Assorted programs written by Kate Rhodes. Unless noted otherwise all software mentioned here requires Java 1.4.x. If you have Java installed simply double clicking on the .jar file should be all that's required to run the app. Links to other apps I've written that have their own sites can be found at the botom of this page. Please note, the apps here are all quick hacks. For an example of code I'm proud of please check out the About-Time codebase.

All software is copyright 2003 Katherine Rhodes and distributed under the MIT License unless specified otherwise.

ServerWatcher download me (source included)
A graphical server monitoring tool. You can enter the url of a web page and a character string you want it to look for and ServerWatcher will check the page at regular intervals. When something is wrong ServerWatcher will give you a red light, make a "ding" sound, and log all failed attempts. Windows users can send an ICMP ping to a server too. Useful for keeping an eye on a box that doesn't have a web server running. The "AutoTest in 21" in the screenshot is a countdown in seconds to the next test. You can always rest right now by clicking the button and it's multi-Threaded, of course, so you don't have to wait for one dead server to time out before it queries the next one.

Utilizes the Thinlet XML GUI toolkit.

THIS VERSION IS FOR ARCHIVAL PURPOSES ONLY. PLEASE USE Caterpillar 2.0. IT IS FAR FAR BETTER

Caterpillar 1.0 download me (source included)

Caterpillar is a simple textual RSS feed aggregator. It's goal in life is to be small, quick, simple, and allow for the easy addition of other XML feeds, like OPML, Atom, or anything else. Right now it only has RSS readers.

Caterpillar will strip out all HTML or XML tags from the feed you're reading. This includes image tags and formatting. This is by design. When I read feeds I want the info. If I want details I can usually just click the link to go to the details page. the inteface is stretch so you're not stuck with that teeny window.

Utilizes the Thinlet XML GUI toolkit.

Current limitations: Caterpillar requires valid XML feeds. Sadly, there are a number of bloggers in the world who don't know how to write valid HTML, or use blogging tools that don't. The invalid XML gets inserted in their RSS feed, which caterpillar tries to read, and fails. :( Sad caterpillar. Solution: Use regular expressions to parse their RSS feeds.

Future: when I get time (yeah right) I plan on rewriting Caterpillar to use the SWIXML XML GUI toolkit because it's much more flexible, use regular expressions to parse the RSS feeds, and add a handler for Atom feeds. Also, I want to parse out all the HTML links and change the Links button to a pulldown menu of all the links in the article.

EpochTime download me (source included)

An epoch date to human readable converter. Also allows you to generate an epoch date for a given calendar date and lets you convert a number of seconds or milliseconds into HH:MM:SS:mm time. All calculations support milliseconds or seconds.

To do: Right now epoch dates are converted to GMT (Grenwitch Mean Time). I need to modify this to use whatever time zone the users computer is set to.

OMT download me
The OMT package includes the OMT Templator templateing engine (docs coming soon) and the OMT Logging engine. Think Log4J only simple to use and configure and with better results.(Docs coming soon on this one too). Additionally OMT includes the XMLPreferences class which provides an enhanced alternative to Java's Preferences class.

Other Apps:

MooMarks: skinnable, multi-user, web based, bookmark system with XML storage.