A simple package installer (not manager) that handles dependencies and building packages in a reproducible way, including fetching from scm repositories. The purpose is to offer custom builds, typically for bleeding edge builds or builds in environments that don't offer the desired packages. No relation to Gentoo portage.

Project website:
+ Blog entry introducing emerge
+ git repository

SolarBeam is a desktop application for drawing solar diagrams. You supply the geographical position, it draws a diagram showing the Sun's trajectory over your location at various times of the year. It also shows the times of sunrise and sunset. It comes with a large database of locations around the world and handles timezones and daylight saving time correctly.

Project website:
+ SolarBeam project

A modular web spider driven by recipes composed of regular expressions. spiderfetch started out as a tool to spider all the links on a web page, but little by little became a full blown web spider. It is now more a suite of tools that can be used on their own, such as the spider and the fetcher. The whole suite is written in pure python (previously ruby) and requires no dependencies.

Project website:
+ Blog entry introducing spiderfetch
+ git repository

DVDs can be flaky and inconvenient, sometimes it's so much easier to just have the movie on disk. Not to mention that it's nice to have a backup copy just in case. Meanwhile, dvd ripping is a very complex process, which involves deciding on codecs, fiddling with a whole range of tuning parameters, and a lot of trial and error. undvd does all that for you, with sensible defaults, so that all you have to decide is which title(s) to rip.

Project website:
+ undvd project
+ Blog entry introducing undvd
+ git repository

The idea behind this project is to try and emulate a human posting news articles on a forum. Newman gathers news stories from a range of football news sites, filters them by content and posts them on a vBulletin forum, just like certain actual forum members do. The project was conceived as an experiment to see how closely a newsbot could resemble a human poster without needing any input from the user.

+ Project Newman chronicles on the blog
+ Download the code

The concept of galleryforge is a simple one. You sort images in a hierarchy of directories, hence declaring categories and sub categories etc. You place images in those directories and for every directory where images are found, that directory becomes an album, with album pages (index) and image pages (full-size images). galleryforge does this recursively and somewhat intelligently in that existing images are not overwritten, so it's safe to update this directory structure with new images. Then you can simply rsync the whole thing to your webserver.

Project website:
+ galleyforge

GRIDportal is a web-based application portal for High Performance Computing. It facilitates easier access to GRID applications through a comfortable web interface. It was designed for use with NorduGrid, but being very generic by nature, could conceivably be adapted to other environments.

GRIDportal was launched as a student project, as part of my BSc engineering degree at Sør-Trøndelag University College, for the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Later on, as an employee of NTNU, I continued development on the project. It was presented at national grid conferences on two occasions.

Project website:
+ GRIDportal project

GridPortalToolkit is a multi-threaded java gui application for use with GRIDportal. It provides tools for user certificate generation and MyProxy registration. Basically, it provides the facilities for getting started with GRIDportal.

GridPortalToolkit was developed for NTNU, for the needs of the user base at the university, and is an open project under the GPL licence.

Project website:
+ GridPortalToolkit project

[m]piBlast [D]atabase [U]pdater, is a small command line based application used to update or install (since the process is identical in both cases) of databases for use with mpiBLAST. It attempts to streamline the process, so that mdu can be submitted as a job to a cluster machine and run unattended.

mdu was developed for NTNU, and is an open project under the GPL licence.

Project website:
+ mdu project

Eons ago a friend and I started a mock company called MicroProgz. We barely knew anything about programming, but we were under the influence of the shareware trend and put out some really useless shareware applications. In particular, I was really excited about the concept of cryptography, albeit not to any mathematical extent, just to code silly algorithms that seemed to do a really good job if you wanted to manually decode the plain text.

XXX Filez 2K was our "flagship" application, and apparently our exuberant marketing actually fooled some people into thinking it did something useful, as we received a few requests about it.

+ Download the application (installer)

Also for MicroProgz, this application was based on the idea that having files scattered on various media is very impractical, if necessary. Drive Indexer was a way to keep track of them. A floppy or CDROM would be indexed and all the files would be recorded. Then one could search the index to find files, and also find out on what disk/floppy it is.

+ Download the application (installer)