John DiMarco's Software
UNIX shell scripting is a surprisingly useful way to write simple CGI
applications for the web. Because UNIX was designed well before the web, the
usual set of of UNIX utilities does not include any tools for functionality
specific to CGIs. Something that is badly needed by any non-trivial CGI
shell script is a tool to parse and unpack URL-encoded data. So I wrote one,
available from my GitHub page:
The HTTP protocol defines some simple and standard ways of authenticating
users who use web pages: HTTP Basic Authentication and HTTP Digest Authentication. These are implemented in every web browser, and
are useful over HTTPS. But there is no standard mechanism to
"log out", other than shutting down and restarting the
browser. I wrote an extension to the
Firefox web browser,
httplogout,
that adds the ability to log out from all such sessions. Sadly, in 2018
Mozilla dropped support for the XUL API that I was using,
and provided no alternate API for the functionality my extension needed,
and so my extension stopped working in mainstream Firefox as of Firefox 57.
But my extension is still useful for people running forks of Firefox that
support XUL.
In the 1990s and 2000s, I wrote some open-source software, mostly
system utilities. Most of this I have not modified in years, but some of
it may still be of use.
In the 1990s, I significantly modified a couple of open-source packages that
others originally wrote. My version of these are as follows: