At long last, I actually have some new content. Here are two documents for Linux users:

Securing a wireless network point with Debian and FreeS/WAN

An IPSec configuration using FreeS/WAN on Debian GNU/Linux, including sample configuration files

Debian GNU/Linux on an Apple Powerbook G4 (TiBook IV)

Advice regarding running Debian GNU/Linux, ‘unstable’ release (and possibly other Linux distributions) on an Apple Titanium Powerbook IV (and possibly other Apple hardware).

Both are incomplete, particularly the second, but perhaps they'll be useful to someone.

Also, for people at Cambridge University: Port-forwarding via the SRCF using SSH, as a way to access Cambridge-only resources from home in a secure way. This one is actually reasonably complete.

I've added a quick intro to Cascading Stylesheets.

Yay, my exams are (as of last week) over! I now have time to sleep a lot, write programs, attempt to find a job for the summer and (for some reason) play Diablo II. (No, I wasn't exactly planning to reinstall Diablo II, it just sort of happened :-)

This website is now generated by Pseudoweb, a hybrid Python/C/XSLT build system based on Daniel Krech's rdflib and Daniel Veillard's libxslt. I've basically rewritten Pseudoweb completely over the last month — this time last month, it didn't use rdflib, it used a lot more C, its RDF support was pretty shaky, and it needed a special ‘URL’ scheme (xpsweb:// — I would have used x-psweb:// but ‘-’ isn't a valid scheme character, apparently).

It now uses standard http URLs, together with some “rewriting” functionality to map them into the filesystem (it doesn't actually ever make a http request). The API to get RDF data (multi-valued typed strings) into XSLT (single untyped strings with no easy way to build lists) is a bit nasty, but I can live with it.

An alpha or beta release will be available “when it's done” :-)

I've been doing some more hacking on Pseudoweb, my buzzword-compliant RDF-based website build tool type thing. Thanks to the power of libxml Python bindings, it's now all one big dynamically-linked executable, rather than forking off child processes in all directions. It's also rather faster.

This will hopefully have some nice consequences; before, the sub-program that did the rendering was done in pure C, but since it now has to be a Python extension anyway, I have nothing to lose by coding it as a C/Python hybrid. (The more logic I can do in Python and the less I have to worry about C memory (mis|micro)management, the nicer it'll be to write :-)

Next I just need to find a good Python RDF library, to replace the messy C one I'm currently using, and incorporate mod_rewrite–style URL manipulation into libxml. Oh, and hook it back up to SCons, since I've set it up to always build everything for now (dependency tracking is a future feature, and the way it's RDF-based could make it a pain — I can see I might have to make the dependency tracking pretty intelligent if I go the way I'm planning).

There's the small matter of second-year university exams and the associated revision, as well. Aagh.

I've re-released my old X-Wing vs TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance modifications.

I only changed the readme files, so they should still work just the same, but I haven't been able to test them properly (I don't have a joystick with me at university, so I can't run either of these games for a while). If you still play XWA or XvT, I'd appreciate knowing whether the mods work, particularly the XvT shipset ‘X-Wing: Operation Iceheart’.

While I'm posting other stuff, a note from The Real World.

I don't normally have much time for the people who're meant to be representing me (hey, don't blame me, I was a few months too young to vote last election) but it seems at least one Cabinet minister is willing to stick to his principles — Robin Cook (former foreign secretary, no less) has resigned in protest over war on Iraq. His resignation speech sums up objections to attacking Iraq eloquently and is well worth reading.

(Intelligent comments are welcome whatever your opinion, but no unthinking pro-war flames please.)

A while ago (the last update was September 2000, apparently), I wrote a program called Unreal Tournament System Config to help with Unreal Tournament configuration. Since I haven't been maintaining it for ages, I finally got round to digging out the source code, cleaning it up to remove the dependency on Hyperlabel (I forget whether Hyperlabel is open-source or not, but since I'd lost my copy and the author's website has disappeared, I had to remove it before the program would compile anyway :-) and creating a nice automatic installer for the whole thing (since that's the de-facto standard for packaging in Windows).

So, if anyone wants to develop it further, version 210f (the f stands for ‘final’, or ‘free’, or ‘f——ing broken’ — you decide :-) is now available as free, open-source software under the GNU General Public License. You'll need a copy of Delphi 3 to compile it (later versions will probably work with a bit of tweaking, but I only have version 3 myself), and a copy of Nullsoft's open-source program NSIS (I used version 2.0b1) to rebuild the installer. Two releases are available, executable installer (program, documentation and optional source code) and source only (a zipfile containing source and documentation, but no executable). There are no new features or bugfixes, although there might be new bugs.

While stuck in Windows doing that, I also repackaged Photo Indexer (now at version 100a) to make it easier for people to comply with the GPL: the installer is now based on NSIS 2.0b1 and includes the source code as an optional component, and the source code now includes the NSIS script, which I accidentally left out of version 100. There are no changes to the program (I didn't even recompile it), which is why it doesn't get a whole version number to itself. Like UTSC, it's available as an executable installer (program, docs and optional source) and a source-only zipfile (docs and source) and you'll need Delphi 3 to make any changes.

Please don't treat the UTSC source as a fair assessment of my programming skill, I've got better since then :-)

Switched over to Pseudoweb, which is Yet Another website build system. This time I wrote it as a plugin to SCons, libxml2 and libxslt.

Of course, this led to plenty of design changes, again :-) The site map has died and been replaced with a Google form and some section headings, and navigation is a little more consistent.

A few design changes, a few broken link fixes (oops), and looked through my server log for the most common 404s to install appropriate redirects. Website maintainers: please stop deep-linking downloads, it's considered rude.