About
: Contact info, areas of expertise, business philosophy.
Articles
: Articles, Essays, Rants/Raves, and "On-The-Soapbox"
Tech Info
: Primarily How-To documents.
Downloads
: Get various Cosmic creations. These are mostly Perl scripts and FileMaker Databases.
Links
: Pointers to other resources on the web that might be useful.

Downloads

Some are free for anyone to use. Some are covered under the Gnu Public License, there are restrictions on copying and distributing the files.

When software provided here is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), this in effect says that you can distribute it freely as long as you provide the source code with each distribution. For more information on the GPL, check out the GPL page of the Free Software Foundation. See the file COPYING for the license.

The "coming soon" items need a bit of polish and documentation before I post them.

FileMaker Pro Databases

FRED

The FileMaker database Fund-Raising Enhanced Database keeps track of donors and their gifts and pledges.

FlockFiler

FileMaker database to keep livestock records of sheep. Presently FlockFiler Lite is available. FlockFiler Pro will be available in the first half of 2005. (Not GPL. This is commercial software licensed for one user.) Learn more about FlockFiler and you can buy it online at the FlockFiler website.

ListCombiner (coming soon)

FileMaker database to combine separate mailing lists into one. It helps clean up sloppy lists and eliminate duplicates.

ASCIIFiler

FileMaker database to generate formatted text files from your FileMaker records. This is a proof-of-concept database that illustrates the techniques of rolling your own merged document using your own merge template. This is useful when you don't want a printout or a PDF document but you do want to specify exactly what the resulting text looks like. Example templates for plain text, RTF, HTML, and LaTeX are included. The sample data is for a simple mailing list. It is intended as a guide for you to customize it for your own data. This database requires FileMaker Pro 7 or 8.

Perl Scripts

SHYPREC - Simple HYpertext PRE-proCessor   program   documentation

Version 1.3

SHYPREC (pronounced like "shipwreck") is a web page pre-processor. With this you can make definitions and include external files. You can achieve some of this using server-side includes but using SHYPREC to do this pre-processing takes the load off the server and provides greater power such as nested includes. C/C++ programmers have the program cpp that is invoked automatically by the compiler to handle includes and macro definitions. SHYPREC provides most of this functionality to HTML coders. When used in combination with make or another project management tool, a web site can be built and maintained relatively simply. (GPL)

The HTML for this web site is built and maintained predominantly using SHYPREC, SyncUpSite, and emacs.

SyncUpSite 1.0

Used to update websites from a local copy. This is essentially a Perl version of the C program sitecopy borrowing from the techniques of FTPSync.pl. (GPL)

jpeg272.pl (coming soon)

Used to convert JPEG images to 72 dpi.

filemanager.pl (coming soon)

Used to provide web visitors the ability to upload and download files to a specific directory on a website using only a web browser.