Some useful Unix software

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These programs were written by Andrew Myers and are freely available for use, subject to some provisos contained in individual distributions. These programs are free, but come with absolutely no warranty.

The programs requiring compilation are set up using autoconf, and are easily built and installed. They do require an ANSI C compiler (such as the GNU C compiler, gcc).

To receive notification of updates to any of the software offered here, please send mail.

• The Condorcet Internet Voting Service makes it easy to set up your own secure, anonymous elections across the Internet, using state-of-the-art algorithms for ranking choices.
• XSokoban is the X version of the classic puzzle game.
• relplot generates high-quality PostScript plots of relations on two variables, expressed as equations.
• rcsview displays RCS and CVS files by using color to indicate which version various text came from. It allows rapid switching between viewed versions while maintaining the same position in the file, and convenient display of log messages. It requires Tcl/Tk.
• mvsed is a simple but useful script that allows easy manipulation of files while applying substitution patterns to the filenames. For example, mvsed makes it easy to change file extensions, to change filenames from upper- to lowercase, or to move files between one directory structure and another.
• grader is a program for generating appealing plots of exam scores and other sampled data, using a posteriori principles to form a hypothesis about the "true" probability distribution being sampled (or at least a nice excuse for smoothing). [An example]
• netview displays the packets being sent on a local network in an unusual and intuitive dynamic animation. It works on Linux and Windows. (This program was developed with Saikat Guha, building on an older program that was developed with Bruce Karsh and Paul Haeberli.)
• ccube displays the current X colormap in either a standard 8x8 grid or by the colors' positions inside the RGB color cube. Handy for seeing how various programs are using the colormap.

TeX packages

• cu_thesis.cls. This is version 2.9.3 of the Cornell thesis style document class, originally written by Sergio Gelato and modified by several others including me. This version corrects some bugs in previous versions, relating to line spacing, page number placement, page size and page centering. It also includes a sample thesis document and a sample Makefile for building a thesis. [Cornell thesis information]
• ttquot.sty. This package has seen a lot of use for writing technical documentation and papers. It's very simple: the double quotation marks (") put their contained text into typewriter font, and underscores put contained text into italics, except when they occur in math mode or inside "". Thus, documents written using ttquot are readable both before and after formatting.
• angle.sty makes < and > produce angle brackets instead of less-than and greater-than signs. Useful for typesetting mathematics. Occasionally interacts badly with other packages that want to use the same characters.
• exam.sty is a package for writing examinations. It has reasonably nice formatting support, but the best feature is that it keeps track of how much questions and parts of questions are worth and makes sure that everything totals up correctly. The solutions and the exam itself can be written in a single file, with package options controlling which version is generated. An example exam is available (and here it is formatted and as solutions).
• The utf8 package supports UTF-8 encoded LaTeX documents. If your editor supports UTF-8 encodings, you can use Unicode characters in your document directly. The set of mappings currently includes more than 500 characters: a lot of the math symbols, the ISO-Latin-1 characters, and the Greek alphabet. Modern LaTeX distributions do include some UTF-8 support via the inputenc package, but it only seems to support Latin-1 characters. The utf8 package also comes with a set of Vim bindings for entering all the characters; just set the Vim variable encoding to utf8 (Eclipse has a similar setting).

  Here is an example document: [ LaTeX | PDF ]. If you'd like support for additional characters, add them to utf8-table.txt (included) and I'll quickly generate an updated version of the style file for you.

PostScript hacks

These are some not very useful but fun PostScript documents.

• A dodecahedron viewed either as wireframe or as a lighted model. A different view angle on each page. [ dodeca.ps ]
• Want to make a paraboloid? Here is a paper model (8 copies needed) and the program that generates models like it. [ para8.ps, paraboloid.c ].
• Need some graph paper? This file will make it. Contains various parameters that can be adjusted. [ graph_paper.ps ]
• Penrose tiles. (PDF)
• A circular calendar (2010 PDF) (2011 PDF) (2012 PDF)

Small Javascript hacks

• A clock for exams.
• A demonstration of Pythagoras's Theorem
• Factorize integers (useful now that Unix 'factor' is gone...)
• Bingo card and master.

Useful software I don't distribute

• I wrote the original graphical diff/merge tool, called gdiff in 1989 when I worked at Silicon Graphics. I was inspired by the interactive textual diff program, sdiff. Since then there have been several nice spinoffs that add features like text editing and directory-level merging. Examples are mgdiff, xxdiff, kdiff3, and meld. They still look very much like the original gdiff!

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Andrew Myers
andru@cs.cornell.edu