Fun and useful software by
C. Scott Ananian

This page hosts those of my projects which other people actually use. The other bits are on my Projects page.

Software packages:

• 2013-present
  Since 2013 I have been employed by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that supports Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. The primary software I support is MediaWiki which runs Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites. All software I've written while employed by Wikimedia is open source; highlights are on my Wikipedia user page.
• 2007-2013
  I was employed by the One Laptop per Child project during 2007–2009 and again from 2011–2013 (as Director, New Technologies). All software I wrote during that period is open source, and is available via dev.laptop.org.
• 2019-12-27
  inkscape-stellation, a software package inspired by George Hart, for making polyhedra stellations.
• 2009-02-04
  JDoctest, an implementation of Python's doctests for Java, integrated into javadoc.
• 2008-11-19
  Click-to-translate demo, for future of OLPC i18n talk.
• 2008-12-06
  OLPC activation server. This django web app/database maintained records of every XO-1 manufactured for OLPC, served update and theft-deterrence requests, and communicated with a secure machine to generate and serve cryptographic developer keys and activation leases.
• 2008-12-23
  I wrote the OLPC boot GUI: start up screen and activation lease UI. For size and efficiency, this directly blitted to the linux framebuffer device.
• 2009-01-06
  The OLPC upgrade mechanism was designed with a copy-on-write functionality to allow kids to easily undo the results of their tinkering. (See the original Bitfrost specification for more details.) Early experiments with the vserver copy-on-write functionality failed miserably: the races in the code and filesystem corruption they caused almost scuttled our first release. I wrote C and Python implementations of a lightweight and relatively high performance COW system based on FUSE. The source code is in OLPC's cowfs git repository.
• 2008-10-14
  The OLPCfs filesystem is a fully-persistent continuously-versioned filesystem with POSIX semantics based on content-addressable storage. It was designed to support OLPC's Journal and Collaboration goals. A specification and source code is online.
• 2009-01-08
  Olpcfs2 is a scaled-down versioning filesystem based on RCS and cowfs.
• 2008-12-23
  I implemented OLPC's initramfs, which enforces boot-time security and provides the COW mechanisms used for Bitfrost and upgrades. The infrastructure is based on debian-installer. The rootskel package provides most of the actual implementation, with the exception of the UI code from the act-gui submodule and the cryptographic functionality in the leases submodule.
• 2008-10-16
  The journal2 codebase was a next-generation Journal proposal, described at Journal, reloaded on the OLPC wiki. It merged the notions of tags and directories, to create a tag-based file browser that could also display legacy filesystems (from a USB stick, for example).
• 2008-10-23
  I also contributed to the development of Pippy, the Python learning environment created by Chris Ball. Among other features, I added activity-generation ability to Pippy, which then allowed me to make Pippy self-hosting: you can open the source code to Pippy inside Pippy with the 'view source' key, modify it, and then create a new version of the Pippy activity. (pippy source code.) I also created a library of tutorial examples for Pippy, based on the Commodore 64 manual which taught me how to program all those years ago. During a trip to Peru, I translated the examples into Spanish and used them to teach a crash course on Python at Universidad San Martin de Porres in Lima.
• 2008-12-29
  I implemented the upgrade system for OLPC laptops in the field. It consisted of a simple server based on rsync, file manifest creation and verification tools, an update daemon that lived on the XO, and a control panel plugin for Sugar. The Software update and olpc-update pages on the OLPC wiki describe the user-facing side of these tools.
• 2008-09-23
  While employed at OLPC, I adopted and maintained pilgrim, the OLPC build image tool.
• 2007-06-29
  Bittorrent fork with support for unix special files and owner/group/mode information. This can be used to distribute entire filesystem images over bittorrent. It was created as a research project for the OLPC updater functionality.
• 2007-04-09
  FLEX, a Java compiler infrastructure.
• Alpha, 2007-03-07
  Square Dance Revolution, a voice-controlled game based on calling a square dance.
• 2006-12-05
  I wrote/maintain the Linux GTK UI for Bill Ackermann's Sd square dance choreography program.
• 2006-10-30
  JUtil: a library of parameterized collections for Java.
• 2004-01-24
  JChirp: a light board application for the chirp/cheap hardware.
• 2004-01-24
  SinjDoc: a javadoc clone for JSR-14 Java. Also SinjP, a javap clone.
• 1998-02-18
  PPTP-linux, a PPTP client for Linux.
• 1997-12-16
  Synaptics TouchPad driver for Linux
• 1997-10-21
  IPfwd, an IP protocol redirection tool.

cscottcscott.net