I've just finished some long overdue updates to my web-based local filesharing tool nearshare.net. Mostly cosmetic fixes needed as browsers continue to evolve (this was originally written in 2005, after all), but also some bug fixes needed for Firefox 3 on Linux. If you need a quick way to shoot files across a local network, give it a try! If you have Java, there's nothing to install - just point two computers on the same LAN to nearshare.net and share away!

"jar2sh is a bash shell script that wraps Java applications into bash scripts that can be run without any installation. It's sort of like launch4j or exeJ, but for *nix..."

You might think this site and its projects are dead. After all, it's been over a year and half since the last update. A growing family and part-time MBA left me no time for Martian Software, but I am now slowly blowing the dust off a few projects and considering some more. Martian Software is still alive.

JSAP 2.1 is now available. This is a long overdue bug fix release.

Many thanks to Henning Nitschke, aztec, Jonathan May, James Carroll, Ivan Todoroski, Olivier Lafontaine, and others for bug reports and fixes!

Version 0.21 includes a large number of updates, including the use of sox to accommodate Vonage's new(ish) .wav file encoding, improved support for Vonage's Canadian customers, and general bug fixes throughout. If you have a network-connected Series 2 TiVo, a Vonage account, and Java installed, you should give this a try.

I'm alpha testing a new web-based local filesharing tool, and I've decided to open it up so you can give it a whirl. It is known to work on Firefox (Linux/Windows) and Internet Explorer (Windows), and known to not yet work on OS X. If you need to send files between machines in your home or office, give it a shot and let me know how it works out! (I repeat: this is an alpha!).

JSAP v2.0a is now available. This is a bug fix release. Auto-generated help is no longer outputting "à" characters, and FileStringParser now enforces mustExist(), mustBeFile(), and mustBeDirectory().

JSAP v2.0 is now available. In addition to several minor bugfixes, a number of new features have been introduced: the SimpleJSAP class makes construction of basic parsers even easier, singleton instances of stateless StringParsers can be obtained from the JSAP class itself, and an experimental XML-based JSAP configuration has been introduced.

I'm pleased to announce that Sebastiano Vigna has just joined the JSAP development team. Seba has made numerous improvements and brought many good ideas to JSAP - which will be included in the next release.

Sebastiano Vigna is an associate professor at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. He uses JSAP for flexible and powerful command line parsing for several tools distributed in MG4J (full-text indexing), in the LAW (Laboratorio di Algoritmica del Web)software (computation of PageRank and variants), in WebGraph (web-scale graph compression) and, from now on, in all Java command-line tools he will ever develop. In the spare time, Sebastiano typesets Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas and other music using Lilypond (see the music section of http://vigna.dsi.unimi.it/). Welcome, Seba!

TiVonage is an HME application that allows Vonage customers to manage their voice mail via the TiVo UI. This was my entry into the TiVo Developer Challenge.

Nailgun version 0.7.1 is now available. There's only one change since the last version, but it's a big one: System.exit() is now trapped on the server, and results in a graceful exit by the client with the appropriate exit code.

Nailgun version 0.7 is now available, with many improvements. Most notable is the availability of a Windows binary client - see the changelog for the full list of new features.

I'm pleased to announce that Nailgun is finally available for download. Nailgun is a client, server, and protocol for running Java programs fast. Really fast. With Nailgun, Java-based command line utilities are completely practical.

Earlier today, John Graham-Cumming absorbed into tumbler a Java-based client API I developed for sending tumbler knock packets. Tumbler is a simple and secure variation on port knocking, with client and server implementations already available.

I've just learned that an article on JSAP has been published in this month's issue of JavaMagazin. The author, Klaus-Peter Berg, knows what he's talking about - he contributed several new features in v1.03. If you're interested (and can read German) copies of the magazine can be obtained here.

Two bug fixes: a brown-paper-bag bug in the build script that resulted in broken documentation, and a NullPointerException that could arise in the generation of help text.

Trivial Persist was developed to provide the quickest and easiest means possible to object persistence in Java. That means no cumbersome XML files to glue things together, no SQL database at all, and use of normal Java classes for access - normal as in Set, Comparator, Iterator - rather than JDBC or a new API. As a result, a new object repository (called a Store) can be created or modified in just a few seconds.

Martian Software's command line parser has just been released. Changes include a new switch type (QualifiedSwitch), new StringParsers, dramatically improved documentation, many minor tweaks, and a license change to LGPL (with a clarification making unmodified binary inclusion/redistribution safe for your projects).

"<rundoc> is an Ant task that replaces commands in text files with a docbook representation of the command output. Useful for keeping documentation in sync with code..."

"<snip> is an Ant task designed to help with the single-sourcing of program documentation. This task extracts snippets of text from files, placing them into properties in the Ant project..."

I spoke at the 2004 Spam Conference on January 16 about TarProxy's progress/redesign and discussed my experience using it in production. A webcast of the entire conference is available online; My presentation is available here. The slides are available in PDF and HTML formats.

As I converted this site to XHTML 1.1, I learned that the target attribute has been removed from the anchor tag.

Many developers are working on tools that make our lives easier by automatically detecting and filtering spam. A simple extension to these tools can also make life harder for spammers.