Arch Linux

A lightweight and flexible distribution that tries to Keep It Simple. Since its inception back in 2001, Arch has grown into a formidable Linux distribution with a team of brilliant developers and a strong, helpful community.

Pacman

Pacman is an open source package manager for Linux distributions. Originally created as the package manager for Arch Linux, it has now been adopted by other distributions as well.

Knock

A port-knocking implementation for Linux. Port knocking is a way of surreptitiously offering services on a Linux server without advertising the fact.

For example, say you run a development website but don't want just anybody to be able to visit it. If you wanted, you could use iptables to drop all incoming packets to tcp/80 and only allow your IP to connect. But if your IP is dynamic, or if you have multiple developers who need to connect, then it can be beneficial to protect the server with a password instead.

By delivering a special sequence of "port knocks," a user can open up access to the port in question for her IP only, and close it again when she's done.

Pronto

A web framework written in PHP that focuses on code reusability, extensibility, and speed. Compatible with PHP4 and PHP5, and makes you tacos while you code.

Sadly, the Pronto project has reached its timely end. In its day, it was kinda cool, but these days there are far better and more mature PHP frameworks.

(The taco feature was pretty cool though)

Packrat

A simple backup system written in Bash. It uses dar to take full/incremental backups of files and can store them locally, on a remote system via SSH, or on Amazon S3.

Packrat takes a modular approach which makes it trivial to add new backup methods or remote-storage methods. MySQL backups are implemented as an example. It also supports archive encryption for both filesystem backups and MySQL dumps.

Jive

Jive was an MVC-ish client-side JavaScript web framework. It exists wholly within the browser, while maintaining MVC (ish) patterns.

Phatso

A micro framework for PHP. It is very small (~100 lines) and simple, focusing purely on a basic dispatch and template functionality.

Vantage

Vantage is a bandwidth-monitoring program. Developed on Linux, it uses libpcap to examine all incoming/outgoing packets and tallies the bandwidth usage on a per-IP basis. It also sports a small embedded web server that will display bandwidth reports through a web browser.

This project never graduated from beta, but it is usable. I've also made a build for the OpenWRT system, so it can be used on Linux-based routers.

Cheap HTPC

A simple Home Theatre PC (HTPC) menu system with support for LIRC-compatible remote controls. Lets you configure a main menu system with entries that map to directories in your filesystem. Use your remote control to select a file to watch, and Cheap HTPC will open it in mplayer.

MySQL Shell

A little PHP script that provides a basic shell interface to a MySQL server. I wrote this because I often found myself in a situation where I needed to run some MySQL queries on a remote server and only had FTP access. Most of the time, it wasn't worth it to actually upload PHPMyAdmin in its entirety, so this little script proved to be a suitable replacement.

If you're doing more than running simple queries, I'd recommend you use PHPMyAdmin or something similar.

PyBurn

A simple Python script I wrote to create audio/data CDs. I was used to using the commandline utility cdrecord, but missed the on-the-fly conversion from MP3 to WAV and the drag-and-drop features a GUI could provide.