Dave Aronson's Free Software

These are things I have written for various reasons, mainly as an exercise in learning/using a new language, or because I wanted to use such a tool but none existed.

• DARTS: Dave Aronson's Role Tracking System, for Toastmasters clubs. I wrote this to help my Toastmasters club assign meeting roles to members, and track who was how active... and to exercise my AJAX and general Javascript skills.

• Kakuro module, which I did very recently to brush up on Ruby. (I did it using TDD, or Test-Driven Development; here are the tests.) The Kakuro module currently just "holds" puzzles, including reading them from KDL (Kakuro Description Language) files, translating a Puzzle object to KDL files, and translating them to ASCII so you can print them up and solve them by hand. I also wrote a trivial Kakuro puzzle printer that prints up ASCII versions of the KDL file(s) you give it on the command line, and a sum manager (tells you what digits you can use to make X in Y unique digits) that is part of a Kakuro solving system I intend to work on. (That also was done with TDD; here are the normal tests and here are the longer tests.)

• Toastmasters Speech Timer. I wrote this to start learning how to fire off events and catch them later, in Javascript.

• Google Maps API based Address Center Finder. I wrote this to start learning the Google Maps API... and many people have since found it useful!

• Google Maps API based Out-of-the-Way Calculator. Another Google Maps experiment, possibly useful for either cadging a ride or refusing to let someone else. ;-)

• Google Visualization API based Goal Tracker And Predictor. I wrote this to start learning the Google Visualization API... and plan to turn it into a full-fledged site where you can store your goals and add points (without re-entering them all from scratch), dates on which the samples were taken (versus just sample numbers), and a predicted date of completion.

• Page Reopener. Little JavaScript hack to open a given URL, periodically. Useful for keeping a connection alive, so that for instance the web interface to Exchange doesn't time out.

• CUT: C Unit Tester (a very lightweight easy-to-use plain-old-C unit testing framework). I wrote this because CuTest and other C testing harnesses just weren't, well... cutting it!

• Units of Measure library (C++). I wrote this to brush up on my rusty C++, and because I had an idea long long ago, for a language that would have units of measure (and the ability to declare new ones) built into it, with automagic unit-checking. Since then I have discovered some suboptimal bits about the implementation, but haven't had time to fix it....

• Extended C++ Life "game" as a Rational Rose project. I wrote this to sharpen my C++, shortly after learning it, and Rational Rose as well, as part of learning that.

• Fireworks Java applet I wrote this to sharpen my Java, shortly after learning it.

It's all free, even though some of it says "All Rights Reserved" inside. Eventually I'll get around to fixing that, not to mention making nice neat distribution packages, libraries, etc. Anyway, if you really like any of this, a donation would be much appreciated, or at least let me know that you're finding it useful/amusing/whatever.

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