Free Software

All these programs are copyrighted © by Bob Crispen and are provided without charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License and other licenses as READMEware: In return for the software, you promise to read the documentation.

About the Tools

Command line tools

Files marked contain an executable which will run in a DOS shell (console window) under Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, and NT with no additional runtime apart from DLLs which come with Windows 95 (crtdll.dll and kernel32.dll). They are also known to run under the Cygwin bash shell and may run on other shells and, if they're recompiled from the sources (included), on other operating systems.

Note: if you download one of these programs and double-click on its icon in Explorer, nothing much will happen. I know, I shouldn't have to say that, but you'd be surprised at how many people have never seen a program that runs from the command line. Bring up a DOS window and type in the name of the program and its arguments and you'll be much happier.

How can you find out what the command line arguments and options are? Look in the C source code (which is also a good source for known bugs and hints) or simply type:

<executable name> -?

Windows tools

Files marked are 32-bit Windows executables that run on Windows 95 (etc.). Windows executables require a variety of runtime DLLs, but you already have all those DLLs on your machine. None of these programs use any features of those DLLs that didn't come with the first release of Windows 95, so whatever versions you already have of those DLLs should work fine. Basically, if your computer can download one of my Windows programs, it has more than what it needs to run it.

These programs do not install any DLLs on your system or modify the Registry. Unzip them anywhere and run them.

And this time you can double-click on the icon to run the program. ;-) More seriously, some of these programs have optional command line arguments which can make them more useful. e.g., as context menu programs. Read the documentation to find out about them.

About the source code

I've included the source code for all these programs. If you have no interest in compiling these programs or porting them to another system, just delete the source code and the programs will still run exactly the same. However, you may not distribute these programs to anyone else without including the source code and the files that describe the copyright and terms of license.

The source files for the command line tools are intended to be vanilla (mostly ANSI) C with no exotic system calls. I write them like they're Unix programs. They compile with Jacob Navia's lcc-Win32 and gcc on my system. Everyone who's tried to compile these programs on various Unix systems hasn't had to change a thing, but note that on more recent programs I sometimes yield to the temptation to use some C99 things like declaring loop counters in for statements. If you're compiling for a Microsoft Windows system, make sure you define MSDOS to the C compiler -- e.g.,

gcc -DMSDOS -o foo.exe foo.c

or you may get spurious carriage return (0x0d) characters in your output files.

The source code for my Windows programs compiles with Jacob Navia's lcc-Win32. They're pure Win32 C, with no C++ or MFC, and they should compile with gcc, MSVC++, and other Windows C compilers with little or no modification.

If you'd like to modify any of these programs or use any of this code in your own work, read the GPL to find out what you're permitted to do. Also look in the source code and documentation to see where I've used the work of others and what license terms apply to that code. If you wish to add an advanced feature that's only available in more recent versions of some DLLs, Microsoft has restrictions on how those DLLs may be distributed. Unless other licenses are specified, the GPL applies.

General Purpose Tools

Win-GZ Why is the only gzip program for Win9x/NT/2k a console app? Wouldn't it be much nicer to have a real Windows application that lets you gzip and gunzip files? I thought so, too. Here it is. Version 1.2 now built with zlib 1.1.4 which fixes a security fault in earlier versions of zlib. (50,435 bytes, zipped).

Note: The link above is to simtel, one of the oldest, most trusted download sites on the net, to save my ISP a little bandwidth. If you want to verify the file you get from simtel, here's the md5 checksum and PGP signature.

Users of lcc who want to play with the source code may want to download my port of zlib to lcc (64,295 bytes, zipped). If all you want to do is run Win-GZ, you don't need zlib.

htmlcolor Ever find yourself editing web pages by hand and needing to pick a color for text or a background? You don't want to go to the trouble to bring up a huge WYSIWYG web page editor just to pick one color, but you hate typing and reloading over and over again till you get the color right. Fire up this little utility instead. When you exit htmlcolor, the color you picked will be on the clipboard, ready to paste into your file in familiar HTML hex color form (e.g., "#ff0804"). Version 1.0 (14,769 bytes, zipped).

VRML Tools

Some of these tools may give unexpected results if the VRML file you feed them is ungrammatical. Use Vorlon from Trapezium (free) to syntax-check your files before you use any of the tools that read VRML files.

3dmf2wrl Converts Apple QuickDraw 3D Metafiles to VRML 97. Includes a Windows executable and a Windows command line executable. The current version converts TriMesh, DiffuseColor, CameraPlacement, and DirectionalLight nodes, so this will give you basic geometry, color, lighting, and viewpoints. You can take it from there. Special thanks to Steve Chenney, who provided orient.c, the program that turns 3DMF directional notation into VRML notation. Version 1.0.3 (89,723 bytes, zipped).

Hint if you're porting 3dmf2wrl to Unix: your command line to your C compiler should be something like:

gcc -DMSDOS -DCONSOLE_VERSION -c foo.c

for each of the source files or you'll get more errors than you can shake a stick at.

ColorPicker This is a Windows 9x/NT/2k program that brings up a color palette, lets you choose a color, then copies the VRML color values of the chosen color to the clipboard, where you can paste it into your VRML file in your favorite text editor. Version 1.0 (7386 bytes, zipped)

Wireframe Some modelers have build-in utilities to turn IndexedFaceSets into IndexedLineSets so you can make a wireframe of your object. But if you haven't got one of those modelers, you were in for some tedious work. No longer. Feed this program a Shape node containing an IndexedFaceSet, and out comes another Shape node with an IndexedLineSet. Version 1.0 (7,858 bytes, zipped)

Pbm2wrl Wouldn't it be nice to sketch an image using the airbrush in your favorite graphics program and then turn it into an ElevationGrid? Well, you can with pbm2wrl. A couple of notes: this works on greyscale images only, and only allows 255 different height values. Paint Shop Pro will convert a PBM file to 2 colors; you'll want to save as PGM or PPM (ASCII or binary). If your graphics program won't save PGMs or PPMs, download our program pnmtopix and use the included giftopnm utility. Version 1.0 (14,958 bytes, zipped)

Vwaif Inspired by Twiggy, Kate Moss, and the other "waif" models who weigh less than your average 8-year-old, this program is serious about putting your VRML files on a diet. Reduces the number of significant digits to any number you specify, turns tiny numbers like -3e-07 generated by some converters to zero (you specify how small), and removes commas and whitespace. Version 1.1 (9,400 bytes, zipped)

Vpp VRML Pretty Printer, Version 1.0. Indents your lines, adds a space around brackets and braces (required by some VRML browsers), and makes files you've reduced using vwaif easy to read and debug again. (9.574 bytes, zipped)

Unnormal Removes all Normal nodes and normalIndex fields from VRML 1.0 files and all Normal subnodes and normal and normalIndex fields from VRML 97 files. (7,814 butes, zipped)

Pnmtopix Sometimes a PixelTexture is just what you need. This tool generates 4-component PixelTextures from color PPM files and 2-component PixelTextures from greyscale PGM files. You can specify a color to be made transparent and a transparency for that color, plus a default transparency for the other colors. What are PPM and PGM files? Your favorite graphics program can probably save them, or your can use the terrific giftopnm tool (also included) from the netpbm library. ppmhist is also included, so you can see what colors are in your GIF, and we include ppmtogif, to turn the PPM or PGM file back to a GIF, in case you need to debug. This program was inspired by Cindy Ballreich, Queen of Textures. (103,909 bytes, zipped)

Numpoints Did you ever get a file from a repository and convert it to VRML only to discover that the converter messed up and left some holes or backwards triangles in it? It'd be easy to patch the holes if you just knew the vertex numbers, but typically the holes occur on the most unwieldy IndexedFaceSets. Feed this tool a complete Shape node, and it will generate a VRML file that has the shape node, plus a bunch of billboarded Text nodes that number the vertices. Take your text editor and fill in the coordIndex values for the empty (or inverted) triangles, and you're done. Also good for splitting IndexedFaceSets into multiple objects. (9,608 bytes, zipped)

Dem2wrl has been withdrawn. Richard Horne's 3DEM is so much better that I didn't want people to struggle with an inferior tool. I'm keeping the link active in case anybody needs anything in the source code, but I don't recommend using dem2wrl.

Programming Tools

Glut37 A port to of GLUT (the OpenGL Utility Toolkit) for Jacob Navia's free LCC-Win32 compiler. Includes glut.h, glut32.lib, and a simple test program. (236,223 bytes, zipped)

Nd This may very well be the first C program I ever wrote. It's a simple hex/ASCII dump that I like a lot better than od. I feel stupid posting this here, because anyone could write this in 5 minutes, but since every time I set up an account on a new machine, I copy it over, what the heck. (7,137 bytes, zipped)

Prettify This program prettifies the capitalization of Ada source files. Unlike a full-blown Ada prettyprinter, it does a couple of simple jobs, and it's provided in source code form so you can make it do other things. As supplied, it puts Ada keywords and attribute names in lowercase, symbolic names in mixed case, and lets you define some common abbreviations that, when they occur in symbolic names, are displayed in a different case than the default (e.g., Loudness_In_dB instead of Loudness_In_Db).

This is pretty much the standard of Ada Quality & Style, and since I deal with a lot of source code that's been produced by people with different (and IMHO much less readable) coding standards, it's a great convenience to run files through prettify. It also adds spaces (e.g., before and after colons), but only if they're needed, and removes superfluous spaces (e.g., after left parens and before semicolons). I also have it mapped to function keys in my editor, so I can prettify a line or paragraph as I edit. (11,797 bytes, zipped)

Prettify95 The same thing as prettify.c, but (a) improved to cover Ada 95 keywords and attributes, (b) improved to surround arithmetical and logical operators with spaces, and (c) supplied in Ada 95 source code form only. (8,276 bytes, zipped)

Colalign I map this to a function key in my text editor to align the colons in a "paragraph" -- usually an Ada declarative region. Once again, it's useful if you program Ada, and not much use otherwise. (7,868 bytes, zipped)

Codelns Counts (a) the number of lines, (b) the number of statements, and (c) the number of comments in a list of Ada, C, C++, and FORTRAN source files. Also counts the number of lines in scripts, and names but doesn't count binary and "other" files (anything else it finds and can open, but can't identify). You can feed this a number of filenames and it will produce totals for each filetype and grand totals. The Ada line count follows the AJPO algorithm, and the others are just semicolon and newline counts with allowance made for quotes and comments. (54,100 bytes, zipped)

Internet Tools

Mail2html This is a sed script that converts files you receive through the mail into a first whack at HTML. You've gotta have sed, of course, but if you do, try

sed -f mail2html.sed foo.txt >foo.html

and it should do the most tedious stuff for you. If you knock off everything in the mail header except the "Subject:" and "From:" lines before you feed it to mail2html, it'll leave you a lot less stuff to clean up. Like most sed scripts, fooling around with this will give you hours and hours of fun. (1,325 bytes, zipped)

Foxynews A Windows 9x/NT newsreader and attachment extractor. The focus of foxynews is on low calories. You have to enter the name of the news host and newsgroup yourself (the first time -- after that, you can select it from a list), but in return, it doesn't clog up your disk with huge, mostly useless files. It downloads articles, extracts uuencoded and MIME attachments, and collects URLs from articles posted on USENET, and you can grab all the articles or just the articles that match a pattern. Very primitive, very beta, but small and fast. Version 1.7.4 (123,386 bytes, zipped).

Other Stuff

Our Computer: Windows and programming resources on the net.

Postings: Some collected, unorganized, but searchable postings from newsgroups