Luke Maurits

Today I have released HTTPeek 0.1 on my software page under the usual BSD license. This release is not quite in the “everything works but the code is ugly” state I had hoped the first release would be, as dealing with HTTP/0.9 is still rather unreliable. I was unable to work on HTTPeek for long enough during my recent time without a computer that I cant make fixes very quickly anymore and I was worried that the project would just stall all together if I waited until everything was perfect. Hopefully those few issues will be sorted out soon.

Also, for a little while now (perhaps a fortnight?), the website for Tomb Saver has been live. Tomb Saver is a project run by my fianc

I’ve added a feed section to my site. It’s powered by a very nice engine with the unusual name of Rawdog (RSS Aggregator Without Delusions of Grandeur). I encourage you to check it out, it’s an RSS aggregation solution in much the same spirit as PyBlosxom, which powers this blog: it’s written in Python and is small, simple, easy to configure so as to blend in with an existing site and readily extended by plugins. Very nice simple software!

There aren’t a whole lot of feeds displayed at the moment, but I do intend to add more over time. It may also take a week until I settle upon some values for Rawdog’s many configuration options which give me a page that I’m happy with in terms of the amount and age of content on it.

Development on any of my free software has kind of stalled recently. I have had the power supply in my desktop and the IDE controller in my laptop die within a week of each other, leaving me temporarily stranded without any way to code. I am up and running again with a new desktop machine, an auctioned ex-government Dell I bought cheaply from a friend. With a 1.4 GHz P4 it is substantially beefier than my old 800 MHz Celeron, although it’s not really the kind of thing I notice in my daily usage.

Anyway, I am hoping to have some new code up for download soon. Work on Comanche has taken back seat to work on a tool I have called HTTPeek. HTTPeek is a Python program with a Tkinter GUI for hand crafting HTTP requests, throwing them at servers and then taking apart the response. I wrote it because I am starting to implement features of HTTP in Comanche that are not easy to test with a standard browser – things like time and range related header fields. I am quite happy with it because it feels like a genuinely useful tool. You can probably expect an "everything works but the code is ugly" release within a week, and an "everything works and I’m not ashamed anymore" release a week after that. Once HTTPeek is out, I will probably focus my attention back on Comanche. I have noticed a major error arising from my early misunderstanding of the HTTP specs, which will have to be fixed before any requests with an entity (e.g. POST requests) will be able to work.

I learned about port knocking yesterday and have been thinking of trying to implement some of the ideas (in Python, naturally) myself. This may be the focus of an upcoming project.

So, I have decided to add a blog to my website. It will not be used for personal or social things – I already have a blog for that, and those who I consider friends know where to find it – but rather for things related to this website, like announcing new software releases or site sections, and also technical things like discussing interesting programming and Unix problems and ideas, etc. Updates will likely be sporadic.

This blog is powered by a lightweight blogging framework called by PyBlosxom, which is a translation into Python of the framework Blosxom (pronounced "blossom", written in Perl). From what I have seen so far, PyBlosxom is really cool. No databases are involved – each entry is created as a plain text file and the framework assigns a date and time to each entry by looking at the modification time stamp on the corresponding file. This is pretty neat. You can write your blog entries using vi or emacs (or whatever else you like), and backing up/moving your blog is trivial (it’s just a directory of text files). Customising your blog’s appearance is very easy, it took me no time at all to get my blog looking like the rest of my site. PyBlosxom fits nicely with my ideals on simple software.