Amelia Zabardast Ziabari
Welcome to my personal web-site; here you will find some of my work and interests, such as experimenting with kernels and boot firmware, embedded systems, systems programming, software optimisation, the Unix environment and tools, retrocomputing, and more. I live in Valencia, Spain.
I also enjoy working with systems now considered legacy or somewhat esoteric, and experimenting with novel ways their ideas can be repurposed to solve difficult contemporary problems. You can see this pattern expressed in many of my projects, but an immediately visible example would be Webbit, the technology powering this entire web-site.
Software
- fwhtool
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2024—present Target and host-independent utility for reprogramming NOR flash memory chips which employ the Intel Firmware Hub/Low Pin Count protocol bus using only low-cost hardware, such as commonly available single-board computers with GPIO connectors, DB-25 parallel connectors, and microcontroller development boards.
- xthttpd
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2023—present eXtended Tiny/Turbo/Throttling HTTP Daemon, a backwards-compatible spiritual successor for Jef Poskanzer's thttpd with greater CGI support, configuration preprocessing with m4, static Deflate compression, forking "multi-server" feature, and more; useful for serving non-trivial web-sites on resource-constrained devices such as an Intel 486 computer or SONY Playstation 2.
- lockalt
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2023 NetBSD kernel module that disables or enables the Alternate Instruction Set feature/vulnerability in VIA C3/Samuel 2 processors.
- scrcnt
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2022 Short for "Script Count," an old utility I wrote to quickly assess a directory tree of files for their programming language content, producing a table of quantities of source files per language.
Single-file Utilities
Self-contained programs put together to solve an immediate issue. These can be fed directly to the system C compiler, e.g. cc -O2 programname.c -o programname on UNIX-like systems.
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C99 utility that can translate raw binary input, both from stdin or a file, into either plain hexadecimal output, or pretty-printed hexadecimal, plus a few extra options. Many features in just 400 lines (including documentation) and no dependencies, as well as support for old and new versions of Windows under unusual compilers.
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C99 utility to custom generate a sequence of interpolated voltage-frequency translation values for the model-specific registers of select Intel processors that can automatically be passed to a corresponding NetBSD sysctl(7) or the phc-intel module on Linux. See the accompanying report to learn how and when to use it.
Other less noteworthy utilities or versions of software from other sites patched for some new capability may be found linked under relevant articles.
Miscellaneous
- Benchmark your browser's layout engine by playing Bad Apple in a HTML table.
- Fast and tiny embeddable HTML IRC client that maintains compatibility with web browsers dating back to 2011.
Discontinued
- Portable Unified XUL Platform (PUXP) — From 2022 to early 2026 I maintained an experimental fork of the Pale Moon web browser's Unified XUL Platform rendering engine with a handful of useful features (NetBSD and Windows XP support, a port to the
clang-clcompiler, memory leak fixes, and layout performance enhancements). For posterity an archive of the sources can be downloaded (last updated 2026.01.13).