Sam Smith

For money, I work on interfaces to data. For fun, my interests, in no particular order, include theatre, OpenBSD, UKUUG/UNIX and slacking; some more than others. They come together more often than you might imagine.

I have an LiveJournal account where I occasionally post theatre and junk, but have lots of RSS feeds incoming. Much of my "e-democracy" stuff gets posted to DisruptiveProactivity.com. I also have an author's page on the O'Reilly Network and an Amazon.co.uk wishlist.

Code

I do various things, most of which don't live here. Things that are here (probably temporarily) include demo code for graphing PublicWhip and TheyWorkForYou data (experimental); the start of RSS of FCO Travel advice; and various ports for OpenBSD (uncommitted). I'm also fiddling with the backstage.bbc.co.uk services, here's some stuff based on that.

Stuff that lives elsewhere: Comparative searching of Direct.gov.uk and Google (I was bored); TheGovernmentSays.com which is about to launch (TGS is a relatively generic RSS aggregator - code will be downloadable at some point). I'm Webminion for MUGSS and had something to do with pretty much all of the site. I'm one of the main cat headers for the Manchester BSD User Group and and am website guy for, and on the Council of, the UK Unix User Group I also get credited on WriteToThem.com for doing not very much. I also do random stuff for my day job.

Secret Software

Following Danny O'Brien's Idea and Simon Cozen's lead here's the stuff in ~/bin/ which people might want to reuse.

• wl2rss Take an Amazon wishlist URL and create an RSS feed of it.
• lc rename files to lower case.
• mstat show recent incoming mail - wrapper around mailstat (procmail).
• pp postprocess a mbox file through procmail.
• writedatacd Write a data CD of the contents of a directory.
• writeaudiocd Write a audio CD of a selection of WAVs.