William's Projects
Not shown here are William's major, proprietary projects and those developed for previous employers. After all, we wouldn't want to violate any copyright laws, nondisclosure contracts, or opportunities to monetize particularly novel solutions!
Free Open Source Software
The following are William's contributions to other Free Open Source Software (FOSS) projects or his own original offerings.
- Dynamic Package Builder
- William has been building RPMs since 2001. Like most other packagers before him, William started writing SPEC files by hand as monolithic entities, managing version and release numbers by hand, and running the build commands with a small set of shell scripts and aliases. As he took on more and more packaging projects however, William noticed repeating content and usage patterns. He adapted his scripts several times, ultimately extending how RPM specification files are written and consumed by package building workflows.
- YAML for Puppet RSpec Testing
- William has been an avid Puppet module author since before modules "were a thing". One of the tools which responsible Puppet developers use most in common -- next to the Puppet DSL itself -- is RSpec for unit testing. However, the RSpec syntax just isn't intuitive and RSpec code is labored by the unyielding need to write every test in Ruby language. This causes no end of frustration for RSpec test writing, especially for newcomers. William's rspec-puppet-yaml offering removes the language barrier for anyone who can more easily learn the more human-friendly syntax of YAML. In the process, William extended RSpec's capabilities to enable automatic variant testing. This is the ability for test authors to write very little instruction to re-run a particular test with small or large variations in inputs and environment.
- htmlMasterPages
- Driving this very web-site, htmlMasterPages is William's take on a concept introduced to him while working with Microsoft ASP.Net; that of "master pages". In applying this concept to Apache web server and improving upon it, William's version is an even simpler, yet highly intelligent Reverse-SSI system wherein entire, complete HTML documents (even those generated dynamically by PHP or with internal PHP snippets) are merged, providing consistent page layouts, styling, and other treatments (like nested Master Pages) for every page in a web-site. This solution is superior to existing SSI solutions and even enables web page authors to use it without writing a single line of code, using archaic forward SSI include statements, or writing disjointed, code-laden page fragments with "insert-content-fragment-here" echo statements that are simply not intuitive for today's web authors. Instead, to use your Master Page templates with William's htmlMasterPages solution in place, you need only add some specially-identified HTML elements to any regular HTML document! Every file you create, from the Master Page to the content page, is a whole HTMl document without any code in it, whatsoever (though, if you choose, you may deploy any amount of PHP code you need if you wish to use dynamic content but you still won't be required to meddle with disjointed HTML document fragments). No other PHP-based solution offers this level of simplicity and integration for non-programmer web page authors! Visit the dedicated project web-site for more information.
- popAuth3
- popAuth3 is an "MTA Hardening Agent" (a program that runs in the background on mail servers, watching for and responding to specific malicious activity) that happens to also provide "POP before SMTP" service. This project is a derivative of popauther -- a much simpler POP before SMTP utility that was adapted by William R. Thomas of a concept by John Levine -- and an extension of your MTA for a stronger anti-UCE stance. popAuth3 is a complete rewrite of Harlann Stenn's adaptation of William R. Thomas' popauther source and it does MUCH more than just POP before SMTP relay authentication. Read more at the project's own web-site.