what I learned back in high school. It iterates through the odd numbers, up to the integer value of the square root of the number in question. I still remember the epiphany that I had that I only needed to calculate through the square root of the number. 8^)

Theres a minor paradox with the calculation of a prime. The quickest way to generate primes would be to only attempt modular arithmetic with prime numbers. However, to do it that way means that you have to generate a list of prime numbers first, which involves a primality test on every odd number up to the square root of the number in question. This would be sloooooow for the primality test for any single number. (For instance, isprime(10000) would involved roughly 50 full primality tests to generate the list needed to be a maximally efficient test on it.) So, we accept that even if were not going to get any results doing (N mod 9), its much quicker to eat those wasted cycles than to determine if 9 is prime first.

However, if youre doing nothing more than simply cranking out prime after prime, it becomes much more efficient to only do the primality test with a list of primes, since (if you start from 2) youve already determined the ealier ones before. (Theres probably a break-even time first (machine dependent) before "determine all primes with primes" becomes more efficient than "crank through the odd numbers".) Its easy to see however, that for very large numbers its much better to only work with primes.

Theres also a minor question of the speed of the data structures used to store the prime list versus the very fast next odd number test. However, Ill leave that one up to the True Computer Scientists.