Andrew Burt <aburt@du.edu> contributed menushell for Volume 38, Issues 66-68. menushell is a UNIX menuing shell that provides an easy-to-use interface for users. Administrators will find it easy to write menus for menushell as well. You can write menus in any format; and menushell can execute any code your shell can. menushell supports argument prompting, context sensitive help, and text-based menu generation.

Ted Wisniewski <ted@oz.plymouth.edu> submitted a different, and simpler, menu shell, PSCMenu, for Volume 39, Issues 60-61. PSCMenu is a menu system capable of executing any UNIX command from the "menu." PSCMenu reads individual menus from menu files located in a "menu" directory. You can edit the menu files with any editor, since they are simple text files. Through the "menu" is flexible, the only command line argument PSCMenu accepts is the name of a directory containing the menu files. You specify a default directory in the menu header file.

Jeff Kingston <jeff@joyce.cs.su.oz.au> made one of the larger contributions this time, with lout in Volume 38, Issues 69-103. Quoting the author: "lout is a document formatting system. It reads a high_level description of a document similar in style to LaTeX and produces a PostScript file which can be printed on many laser printers and graphic display devices. lout offers an unprecedented range of advanced features, including optimal paragraph breaking, automatic hyphenation, PostScript EPS file inclusion, equation formatting, tables, diagrams, rotation and scaling, sorted indexes, bibliographic databases, running headers and odd-even pages, automatic cross referencing, and much more, all ready to go. Furthermore, lout is easily extended with definitions which are very much easier to write than troff or TeX macros because lout is a high-level language, the outcome of an eight-year reasearch project that went back to the beginning."

Hadmut Danisch <danish@ira.uka.de> had updated his hpcdtoppm, PhotoCD-Decoder that produces output in portable pixmap format (ppm) and PostScript (from Photo-CD's) for Volume 39, Issues 2-4. v0.5p11 contains the following updates: bug fixes, support for gsave/grestore in the PostScript stream, Floyd-Steinberg dithering on the PostScript output, and ANSIfication of the procedure headers.

Chip Rosenthal <chip@chinacat.unicom.com> contributed enh-du2, a highly_portable, high-performance, POSIX-conformant reimplementation of the du command, for Volume 39, Issues 35-36 with a patch in Volume 39, Issue 72. Enh-du also adds some helpful features your system du lacks. Enh-du includes, in addition to the enhanced du command, dusort a filter that formats the output of du, and ngsizes, a script that produces a summary of disk space used by the Usenet news system. This last feature alone puts enh-du2 to good use.

Adam Costello <amc@wuecl.wustl.edu> contributed par, a paragraph reformatter, in the spirit of the BSD command fmt for Volume 39, Issues 83-85. par copies its input to its output, reformatting paragraphs as it goes. par does text fill, prefix and suffix stripping/replacement, hanging idents, optional justification, and many other advanced operations.

Mike Gleason <mgleason@cse.unl.edu> has issued version 1.5.0 of his ncftp package, posted as Volume 39, Issues 53-57. ncftp is an alternative user interface to ftp. Gleason has updated the previously posted version, v1.0.2, with the following new features: support for input command line editing (gnu-readline package), support for several firewall libraries and their implementation, a recent sites file, better on-line help, faster ASCII transfers, and of course bug fixes. Patch 1 appeared in Volume 39, Issue 65 and fixed some bugs in the termcap code and history file. Patch 2 in Issue 68 fixed another termcap problem. Patch 3 in Issue 77 fixed some portability problems. Patch 4 appeared in Issue 90 and fixed many problems and added SVR4 support.

On the patch front, contributors posted several patches to remind version 3.0. Patch 7, Volume 38, Issues 62-65, adds system variables to allow more user control over remind operations and to allow for queries about the command line options from within a reminder script. Patch 7 also adds sunrise and sunset computations as well as daylight savings time and time zone computations. Patch 8, Volume 39, Issues 79-81 adds foreign language support including French and Norwegian language catalogs. Of course, both patches include bug fixes and various minor enhancements. David F. Skoll <dfs@doe.carleton. ca> contributed remind.

Qiegang Long <qlong@giane.cs.umass.edu> fixed several bugs for his deaf package in Volume 38, Issue 65. deaf is an integrated environment that manipulates files and directories, queries Archie servers, and transfers files. Because of its embedded ftp utility, deaf not only supports file/directory operations on a local system in a full-screen fashion, it also allows most of those operations (like view, edit, delete, rename, etc.) to apply to files/directories located at remote machines.

Brad Appleton <brad@hcx1.ssd.csd.harris.com> introduced patch 2 to CmdLine in Volume 39, Issue 44. CmdLine is a C++ command line argument parser that understands both the short (minus letter) and long form (+keyword) argument formats. Patch 2 fixes a problem with certain compilers in which the constructor would ignore the first argument.

William LeFebvre <phil@eecs.nwu.edu> updated the famous top program to top 3.2 for Volume 27, Issues 1-12. top produces a real-time continuously updated display of the "top n processes" using the most system resources. top runs on most SVR4 and BSD style UNIX systems.

UNIX includes several incompatible talk programs that allow two users to communicate in real time, via a split screen character-at-a-time display. ytalk from Britt Yenne <yenne@austin.eds.com> provides a multi-user talk program that understands the existing incompatible talk protocols, and even understands incorrectly compiled talk daemons. (Multi-user talks allows any number of users to connect and hold a conversation.) Version 3.0 of ytalk was posted in Volume 27, Issue 24 with patch 1 in Issue 25 to fix some problems.

Bruce Perens <bruce@pixar.com> contributed a new multi-system compatible version of an old SunOS standby, efence, for Volume 27, Issue 26. Electric Fence is a unique kind of malloc debugger. Electric Fence uses the virtual memory hardware of your system to detect when software overruns the boundaries of a malloc buffer. Electric Fence will also detect any accesses to memory previously released by free. Because it uses the VM hardware for detection, Electric Fence stops your program on the first instruction that causes a bounds violation. It's then trivial to to display the offending statement with a debugger. This version supports SysV/386 including SVR4, Solaris 2.x, SGI IRIX 5.0, IBM AIX, SunOS 4.x and HP/UX 9.01. A very short patch for a HP/UX kernel bug was posted in Volume 27, Issue 30.

conv123 is an interesting set of utilities posted in Volume 27, Issues 31-32. Contributed by Gregory Santos <greg@brooktree.com>, conv123 provides two utilities, conv123 converts an ASCII file into a 123format binary spreadsheet file, grph123 converts an ASCII file into a 123-named graph file. You can use both utilities to import arbitrary data into programs capable of reading 123-format files.

The moderator contributed one himself, a new issue of avlsubs. Submitted by Paul Vixie <paul@vix.com> for Volume 27, Issue 34, this new release adds ANSI and POSIX support. Quoting the author: "These functions create and manipulate a balanced binary (AVL) tree. Each node of the tree contains the expected left & right subtree pointers, a short-int balance indicator, and a pointer to the user data. On a 32-bit system, this means an overhead of 4+4+2+4 bytes per node (or, on a RISC or otherwise alignment-constrained system with implied padding, 4+4+4+4 bytes per node). There is no key data type enforced by this package; a caller-supplied compare routine is used to compare user-data blocks. Balanced binary trees are very fast on searches and replacements, but have a moderately high cost for additions and deletions. If your application does a lot more searches and replacements than it does additions and deletions, the balanced (AVL) binary tree is a good choice for a data structure."

On the patch front, xinetd-2.1.1 from Panos Tsirigotis <panos@cs.colorado.edu> received patch 1 in Volume 26, Issue 299. The patches resolve a problem with unlisted RPC services and fix some initialization problems, especially with syslog.

George Ferguson <ferguson@cs.rochester.edu> contributed a patch to the latest version of xarchie. xarchie is the Internet tool to search the FTP servers for a file or set of files. Patch 1 in Volume 20, Issue 107 fixes some minor bugs and adds some new weight and server information.

Justin Kibell <jck@kimba.catt.citri.edu.au> turned his learning exercise with the XPM library into xboing, a simple blockout type game where you bounce a ball around the game area with a paddle, blowing up blocks with the ball. You win by obtaining points for each block destroyed and each level completed. The person with the highest score wins. Posted in Volume 20, Issues 108-133, xboing makes use of the XPM library (also publically available) at version 3.2 or better.

Andrew C. Plotkin <ap1i+@andrew.cmu.edu> submitted patch 1 to his spellcast for Volume 18, Issue 52. Again, this patch fixes bugs, and includes a workaround for the SunOS realloc problem.

Generic Tetris, gtetris4, got a fresh coat of paint and a repost in Volume 18, Issues 53-55. Contributed by Q. Alex Zhao <azhao@cc.gatech.edu>, this version uses only Xlib and supports almost all UNIX X11 systems. New in this version is enhanced portability to more platforms.

Taking tetris to the next plane, literally, is Andrew C. Plotkin <ap1i@andrew.cmu.edu>, who contributed threedee for Volume 18, Issues 56-59. threedee is two games; tetris on a sane, cubical 3-d lattice, and tetris on a close-packed 3-d lattice of spheres. Time to squint a bit more at your display?

Jeff Epler <jepler@nyx.cs.du.edu> posted aat, Another Animation Tool, on July 21, 1993 in 1 part. aat allows you to use a simple script language to mostly automate the process of animation with your favorite raytracer/renderer.

To handle the different sound formats used by each computer and workstation, Lance Norskog <thinman@netcom.com> posted st on July 26, 1993 in 9 parts. st translates sound samples between different file formats, and performs various sound effects. This new release understands raw files in various binary formats, raw textual data, Sound Blaster .VOC files, IRCAM SoundFile files, SUN Sparcstation CD-R (music CD format, Macintosh HCOM files, Sounder files, NeXT .snd files, SUN ADPCM (compressed) .au files, and Soundtool (DOS) files. st sound effects enable changing the sample rate, adding echo delay lines, low-, high-, and bandpass filtering, and the Fender Vibro effect.

A1 Davis <rbc!al> posted version 0.11 of "A Circuit Simulator," acs-0.11 on July 28, 1993 in 20 parts. acs is a general purpose mixed analog and digital circuit simulator. acs performs nonlinear dc and transient analyses, fourier analysis, and ac analysis linearized at an operating point. acs is fully interactive and command driven. You can also run acs in batch mode or as a server. acs produces output as it simulates. This release provides Spice-compatible models for the MOSFET (level 1 and 2) and diode. Other models, including BJT, are (still waiting) in the testing phase. This version, while still officially in beta test, should be stable enough for basic undergraduate teaching and courses in MOS design, but not for bipolar design. In batch mode it is mostly Spice compatible, so you can often use the same file for both acs and Spice.