Live demos of some simple web tools I developed

As an IT guy, I look to using computers to solve some of my day to day problems. I say computers in plural because I readily use two at home and one at work, and I could also be in the internet cafe near my work. For instance, I store my personal passwords and other sensitive information in Crypt File Manager. It stays secure by encryption in such a way that not even my web host provider can access the data and the password is not stored anywhere on the web server or browser. This solution works great because I can access it wherever I want with only a web browser.

If you're interested in any of the apps, drop me a line on the Contact page.

• Symmetric Crypt Tool: As an experiment with symmetric encryption, I put together a simple example to show how it works. You can choose from DES or Blowfish ciphers and encrypted output can be binary, hex string, or base64 encoded.
  Written in Perl/CGI.
• Crypt File Manager: I found myself always in need of some personal information that I stored on my home PC, but while I was not at home; things like: banking information, PINs, web site passwords, etc. Being security-minded, I knew I did not want to print out this information and risk somehow losing it. I could copy it up to my Yahoo! Notepad account or under a password protected directory of my web site but that's grossly insecure.
  The solution? I developed a simple web-based file management tool to encrypt the contents on the back-end file system using a password provided at login. The password is not stored as clear text on the server side, so it cannot be obtained by a rogue sysadmin. The ideal implementation is to utilize only the HTTPS protocol to access this application, but for demonstration purposes, only HTTP is available. In the demo you can browse both non-encrypted and encrypted directories where you can view, edit, upload, and download files. When prompted for a password, enter 'password'.
  Written in Perl/CGI.
• Image Viewer/Resizer: There have been times I wanted to post a link to an image on a web page, forum, or elsewhere on the web but I didn't want to manually resize a large image everytime and store duplicates. Instead, I coded this simple tool to take a single image and resize it on the fly.
  It starts with a thumbnail preview of all images and subdirectories. Clicking an image will display at full size. You can add querystring parameters to resize. Provide "w=400" to set the width to 400 pixels and keep aspect. Provide "h=350" to set the height and keep aspect. Provide both to override aspect, or also provide "resize=limit" to keep aspect and constrain image to fit the width and height.
  e.g. ...viewer.cgi/River.jpg?w=400&h=350&resize=limit
  Written in Perl/CGI and uses ImageMagick for image manipulation.
  Why Perl/CGI? Why not PHP, ASP.NET, etc.? My web hosting account is based on Linux and provides Perl, which I personally feel is a better platform for application development than PHP and still receives a broad spectrum of support both in publication and on the web. My provider uses the FastCGI Apache module to make CGI applications as fast as possible by keeping the program loaded into memory for repeated accesses, much like other well known web platforms.