Some useful software

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.

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.
• bibweb is a flexible HTML bibliography generator.
• Constrain is a JavaScript package for building responsive, animated figures into HTML web pages and presentations.
• Multilist is an Android checklist app that allows dependencies between checklist items to form not just a tree, but an arbitrary acyclic graph.
• MakePassword is a password generator for Unix and Android.
• The Roll language supports complex dice rolling expressions that support a wide variety of games. It can also compute or approximate probability distributions.
• Instant-feedback sliders for talks.
• 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]
• splitdefs improves a build process by avoiding unnecessary builds. One of the annoyances of Unix programming in C or C++ is excessive rebuilding when using make. One reason for this problem is the natural desire to organize preprocessor definitions into central configuration files, particularly when using autoconf. This program addresses the problem by automatically splitting configuration files into smaller headers, allowing fine-grained dependency analysis and fewer gratuitous compilations. Splitdefs is easily integrated into a typical build process.
• join-csv joins multiple CSV spreadsheets into a single spreadsheet, combining rows that match on some set of keys.

LaTeX 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.
• exam.sty supports writing examinations. It has reasonably nice formatting, 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 options controlling which version is generated. An example exam is available (and here it is formatted and as solutions).
• utf8math.sty supports UTF-8 encoded LaTeX documents, including most commonly used math characters. Since most text editors now support UTF-8 encodings, this feature allows more concise, readonable math. The mappings currently include more than 500 characters: the most commonly used math symbols, the ISO-Latin-1 characters, and the Greek alphabet. Modern LaTeX distributions do include some UTF-8 support via inputenc, but it currently seems to support only Latin-1 characters. The utf8math 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). If you'd like support for additional characters, make a pull request to the GitHub repo.
• authcomments.sty makes it easy for authors or editors of a paper to add PDF comments colored by author, building on the pdfcomments package. It supports controlling whether comments are visible, so you can easily toggle between a draft version where comments are visible and a final version that turns them off.
• My research group's standard template for writing papers using LaTeX. Includes utf8math and authcomments.

PostScript hacks

A few 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
• A reasonably accurate paper sundial. (Source code: [ sundial.ps, sundial2.ps ]) Sundial #2 showing 4:10pm

Small JavaScript hacks

• Email address blinding for web pages (see link at bottom).
• A clock for exams. Includes editable corrections and clarifications.
• Factorize integers (useful now that Unix 'factor' is gone...)
• Bingo card and master.

Other stuff

• A Mac OS X keyboard layout that makes a lot of math symbols and also the Greek letters easy to type. Supports / and O as combining characters; also, alt-G enables Greek. Copy to /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ and reboot (!).
• My code coloring scheme for Vim

Useful software I don't distribute

• I wrote the original graphical diff/merge tool, called gdiff, in 1989 when I was an engineer at Silicon Graphics (SGI). I was inspired by the interactive textual diff program, sdiff. Since then there have been several nice descendants that add features like text editing and directory-level merging. Examples are mgdiff, xxdiff, kdiff3, and meld. Many of them still look very much like the original gdiff. If you ever see a diff where added lines are shown in green and deleted lines are shown in red, you're experiencing the color choices I made for gdiff!