Tim's directory of programs

Tim's Law: A program grows as the exponent of its revision number.

Convergence

My current project is to link together the major open-source EDA tools into a coherent whole, sharing data through an interpreter and allowing interaction between all of the parts. I have decided to call this tool suite Convergence, indicating the way the tools work together inside the Tcl interpreter environment. Click on the link above to get to the Convergence home page.

Other CAD tool programs:

pplot is a plotting program for turning integrated circuit layouts in CIF format into neatly printed plots on your printer. My hacks to this program include EPS compatibility and color printer output. Version since 12/2/97 can be compiled under Linux. By the way, if you're interested in how just about *ANY* printer (including, for instance, the HP color deskjets) can be turned into an instant PostScript® printer, then look at the pplot README file, or ps2pcl.c below.
pplot.tar.gz
Note: Several bug fixes were made on 8/17/98; pplot will now print on high-resolution color laser printers. The output from a QMS MagiColor2-EX (2400 x 600 DPI) or Xerox/Tek Phaser 2135 (1200 x 1200 DPI) is especially nice, with the stipple patterns so dense that they look essentially opaque. A bugfix introduced on 8/16/01 prevents PostScript errors if a page device larger than 8.5 inches is specified.
Click here for a sample color output from pplot (originally PostScript®): pressure sensor (19.3KB GIF). Unfortunately, this plot doesn't really tell the whole story. The GIF is generated by ghostscript, which uses the standard monitor resolution of 72dpi, which interacts with device-dependent code in the program. Consequently, stipple patterns come out large and ungainly. At 300dpi, they look reasonably good, and at 600dpi, nearly opaque.
net.tar.gz is a netlist compiler program for analog and digital VLSI circuits. The original program was written by Chris Terman of MIT as part of the "rsim" simulator. Later, the "rsim" code was heavily modified by Mark Horowitz and others at Stanford to become the popular IRSIM switch simulator (see the web page on magic). Thanks to Jim Burr for information on the origin of net.
In summary, input for the program net is a circuit description in a format which is a subset of LISP (see net.doc). The output of "net" is a file in ".sim" format, although the format has been extended to include other device types such as bipolar transistors and capacitors.
News: This program has now been ported to Linux (April 2000).
Here is the source tree of net.
netgen-1.1.tgz. In order to netlist compare with extracted output from "magic", I use the program "netcomp", which is part of the "netgen" package of netlist-handling tools. As of December, 2002, this package has been redesigned with a new "make" process to match the rest of the open-source tool suite. This guarantees compilation under Linux (the development platform), although other operating systems may require some manual tweaking of compile-time options. Netgen has also been redesigned to (optionally) compile under Tcl, with a full-word command-line syntax, and the "netgen" and "netcmp" parts of the package have been combined. Go to the magic-7.2 page from the Magic VLSI home page for download and information. Netgen was written by Massimo Sivilotti (written when he was a student at Caltech, around 1990; now he's at Tanner Research). Version 1.1 has been hacked on by me. Details of where I expect to go with this can be found in the netgen-1.1 source top directory, file "TO_DO".
xbm2cif.tar.gz is a simple program which converts bitmaps to CIF format for inclusion into layouts. Given that one can do a conversion into XBM format from practically any graphics format using "xv", this program allows basically any graphic to be compiled into CIF and included into layouts. Compile with a simple "cc" command; no special linking is required.
CIO-DIO96.3.1.tgz (v3.1) is a Linux driver program for various ComputerBoards digital I/O cards, namely the CIO-DIO96 board, but also including all of the ISA-based 82C55-based digital I/O cards (CIO-DIO48, CIO-DIO24, NICB-DIO96 clone of the National Instruments ``DIO-96'', PCI-DIO48 and family, and the compact PCI boards as well). Use of this card and driver along with custom C software is how I test all my electronic designs.
Updates:
1. September 5, 2001
2. April 10, 2001 (fixes for PCI-DIO48H compatibility)
3. July 19, 2002 (fixes for Linux kernel version 2.4 compatibility)
4. September 4, 2002 (some Makefile fixes for "make install")
5. February 26, 2003 (correct support for the PCI-DIO24H card)
6. April 28, 2004 (support for ICS Advent cards: PCI-DIO24DB, PCI-DIO24HD, and the /CT variants. Thanks to Corinne Boyer at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii)
7. June 16, 2005 (support for Linux kernel versions 2.6---see below for earlier kernel versions)
8. August 24, 2006 (bug fix; thanks to Dierdre Horan for the bug report)
CIO-DIO96.2.4.tgz is the version compatible with Linux kernel versions 2.4 and earlier.

For more information, see the Linux Lab Project.

Also see the "test" directory and file "diotest.c" in the driver distribution for example use of the driver.

diowrapper.tgz was contributed by Conrad Rehill; it is a wrapper program designed to act as a frontend for systems controlled by a DIO card. Conrad uses it for various household controls. His DIO card and driver program are "the basis for a home burglar alarm, fire alarm, relay controller for my heat/AC/circulator". See the README file in the top-level directory for more information. In brief: the original driver is in subdirectory dio96/src_driver/. Make and install this first (including loading the dio96.o kernel module). The wrapper software is in subdirectory dio96/src/. Go to that directory and run "make". Executables end up in the dio96/bin directory. I have not had time to play around with these programs, so until I do, I cannot provide much more information on how to use the system.

NICB-DIO96.1.1tar.gz is an outdated version for the NI clone card, also compatible with most of the ComputerBoards DIO-series cards. This older driver is not PCI-compatible, and in general the use of the new driver is much clearer.

Artificial Life

Bug's A-Life

Warning: In spite of all efforts to optimize the computation in this program, it still remains compute-intensive. The main sensory source for each bug is its ``eyes'', which are made up of a number of pixels spanning some angle of aperture in front of the bug. The position of each object in the world is projected onto the bug's eye. This necessitates a large amount of geometry problem solving with its attendant sines, cosines, tangents, squares, and square roots. It will run smoothly on a 400 MHz machine. It runs exceptionally well on my dual-Pentium 400 box, with the simulation and the X11 display neatly divided between the two processors. On my 166 MHz laptop, it grinds along rather slowly, but it's still good at holding my rapt attention for long periods of time.

This program is provided as freeware under an artistic license. Improvements, changes, interpretations, discussions, and citations are all welcome. Useful and/or interesting code changes (or suggestions) should be referred back to the source (me) so I can add them to the distribution as the mood strikes me.

Notice: Source includes a binary executable for Linux systems. Source compilation requires Motif or Lesstif libraries.

Other X11 programs:

The all-new dclock is a heavily modified version of the original dclock by Dan Heller (argv@sun.com) if anyone remembers that one any more (actually, it is remembered---it and other old Unix utilities are kept nice and tidy in the `` sipb locker''. Thanks to Sal Valente (sipb maintainer) for pointing this out to me and correcting the original URL pointer to Dan Heller's source. See below). The original dclock program used very simple calculations to make the digital segments; due to a well-known psychological effect, the numbers seem to lean the wrong way (because almost all LED segments are slightly slanted, and these weren't, although I have seen exceptions). So I studied a digital watch (a Casio, if you must know) closely, and wrote routines to more closely approximate real LED segments, while adding a few extra features as well. Because the LED segments are described by a parameterized geometry, a wide variety of LED styles is possible. Slope, thickness, and spacing of the digits are all independent and continuously-variable parameters.
August 1999: Added smooth fading to replace the stipple patterns; the program will revert to stipples if it cannot allocate all the colors necessary for the color fade. Added antialiasing to the segment lines for the smoothest graphics possible. Now includes the capability to play audio files for the hourly bell and the alarm, with alarm and bell icons to keep track of the enabled features.
November 1999: Repaired the audio play so that (1) playing the audio file does not leave behind a zombie process and (2) the audio executable can be specified as an X resource. Also put back Dan Heller's original dclock man page, modified to include the new features of this version.
January 2000: Major embarassment! Dclock is not Y2K compliant! Egads! Those who bother displaying the year in 4-digit format (I never do; I know what year it is) will discover that we have reverted to 1900. The Y2K-compliant version was posted January 3. Note that the Y2K-compliant version has taken the very sensible approach suggested by "mho" (mho@mho.nu) of using system function strftime() as the basis of its date-to-string conversion. Thus the format of the format (the meta-format?) has changed.
June 2000: Changed the timeout function from a fixed 1000 msec delay to a delay based on the number of microseconds to the next second boundary, as returned by gettimeofday(). Also added a time check during number fades so that the seconds won't stop counting during that period. Also make seconds digits draw before the minutes digits, so there is no extra delay between 59 and 00 seconds.

December 2000: Added patch by Matt Magri (magri@anarcho.com) which added the "-dateup" option to print the date up at the top (out of the way of obscuring windows) and which can be toggled in real-time using the "u" key. Also, he added the "-nomiltime" option which is mentioned in the man page but was heretofore unimplemented.

February 2002: Added window manager hints so that dclock requests input focus from the window manager for mouse clicks and keys. Otherwise, some window managers refuse to give input focus to the dclock window.

April 2002: Added patch by Andy Peterson (andy@petersonkids.com) which adds the "-utc" option to print the date in universal coordinated time (substitutes gmtime() for localtime()).

January 2005: Altered the timer routine (see June 2000) to aim for about 5ms later than the second boundary. This became a problem with Fedora Core. Due to some change in the scheduling algorithm, it is possible to trigger the timeout a few milliseconds too early, resulting in apparently "skipped" seconds on the clock.

June 2008: Corrected a long-time annoyance, which is the handling of the first "1" digit, such that its background consists only of the two segments used. The original behavior left no segment background when the "1" was not being displayed, and displayed the unused horizontal segments' background (running off the left edge of the window) when it was. Also changed the flashing ":" background to the segment background color, instead of the window background color. Also, added some changes from the Debian branch version, in the hopes that the next Debian version will incorporate the changes I've made in the last few revisions.

June 2008: Corrected a long-time error in the antialiasing routine, which turned out to be due to round-off error producing a small negative number for a (squared) distance metric, then passed to a sqrt() function and resulting in "NaN". The result was occasional pixels being drawn bright foreground color when they should have been close to the background color. Also found another roundoff error in the "insideness" routine (determines if a point is inside a polygon using the winding number), and corrected it. At the same time, I implemented antialiased circles for the colon between hours and minutes.

July 2008: Introduced a new version with date text based on Xft (the anti-aliased font rendering server). The freefont font can be specified on the command line with "-fontName ". These fonts are resized proportionally to the window. I have not (yet) attempted to add support for different font sizes (relative to the window; it is now fixed at 1/6 the window height), or other font properties such as style or weight. I will eventually get around to adding the "AM/PM" string in an Xft font, as well as perhaps playing around with scalable font glyphs for the bell and alarm symbols.
Also: Corrected behavior with respect to resizing in a window manager implementing "opaque resize". Dclock punts on the resize and redraw until all resize events have been processed. There is a slight delay between resizing and redisplay, but this prevents dclock from queueing up many (computationally expensive) resize events. Note: The original dclock is still around, though I have not found it in a packaged form. Try the following link to the ``sipb locker'' at MIT: Dan Heller's dclock (screenshot).
dclock compiles readily under Linux; its status on other systems is untested since the advent of the new version (please let me know if you try).

Source code available here:
dclock-2.1.4.tgz (64KB)

New version based on Xft available here:
dclock-2.2.2.tgz (65KB)

Sample dclock window.
Antialiasing is not built into X11, so the routine for generating antialiased filled polygons had to be written by hand. If you think that antialiasing isn't worth the trouble, or just want to see what a difference it makes, then click here to compare against the dclock display from my 1993 version, with ``jaggies''. Note that antialiasing is slow by nature, requiring per-pixel fill operations, but it works here because digits are drawn only once, onto pixmaps, and copied to the window as necessary. Due to the saved pixmaps, making dclock fill your background is bound to be a waste of memory.
Joeri Sebrechts (joeri@sebrechts.net) suggests the color scheme background=black, foreground=lavender, led_off=gray22. With a black screen background, he describes the effect as looking like one of ``those neon blue car radio displays molded into my background. Very cool.'' He made a screenshot of the result, posted here with his permission.
Sample dclock window from the new (July 2008) 2.2 version, using Xft fonts.
xbiff is a modified version of the standard xbiff mail monitor into which I have folded the Xpm pixmap package, allowing full-color mailbox icons. The pixmap icons can be read in from the application defaults, and can use "*pixmapFilePath:" in .Xdefaults just like it uses "*bitmapFilePath:". Behavior is to look for a pixmap down this path, then the current directory; if not found, it then looks for bitmaps of the same name. Supports Xpm pixmap masks (using a color called "None" in the xpm file) and color override information. Xbiff additionally supports audio playing processes to generate different sounds for incoming mail (no, ``You've got mail!'' is not included. . . but you can always record it yourself. . .)
Update: (11/16/99) Bug fix to prevent zombie processes from accumulating after forking the audio play executable.
Update: (7/22/03) Fixed a few problems that prevent compilation on Linux systems.
xbiff.tgz (41KB) is available here.

Sample xbiff pixmap icon.
Required: Xpm extension for X11 (included with modern versions of Linux).
xman is the repaired version of the usual xman program. xman typically does not come with Linux distributions, perhaps because no one ever fixed this error, which causes xman to segmentation fault when the manual page window is popped down. It appears that xman was attempting to close a file descriptor which was not open. Possibly the bug has not been noticed before because other UNIX platforms treat the closing of a null file descriptor in a more graceful manner? Anyway, this program will eventually become obsolete due to the rise of admittedly far superior HTML man pages. But for now, systems come with an ungodly mess of both (not to mention emacs info pages, how-to text pages, latex, and postscript), so I find it useful to have a correctly working xman lying around.
xman.tar.gz is available here and via anonymous ftp.
Xw.tar.gz is a port to Linux (and X11R6, in general) of the HP Xw widget set library. For reference on how to use the Xw widget set, try to get a copy of Douglas A. Young's excellent X Window Systems Programming and Applications with Xt (Prentice Hall, Inc., 1989). For traditional hackers used to using source code as reference, probably enough can be gleaned from the XCircuit source code to get started.
url is a program I wrote in response to a co-worker who asked if it were possible to print the URL at the top of a Netscape printout, which he says is possible under all versions of Netscape except the UNIX one. This little program, an exercise in understanding X11 "Atoms" and Widget trees, will search out the window on your display running Netscape and request the current URL from it. The optional first parameter to url is a (remote) display name, so you can see what Netscape page someone else is reading, as long as they have X11 access enabled (i.e., xhost +)!
Updated 3/2/00 with a bug fix by Robert Mitchell of WFF/NASA which prevents url from getting confused by Netscape windows other than the Print window, and picks up the _MOZILLA_URL Atom from the correct window.
Simple (manual) compile instructions are written in the first few comment lines of the program.
urlfilter is the companion script written by Ed Hawkins III at JHU-APL for getting the url program to write the current URL to the top of the printed page. Format is to put the web page title on the upper left hand corner and the URL on the upper right hand corner. Format adjusts appropriately for both portrait and landscape page orientations. The PostScript statements in the filter script can be customized to change the font and appearance of the URL title on the page.
To use urlfilter, from the Netscape Print window, select
Print Command: urlfilter | lpr
(i.e., prepend the urlfilter and pipe into whatever program you use for the print spooler).
urlfilter.pl is a port of the urlfilter script (above) to Perl. Make sure you configure this script so that the first line points to your Perl executable (/usr/bin/perl on Linux, but may be elsewhere on other systems), and that the variable $URL points to the executable for url.c (above). Thanks to Robert Mitchell for this script. urlfilter.awk is a variation of the urlfilter script using awk instead of sh or perl (above), kindly provided by Jonathan R. Senning (senning@gordon.edu), math and CS professor at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. He has added page numbering and date, printed at the bottom of the page. By streaming the input, it works faster than the Perl and Shell versions and does not alter the original Netscape PostScript output. This is probably the best of the ``urlfilter'' versions listed here, and I recommend it over the others.
RPM packages of urlfilter also provided by Jonathan Senning:
- Source: urlfilter-1.0-1.src.rpm
- i386 Binary: urlfilter-1.0-1.i386.rpm
- PowerPC Binary: urlfilter-1.0-1.ppc.rpm
xtdnn is a program which I wrote in 1991 for drawing and solving time-delay neural networks (temporal backpropagation). Connections and their strengths are drawn on-screen in color and updated during the learning process.
Required: Xw widget set.
xdigit is one of my past research topics in acoustic classification: a speech recognition network which uses time delays, except that it relies on basic hebbian learning, a perceptron-like one-layer network, and is geared toward analog hardware implementation.
Required: Xw widget set.

UNIX utility programs:

tgrind is a Linux port (and in general, a slightly updated version) of tgrind by Van Jacobson (1985, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), which itself was adapted from an even earlier program called "vgrind" (based on troff, and essentially obsolete for that very reason). "tgrind" is a "pretty printing" formatter which uses TeX as its underlying text processor, used primarily for generating nice PostScript listings of C programs.
hpduplex is the C source code for an lpd printer driver to act as an output filter for a printer like the HP LaserJet-4 with double-sided printing capability. Using this executable, the printer is called by two names (in our case, ``hp1'' and ``hp2'') to get single- and double-sided output, respectively, if the printcap file is setup as in this sample. For the most part, this has been superceded by simple filters as described in the printing HOW-TO. I have not used a meta-filter like this one in practice for years, mostly because newer printers are usually smart enough to tell the difference between text and PostScript, and those that have duplex printing or multiple-tray sources can be controlled through simple postscript commands prepended to the output by the "if" filter.
ps2pcl.c is a simple program to drive a hp560c or other HP PCL-compatible color inkject printer as a color PostScript® device. This file must be compiled and the executable placed in someplace obvious like /var/spool/hp560c/, which is how it is set up for this sample printcap file. Note that the system configuration shown here was an hp560c connected to the parallel port (/dev/plp) of an SGI Indigo workstation. With this printcap file, any color PostScript® file can be sent directly to the printer by the command:
lpr -Pcolorps filename.ps
Comment: This method is outdated for the same reason as mentioned in the previous item.
trace.tar.gz. The program trace is the UNIX system call tracer for IRIX; used to be a UNIX standard, was probably considered too useful a tool for hackers (like "adb") and discontinued. A recent look for source code of trace yielded only an outdated version for IRIX 5.0.something. I updated this code to work under (at least) IRIX 5.3. It will also work under IRIX 6.2 (since I made some changes (Nov. 1998)), though I have not done a thorough check to see if it handles all system calls known to IRIX 6.2.
binedit.c is an extremely simple vi-like binary editor. Only implements a few commands from vi, but this is enough to allow a person to load, search through, and change individual bytes in a binary file. Includes the vi commands delete(x), insert(i), replace-character(r), replace(R), move(h,j,k,l,0,$), move-eof(G), status(^G), save-and-quit(ZZ), search(/), search-next(n), goto-line(:#), quit(q), write(w). Implements command "format" (f) to switch between hexidecimal, decimal, and character modes. "Lines" in the binary file are determined by the number of bytes per line displayed on the screen. Very useful for looking at binary file header information, hacking machine code, etc. Due to the available modes of display, binary output is easier to read and deal with than emacs or nvi output of nonprintable characters.

Notices:

Please contact me if you find that any web links are broken.
Some of the X11 programs listed here (namely xtdnn and xcircuit) use the Xw widget set, originally freeware from Hewlett-Packard. When I last checked, this package was becoming increasingly difficult to find anywhere on the Web. It is also getting increasingly out of date. Personally, I am moving to Motif as my main widget interface, not because I like it so much as because it is a reasonably modern interface. GTK is probably even better, but since it redefines all the basic Xt commands, it will take a lot of work to get used to it (it's better for building X11 source from scratch rather than to convert an existing interface). Motif also is more usable since Lesstif (the Motif-compatible freeware package) came on the scene.
A few other programs listed below use the Xpm extension for X11 which gives support for pixmaps. Fortunately, RedHat Linux and I believe some other operating systems now consider it a UNIX standard. If your system does not have Xpm installed, The package is available from sunsite.unc.edu under the /pub/X11/contrib/ directory, file xpm-3.4j.tar.gz. Also in the sunsite X11 libraries directory is an xpm tutorial and collection of xpm examples.
From 1998, xpm appears to have stabilized at version 3.4k: xpm-3.4k.tar.gz
Please contact me if you have any difficulty compiling this package or any of the programs listed here which depend on it. Clicking on the file name above will automatically transfer the 93KB compressed source file to your site.
Note: I have not looked at the source since version 3.2.

Back to my home page. . .

email:

---As always, Caveat end-user.

Last updated: July 7, 2008 at 9:06pm