Graphs of a variety of elementary math functions, useful for a quick picture of how they behave or to grab one or two significant figures of the value.

How to do things in Open Office's equation writer.

Introduces the equation-writing capabilities of Open Office 2.0.  I find that I have no need for LaTeX given the equation-handling abilities of Open Office.  While not as powerful as TeX or LaTeX, it's adequate for my needs and provides a variety of other tools.  For writing technical documents with equations and drawings (made with the Draw tool that's part of OO), Open Office suits my needs very well and it's free, to boot.  I haven't used MS Word in years, but unless the interface to the equation writer of Word has changed, it was quite painful to write a document containing equations and drawings.

A pure-python translation of Stephen Moshier's cephes special functions. Bessel functions are missing. If you are doing serious numerical work with python, use scipy instead, which contains the cephes functions written in C.

Implements a general-pupose root-finding method in python that was published in Embedded Systems Programming, May, 2002, pg 7-14.  The method is based on fitting a parabola and converges quickly.  It is similar to bisection in that it needs two abscissas where the ordinate differs in sign and thus brackets a root.  Convergence is highly likely, unlike a single estimate and Newton-Raphson iteration, where a near-zero derivative can send the algorithm into the next county.

This script will generate most any linear isotropic graph paper by creating a PostScript file.

This zipfile contains C++ and python code that implements the IAPWS95 equations for the thermodynamic properties of water. You might also want to take a look at John Pye's freesteam project.

Calculate irradiance over a wavelength band from a spectral irradiance data file. It is written to work with StellarNet spectroradiometer files, but it can easily be modified to work with other data files.

A script to aid in mixture calculations. Adapted from a C program here.

Translation into python of some C code from the US Naval Observatory. It contains routines that are nearly identical to those used for calculations of the Astronomical Almanac. Here are some notes I made on it.

Contains various spreadsheets in Open Office format and PDFs of tables that I find handy to have in the shop.

A C++ program to print out combinations of inch gauge blocks that yield a desired composite length. Should work with most any set of gauge blocks.  Uses brute-force searching to find solutions -- it's not elegant, but it works.

How to use a carpenter's square to lay out angles from 1° to 44°.  The fractional values given will result in angles accurate to 0.01°, assuming your square and your layouts are accurate enough.  I find a speed square a much handier tool for carpentry layout than the carpenter's square and it's accurate enough for the usual purposes.

Prints out various dimensions associated with threads. Calculates the values based on the ASME B1.1-1989 standard document. If you machine threads on a lathe, you may find this program handy.

Handy application if you like to work at a cygwin command line. Given one or more files, it will cause them to be opened with their registered application.

Performs a comparison between binary files; differences are printed in hex dump format.  You can print an ASCII picture that represents where the different bytes in the files are in percentage through the file.

Contains ddiff.py and ddiffcp.py. The ddiff.py script compares two directories and lists the differences between them. You can compare based on time, file size, or content. ddiffcp.py will perform the needed copying operations to help synchronize the content of two directories.

Contains a sh-type shell function and a python script that let you navigate around to various directories.  I've had a number of UNIX users tell me they couldn't live without this tool once they started using it.

32-bit Windows console RPN hex calculator (supports floating point too). Use hc -h to get a man page.  This has been replaced by an open-source program here.

Will produce a list of readable words from an HTML file, all in lower case, one per line. You could then run the list of words through a spell checker.

Contains a python script that can perform NAICS and SIC lookups. These are codes produced by the US Federal government and are used to identify different types of businesses.

Will calculate various readability indexes for text files, such as the Gunning Fog Index, the Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Level, etc.

See where the space is being consumed in a directory tree and where the biggest files are.

Script to generate tag files; supports xBase program files and BASIC.

Script to rename all files in a directory to lower or upper case.  Us UNIX weenies like all lower case.  :^)

Produces a list of files that are candidates for turning their execute bit permission off. Handy in cygwin, since most Windows programs don't know how to behave properly with respect to the execute bit.

A C++ console program that will cross reference the tokens in a set of files -- each token will be listed in alphabetical order with the file it occurs in along with the line numbers it's found on. It can perform spell checking. It has a -k option which makes it useful for programmers, as it will split composite tokens in their source code and spell check the individual tokens.  In the late 1990's, I wrote a similar tool in python, but it took a couple of hours to index our project's files (a medium-size project with about 100,000 files).  The C++ version runs much faster and is one of the few times I've found it necessary to replace a python script with a C/C++ program.

Einstein fish puzzle notes and script to find all solutions by brute-force search. What's of interest to programmers here is probably the comb_perm.py script that can be used for searches using combinations and permutations.  Oct 2009 update:  python's itertools module supplies the ability to generate combinations, permutations, and cartesian products in lexicographic order, so the need for the stuff in fish.zip has pretty much evaporated.

Generates one time cryptographic pads, assuming you have a cryptographically-secure random number generator.

Contains two PDF files of shooting targets.  One's for BB guns and the other is for pistols and rifles and includes a table to let you figure out the subtended angle of the target at various distances.