Software

by

Alan Jackson

Listed below are several little Perl, Python, R and Tcl/Tk programs I have written. Being done in Perl, Python, R and Tcl/Tk, they should run on nearly any system in existence today. In particular, Unix, Windows, and Macintosh.

python stuff

Python for R

A work in progress to build numpy tools to emulate some of the better bits of R, based on working through the online book "Using R for Data Analysis and Graphics" by J.H. Maindonald.

Includes a routine to prettify the axis ranges and tics in Matplotlib, and a library of useful tools.

Perl Scripts

Makemstr

Makemstr is built to be an adjunct to the excellent recipe database software MasterCook®, available from Sierra. What Makemstr does is to read a fairly arbitrary input recipe file, and clean it up so that it can be imported into MasterCook®.

MailStats

MailStats is a series of Perl modules adapted from Greg Bacon's News::Scan code. MailStats gathers data and reports statistics on e-mail lists. I run it on 4 different lists, both digest format and individual messages, Majordomo and Listserve. It does assume that you are running on Unix and using MH-style mail folders, but this is not a very strong assumption. Minor code edits would adapt it to other mailbox formats and other operating systems.

Convert Pegasus to Mail Handler

When I moved from Win95 to Linux, I had to move my mail from Pegasus to Mail Handler (MH). I wrote a few perl tools to do most of the work. Feel free to steal them. There is more info on my Linux Adventures page.

Capture caller-id information.

This simple perl script talks to your modem and, assuming you have hooked your modem up to your phone line, will capture call-id information and store it in a file.

Palm Pilot Address Database Tools

dump_addrs

This script does just what it says, it dumps the contents of the address book to STDOUT. It makes a good basic script to modify for your own devices.

print_labels

This script also makes use of the module PostScript::MailLabels to generate a postscript file suitable for printing onto mailing label stock. I use this to address my Christmas cards.

The key things I have done for this script and the next one are the use of the custom fields. The Palm has 4 custom fields in the address book. I define the first one to be family names, so I enter
husband and wife, children
so that for addressing Christmas cards, I can pull out the "husband and wife" part of the field and use that in the address.

In custom2, I put my database keys for selecting subsets of the data. I simply put in a comma-delimited list of keys. For example, everyone on my Christmas card list gets an "Xmas" flag in custom2.

create_teampage

Another very simple example, here I select out a subset of addresses, and output html for a 2-column table, in alphabetical order, of the selected addresses.

Weather Tools

These are a collection of perl scripts for reading data off the serial port from a WMR918 weather station, archiving the data in files, filtering the data for noise, and generating nice plots.

Spamfryer

This is a tool for tracking down spammers in a GUI. It needs quite a bit of polishing, so in the best open-source fashion I have placed it here in case someone else feels inspired to use this as a starting point and clean it up.

Basically it searches your spam for URL's, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses, and highlights them. When you click on a highlighted field, a new window opens that allows you to operate on that address with whois, traceroute, ping, nslookup, etc. The code is written to make it easy to add new functions. It also allows me to email a complaint to the upstream ISP's.

I currently run it from Sylpheed with an action tied to a function key :
Spamfryer: spamassassin -d < %f | Spamfryer &;

Perl Modules

PlotCalendar

A set of 4 modules for plotting nice looking calendars. Follow the above link to the web page.

WORDS.pm

Module for manipulating English words. It will do parsing, canonicalization while honoring proper nouns, and convert plurals to singular and past tense to present. I use it for many tasks: spam detection and analysis, generating keyword indicies for documents, and analyzing psychological word recall tasks.

Spamalyzer

A Perl module and a bunch of code snippets for extracting interesting stuff from spam messages like relay points, phone numbers, addresses, url's, etc. This is alpha code at best, so be warned. Not for the faint of heart. If you find bugs or improvements, let me know. For examples of what it can do, see my page at Geocities.

PostScript::MailLabels

This perl module does everything you need to do to print mailing labels on standard label stock. It will create a calibration page to help you set up the printing, a test page so that you can make sure your address text will actually land on the mailing labels, and, of course, it will print the labels themselves. Included at no extra cost are postal barcodes so that your letters may even get delivered faster.

Version 2.32, October 2012, is now available.

R functions (see the R-project for more information)

spamtools.R

Functions for generating statistics and plots for spam and virus e-mail

To see examples, take a look at my spam statistics page.

Utilities.R

Called by the next bit of code, this basically finds the intersections between two curves.

It is used to construct polygonal areas bounded by 2 or more curves on a plot.

Plot_Weather.R

Make nice plots of weather data.

To see examples, take a look at my weather page.

BusStats.R

A few plots and statistics for Bus arrival times.

Tcl/Tk and Expect scripts

Dialup

TkDialer and dialer scripts

These are both expect scripts for doing dialup and email fetching.

I wrote them because I needed to automate my dialup sessions, and I wanted to learn Expect and Tcl/Tk. I tried some other GUI dialers, but I was not happy with them. The nice thing here is that (if you know Tcl) the scripts are truly customizable.

They assume :

You are running Linux with a dialup pop connection
You use sendmail
you use ppp and chat to establish your phone connection
You retrieve your mail from your ISP with FetchMail
You filter your incoming mail with MailAgent

It should not be too hard to change any of these assumptions if your environment is different.

I assume you have set up your chat stuff so that it works. This stuff simply automates it. The zipped tar file contains this README, and 2 scripts, dialer and TkDialer. I have set up a cron that runs dialer at 2AM to grab my email :
10 02 * * * /home/ajackson/bin/dialer
and I use TkDialer during my waking hours to dialup for email, web cruising, and ftp sessions. Current version is 1.0.6, updated 6/19/98.