Projects

One of my hobbies is software development, usually resulting in applications that scratch an itch of mine. Here's a short summary of the most recent ones. You can also visit my GitHub profile for more information.

Current projects

• pygount count lines of code for hundreds of programming languages. It utilizes pygments' vast collection of lexers typically used for syntax highlighting. The first version was intended as a joke on tools like SLOCCount or CLOC to show that a similar tool written in Python can count SLOC's for more programming languages than it has SLOC's itself. Over time, functionality was added and these days it is used for serious tracking of project SLOC and research projects.
• Cutplace, a tool to validate that tabular data conform to an quite easy to read and write formal interface description.
• ebcdic, a collection of Python codecs for various EBCDIC encodings. I used it a lot while working in finance when processing or sanitizing data we got from the mainframe but wanted to continue with on a modern platform, typically in relation with data warehousing. Luckily, this is easy to maintain because EBCDIC does not change that much.
• loxun, a Python module to write large output in XML using Unicode and namespaces. Of course, you can also use it for small XML output with plain 8 bit strings and no namespaces. At EuroPython 2012 I did a lightning talk about the events that lead to this module, accompanied by slides and example code

Major contributions

• Pygments, a generic syntax highlighter that provides lexers for hundreds or programming languages and text formats. When I was working in finance, I added lexers for some of the obscure languages we were using on the mainframe (Easytrieve, JCL, Rexx) and when processing data (Transact-SQL, VBScript). Because of my own tool pygount (see above for details) heavily uses pygments, I occasionally help tracking down or fixing bugs in lexers from other people.
• For dynAmite, a multi player bomberman clone for AmigaOS I authored a couple of maps and a style named "obvious". The latter makes it easy to map colors from the chat window to actual players. W00t.

Old projects

The projects below are not really maintained anymore. Nevertheless, (possibly after some convincing) they should still compile and run on modern hardware and platforms.

• ASCII-Scramble, a shoot'em up for MS DOS text mode using only ASCII characters written in Pascal. I developed it on an ancient 8086 laptop while working as postman during a holiday job in the 1990's when living at my parents' place. There, I was away from my more fun and powerful Amiga computer but still could not resist the urge to code something. Anything. On any platform. In any language. Now.
• Hsc), probably one of the first static site generators (though this term did not exist yet and the manual refers to it as "HTML preprocessor"). Written in C, maintained by me until 1998. The project was later picked up and improved a lot by Matthias Bethke.
• LichtTools, probably one of the first flashlight applications though
  the term did not exist then and the manual refers to it as "bulb simulator". It was originally designed and implemented by Michael Gehmair during a night when his only bulb broke while learning for an important exam scheduled for the next day. It has been ported to various platforms by various people.
• Jomic, an early, portable viewer for comic book archives using CBZ or CBR as format. It is written in Java and convinced me that I should move to different programming languages for hobby projects.
• Grotag, a platform independent viewer for documents in the AmigaGuide hypertext format. It can also convert them to DocBook XML for further editing on contemporary platforms.
• rcs4cvs2svn prepares RCS projects for processing with cvs2svn. You can also use it as replacement for various rcs2cvs scripts floating around.
• Tratihubis converts Trac tickets to
• Github issues. After I moved all my Trac projects to GitHub, I naturally lost interest in it. It does not work anymore, but might be useful as basis for an updated version.
• Vahunz increases or decreases the legibility or of source code names. It scans a whole source code tree and collects variable and function names in a dictionary. The user can then decide what to do about each name: leave it untouched, assign a more meaningful one, or let vahunz generate a random one. (License: open source; platform independent; programming language: portable C)

Ancient Amiga projects

The project below were develop exclusively for Amiga family of personal computers. They are unmaintained and collected here purely for historic purpose.

• Sofa, a port of the SmartEiffel Eiffel compiler (now forked to LibertyEiffel) for AmigaOS Classic. The binary is available from aminet:dev/lang/sofa.lha.
• envSOF, an Eiffel/Sofa developer environment for GoldEd (now called CubicIDE). It simplifies developing Eiffel programs by adding syntax coloring, a procedure browser and documentation browser.
• WgetRexx integrates the recursive download tool wget into various Amiga web browsers using ARexx. It makes it easy to create menu items that allow to download the currently visible page or the whole directory branch related to it.
• Orbit Amiga 68k, a port of the Orbit space combat simulator for Amiga/68k. This was a funny exercise in futility because it runs fine albeit too slow to do anything really useful with it.