NEWEST to oldest, top down.. sorry, no dates. This page pre-dates the whole blogging concept otherwise it might have been done in some neat, orderly presentation. Anyway, some items are months apart, others may be years apart. Also, I noticed some of the stuff from like 95-98 is for some reason *not* in chronological order at all. Actually, why am I explaining this? Noone cares about that. But watch, I won't remove the lines I've just typed even though we've established that it's completely useless text. I could just delete the lines, but I won't. Nor that one. I'll just ramble on and on and on...

80's high-bias cassette tape "beep"-maker Perhaps it's easier to let you read an irc chatlog from the couple of hours I was working on this. [source code]
my music As a teenager in the late 80's I played in various bands. Some with people who have gone on to be famous, while I eventually became a professional computer geek. My buddy Dave, who I used to jam with when we were kids, and I have recently embarked on a project to write some 80's "new wave" style songs. Blatantly ripping off Clearly influenced by Gary Numan, The Cars, Devo, and the like, I think our first two songs sound pretty good. Dave and I both play guitar (and/or bass) and neither of us sing but for this project (now known as The Detached) I bought a midi-controller keyboard and a microphone and took a stab at yodeling out these songs. Maybe someone will like it. I'd be interested in your feedback to scottvr at gmail dot com.
Recursive Phone Number Algorithm Late the other night I noticed that my phone number looked like an anagram of the Fibonacci Series. I realized that indeed, the first 6 digits of Fibonacci's Series were in there and that after 6, it was still almost interesting. I wrote a couple of loops, then unrolled the loops to make it easier to see, then came up with the recursive sub you see. More pointless than many.
XPI surgery Hacking the Google Toolbar Firefox Extension so that it will install under Firefox beta 1.4/1.5. This information can be applied to any of your Extensions that break upon upgrading Firefox, but obviously you'll have to determine if the Extension actually *works* under your new version of Firefox. Google Toolbar 1.0.20050922 works fine for me under the Firefox beta 1.4 as do the handful of other Extensions I've since hacked at to force installation.
inversions/ambigrams Experimenting with ambigram generation. (text reads the same when turned upside down - "rotationally symmetrical") Some examples: here and here. Oh and yes, one of the sets of characters (can't really call it a "font") was "borrowed" from Word.Net's Ambigram.Matic while I developed at this. I'm now working on some magical gimp script-fu to try to speed up the process of generating new character sets from fonts. Well, to say "working" is a stretch; I worked at it a little. Thought about it a little more and generally think it's a neat idea. I'll probably never spend the time required to complete such a tool to automagically generate the 676 recognizable images for each font set.

You can read a one sentence story
crackmaster Wrote this after reading an article about the concept. Google shows me a bunch of pages about it with mentions of apps or broken links but after googling and reading howstuffworks.com, curiosity got the better of me and I diddled with it until I had 5 obfuscated-looking lines of perl that will give you your lost Master Lock combination.
javaGorillas I started working on a JAVA version of the old QBasic Gorillas game as a way to teach myself JAVA. I've been too busy to finish it. I've created a project on SourceForge so maybe others will help me finish it.
my Charles Manson from Life magazine jack-o-lantern from 1993
my Frank The Bunny from Donnie Darko jack-o-lantern from 2003
my Jack Nicholson from The Shining jack-o-lantern from 2004
orange box CWID tone generator - a simple toy to generate the CW CID tones necessary to spoof. duh.
Filter::decrypt crack [txt for download] [syntax highlighted html]
(not so) NEW! Net-Whois-0.22 - Net-Whois-0.23-unoff patch - I had to patch Net::Whois to get it to work a few months ago since InterNIC again changed their output of a 'dom $domain' (whois domainname) request. Since other people who are not necessarily perl module programmers but are perl module users have asked me for this, and the author is apparently too busy to respond to my email, I'm just posting the diff here. Very small and simple.
LightsOut! clone I wrote in perl. "lights" made in under a minute with The Gimp
msn's searchbot has been playing it non-stop, one move every few seconds, for like a year. It's not very smart.
netmask calculator (CGI) This little script actually gets some traffic
dns admin (CGI) I've never finished for lack of real need.
Digging around, I also found something I was working on in early 1999. The code is heinous.
It's apparently a rewrite or new stab at a DNS web interface
RADIUS administration tool (CGI) - again, never finished - this time because I decided programmatic, non-user-driven was a better means. In any case, it was written, obviously, with a utilitarian purpose in mind - not as a "web page" so don't anybody go off on my use of JavaScript. It simply was not meant to be used from lynx; it was meant to enable billing/sales-types to add/edit users.
In fact, I've found loads of little web-apps from Jan 1999 and earlier which I will link here for fun:
apparently I was trying to overthrow AOL's keyword exclusivity. I do remember hating hearing "or AOL keyword..." after commercials. It was obvious they didn't want to join the www like normal people and get the naive masses accustomed to their copyrighted "keywords" - I didn't want their keywords, but i wanted to make it available outside of AOL as some sort of statement or something.
A batch useradd script (SOURCE) - been tested on Solaris 2.5.1 and Slackware Linux 3.4. it MAY work on any shadowed password system. Let me know if you use it. (Noone ever let me know but a Google tells me it was passed around mailing lists and recently showed up on some phpbb forums. cool I guess.)
program-file v1.0 (SOURCE) - to describe this tool would take up too much space; download it and run it with the --help switch or run it through perldoc to find out. Honestly, even looking at the code may not tell you what it does or what its purpose is. :)
vgalib.pm (SOURCE) Perl VGALIB module. (get it from the CPAN along with any others.)

this below is pretty bad and worthless nowadays but here is the old, probably crappy, code in case it has anything usable. I seem to recall at least one revision of it having some kinda neat config file parsing but I think the "current" (still 5-7 year old at the youngest) version in there changed it. I don't remember.

begin old crap
The Net Watchman This is a program suite (actually a pair of perl scripts and config files) created while I was employed at DFWNet to monitor all of the ISP's hosts and their services. One script (formerly known as Big.Brother but changed to avoid confusion with another program suite of the same name) runs on a single host and watches over hosts/services declared in the configuration file from the outside and alerts the specified contact (for instance an email list or an alpha-pager) of what is down, how badly it is down, and how long it has been that way continuously until it is fixed. It also outputs a status file in html format. (This file is in a VERY early stage of development and will improve greatly in the near future. The images and such were made quickly just to get something that works.) Here is an example output file.

The second (optional) script (formerly known as Little.Sister but changed because it no longer has a Big.Brother) runs on one or more hosts (for instance, the hosts being monitored by the first script) and monitors services specified by its config file on the host on which it is running. This script performs an action specified in the config file if a service dies (usually restart the dead service) and notifies a specified contact once if it was succesful or continuously if unsuccesful (either the same contact or a different "urgent" contact list.)

The real beauty of these programs is in their configurability; nothing is hard-coded so it is completely extensible. For instance, I have one config file/script pair (multiple instances of the script can be run with different configs by simply symlinking it to a different name) that simply acts as a port-scanner.

Currently this suite is available free to ISPs on request but since it is still not widely tested outside its development network, I wish to keep track of who is using what version so if you would like a copy, send me an email (follow the above link) and I'll arrange a download for you.

For the curious, here is an example config file for the "big.brother" portion of the suite and here is an example config file for the "little.sister" script.
Eventually, I will probably eventually GNU it and it will be available for download but not until I am satisfied that it works well outside of its development environment.
NEW! I have been given permission to open up this status page to the world! Check it out to see a real-world usage of the Net Watchman suite. The conf for that output page sets it up to monitor hosts and their services, Livingston PortMaster terminal servers, Cisco routers, Ascend Maxes and more. They use almost every feature except for the new html template configuration which allows custom html output stat files without editing the code to the script!
Though not nearly as fancy, here is a log file from the Little.Sister portion of the suite.
some poet:
a one sentence story
an offensive poem
another
loveletters