sweetcode

At first glance, it looks laid out in a similar way to memepool, with links to the featured software projects. They don't actually host any of the projects, or offer CVS or discussion boards or anything like that. They have an RSS feed and a listserv for updates, of course. Seems like pretty standard fare.

But, there's already Freshmeat and SourceForge for stuff like this!

Ah, but this site is more about quality, rather than quantity. Daniel Egnor, the maintainer of the site, acknowledges that there are other sites with more thorough coverage of the free software scene. Sometimes, updates don't come for weeks at a time. Sweetcode's focus is on clever, interesting software. In his own words, "Innovative" means that the software reported here isn't just a clone of something else or a minor add-on to something else or a port of something else or yet another implementation of a widely recognized concept.

The first project that caught my eye was PEEP (The Network Auralizer). PEEP uses sound to represent the vast amount of available information about network status. For instance, there could be a baseline waveform for standard network activity, and other noises would be layered atop the sample as different events occured on the monitored network segment.

More recently, there was scapy and DIBS. Scapy being a python based packet manipulator, which, according to the authors, can for the moment replace hping, 85% of nmap, arpspoof, arp-sk, arping, tcpdump, etc. DIBS is a crypto enabled distributed backup system that works over TCP/IP and even e-mail.

This site occasionally takes me back to the time when I first discovered that computers could be fun without playing star control 2 on them.

Sweetcode can be found used to reside at http://www.sweetcode.org/.