Over the years I've developed a number of programs and scripts. I often mention them in my diary, and people sometimes ask to see them.

For a long time, I resisted these requests. There are two ways to write programs:

• For other people. The program should be well-designed and well documented.
• For yourself. Depending on its size and importance, you may be able to get by with real hacks: indeed, they might be an advantage. Writing good programs takes time and effort. Some programs aren't worth this time and effort.

To take an example from another area: if you're writing a document for publication, it's reasonable to expect that it is clear and well formatted (though much you see on the web today offends against the latter). But if you're writing a shopping list, are you going to go to that trouble? Many of my scripts fall into the “shopping list” category.

With that in mind, feel free to browse around the following. If I have forgotten to put in a license, take your pick of BSD or GPL license.

• My .bashrc shell initialization file. This refers to a global file abbreviations that I normally put in /usr/local/share/abbreviations; if you use it and put it elsewhere, you'll have to modify .bashrc to match. There's a lot of stuff in here that is of purely local significance, and a lot that is out of date. I only recently removed a macro intended for doing UUCP transfers between two machines I had at home up until 13 years ago.
• My “desktop” X configuration.
• Playing DVDs on FreeBSD with mplayer.
• My emacs initialization files.
• Getting mail while on the road
• mkcd: a script to burn CDs and DVDs. No documentation beyond the script itself.
• mklinks: a program for manipulating directory trees.
• record: a program for recording MPEG streams from DVB-T tuners.
• Sprinkler controller
• Brewing temperature control
• groff tools and macros. These still need to be documented.
• Weather monitoring software for the Fine Offset WH-1081 weather station.