As a break from working on Panstora I wrote a silly app in a web framework I found. It’s called Bash on Balls, and the application I wrote is called Brass Balls. It’s a stupid web app that lets you mess with the computer that’s running it. Effectively, you make GET requests against it, and it runs arbitrary shell commands. It does all kinds of neat stuff.

It’ll alias vim to emacs, try to fill up your hard drive, and even attempt to “upgrade” your operating system to Oracle Linux if that can be said to be an upgrade.

Unfortunately, Bash on Balls seems to be abandoned. Worse, it’s completely undocumented. I found how to accept GET requests by reading through the source to figure out what happened after netcat (yeah, netcat) received the bytes.

I might try to write something more involved in the future using Bash on Balls, if only as an exercise in silly things to do in shell. I kind of sense a zsh-based web framework to go along with the web server that’s already been written. Of course, there’s the minor issue of missing things in the language like “data types” and “reasonable syntax,” as if that’s stopped people before.