Alan Clifford's Software Page

Linux

MARP

MARP (Mundungus Autoresponder Requests a Password) is a challenge and response style, mail filter created with procmail.

Addresses of known senders are kept in a whitelist and the system is totally transparent to them. Unknown senders receive an email asking them to respond with a password. This response will cause their address to be added to the whitelist.

MARP tries not to respond to daemons and mailing lists if they can be identified as such.

For users with <anything>@example.com style addresses, there is a passthrough list of recipient addresses. This is useful for interaction with websites or similar from whence an email will be sent but the sender address is unknown. Adding suppliername@example.com to the passthough list will cause the sender's address of any mail sent to that address to be added to the whitelist.

When initating an email dialogue, it is, of course, polite to add the recipient to the whitelist. To facilitate this, there is a sending filter for use with Pine that adds recipient addresses to the whitelist.

Emails that have elicited a response from MARP are stored in a temporary mailbox as are responses from mailer daemons that result from receiving emails with problematic return addresses. There are shell scripts to clean up this detritus suitable for running from a crontab.

Autoresponses are put into the Sendmail queue rather than being sent immediately, as a defense against mail loops.

Download Marp: marp-1.0.1.tar.gz (10k)

MICE Server and Clients

Mice (Mundungus Internet Connection Enhancer) server is designed for a home network where one machine has a modem to connect to the internet. Clients on other machines can communicate with the server and ask it to connect to the internet. The server keeps track of client requests and disconnects when all clients no longer require connection.

Mice server does not connect to the internet itself - it relies on programs such as pppd to do that. An example set-up using pppd is supplied.

There is console client program for Linux, a GUI Java client that runs on Linux, Windows XP, Windows 95 and the Psion 5mx, or telnet can be used as the client.

In version 4.2, the server can interrogate the clients to check that they are still responding and, if neccessary, terminate the internet connection. The reason for this is that on, for example, a wireless network, if the network is disconnected, the server does not recognise that the client has disappeared for some time. Telnet clients should respond to the check but this is not guaranteed.

Download Mice: mice-4.2.tar.gz (92k)

Psion 3C, 3A and Siena

Alarm Enhancer

Snooze alarms and keep on working. Includes Alarm Killer and Silent Alarm Beeper.

You're working on, for example, a spreadsheet and an alarm goes off. Normally, if you snooze the alarm, you cannot continue working. With Alarm Enhancer, you press Esc to cancel the alarm and you are presented with the Enhancer dialog screen. Here, with just one extra key press, you can reschedule an alarm for 5 minutes time (configurable), or reschedule for other durations or for a specific time and date. You are then back in your application and can continue working.

Psion alarms repeat for a considerable length of time if left unattended. Enhancer's Alarm Killer can be configured to switch off the alarm sounds at a specified interval after an alarm has gone off. Alternatively, Enhancer has an option to sound a single beep when a silent alarm goes off.

Alarm Enhancer is now free but a registration code must be entered to unlock all the features:

Name: Free Registration

Code: 1635399286

Alarm Enhancer, Version 6.39, for the Psion 3C, 3A and Siena. enhan639.zip (30k)

ACsort

Utility to sort Psion 3a Data files.
- Sort on primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary fields.
- Sort on words within fields.
- Limit length of sort string.
- Case sensitive, insensitive or "Folded" (ignore case and accents) options.
- Empty/non-empty field sort option.
- "Empty fields at end" option.
- Sort ascending or descending.
- Supersort option.
- Saves sets of sort parameters.
Version 16 for the Psion 3A. Freeware. acsort16.zip (13k)

Viper!!!

A snake game for the Psion 3A. Version 1. Freeware. viper01.zip (6k)