Archive for the 'tool' Category

Stuff to install on a new Windows PC

Published on September 17, 2008 in tool and windows. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

That is, the stuff I install on a new Windows PC. Since I need this list several times a year, why not make a blog post of it. As you will see,I have a more than average interest in video (conversion) and sysadmin (SSH/FTP). The links typically go straight to the download page.

Audio/video

  • iTunes (+Quicktime): excellent music manager and it rips to MP3 really fast
  • CDBurnerXP: for burning CDs, DVDs, ISO files
  • Irfanview: image viewer, editor and converter – for people who think Photoshop is overkill
  • Picasa: photograph workflow & archive manager (from Google)
  • VLC Player: ultimate video player, very complete set of codecs
  • ffmpeg with a GUI like GVC: video conversion: AVI, MOV, MPG, MP4, …
  • Handbrake: will make a good MPEG4 of any DVD in one go

Internet

  • Skype: for chat, phonecalls and SMSes with people far away
  • Chrome, Firefox or Opera browser – personally I like Firefox less. Opera is solid and fast, Google Chrome is an interesting new kid on the block.
  • FileZilla: FTP client
  • Putty: SSH and telnet terminal
  • EditPlus: customisable editor for text, HTML, CMD … that also works over FTP
  • uTorrent: because sometimes you need to … get stuff, you know

Tools

  • Google Pack: contains Picasa, Skype, Google Toolbar and a whole bunch of other useful programs
  • Adobe PDF reader: for reading PDF documents, and everything is in PDF these days
  • 7-Zip: compression/expansion of ZIP, RAR and 7z archives
  • CutePDF with GhostScript: printing to a PDF file (also allows converting a PostScript PS/EPS file to PDF)
  • UnixUtils: I’m a sucker for GAWK and WGET
  • Nokia PCSuite: for synchro with my Nokia N91 (yes, it’s still my phone!)
  • XAMPP: for developing with Apache/PERL/PHP/MySQL on Windows

Lightbox for photo feeds

Published on June 3, 2008 in tool. 2 Comments Tags: , .

Because I needed it and I couldn’t find it: a tool to embed a Lightbox-based photo album viewer that uses an RSS photo feed as its input. It uses SimplePie RSS library, the Lytebox Javascript photo viewer, and RSS ‘photocast’ feeds from e.g. Flickr, Picasaweb and Smugmug.
It can be found here: tools.forret.com/lightbox/
Lightbox tool for RSS photo feeds
Continue reading ‘Lightbox for photo feeds’

id3.exe – ideal tool for tagging and renaming MP3 files

Published on August 29, 2007 in audio-video, music and tool. 4 Comments

I want to mention a little tool that helped me out twice in the last week, and that I find very little info about online. It’s a Windows command-line MP3 file tagger and renamer called id3.exe. Since I forgot where I downloaded it from and Google doesn’t give me a clue either: here’s where you can download id3.exe.

ID3.exe can do several things, of which I will just cite the things I actually used:

  • it can obviously set ID3 tags in MP3 files (that is, ID3v1 and v2). The first time it adds ID3v2 tags which are stored in the beginning of the file (necessary when you need the info right when you start reading the file, like with streaming), the whole file has to be rewritten, but subsequent modifications are really fast.
    id3.exe -1 -2 -g [genre] -c "[Copyright notice]" -l "[Album name]" "%OUTPUT%"
  • set the ID3 tags of one file to those of another. I needed this when I transcoded MP3 files to a lower bitrate with LAME. LAME does not copy the existing ID3 tags to the new file. So I used ID3.exe to just copy those from the source file.
    id3.exe -D %INPUT% -1 -2 "%OUTPUT%"
  • Rename the file according to the MP3 tags. I had a big collection of MP3 files called “01 Track01″ without any MP3 tags. I first set the ID3 tags based upon the folder structure (the folder name was the Album name), and then renamed them to “[Artist name] – [Album name] - [Track N°].mp3″.
    id3.exe -2 -f "%%a - %%l - %%t.rbs" "%OUTPUT%"
  • Id3 can also deduct album names, artist, song titles and track number from the complete filename + path.

Continue reading ‘id3.exe – ideal tool for tagging and renaming MP3 files’

MRTG data in XML format

Published on January 16, 2007 in tool. 4 Comments

Get ready for a lot of acronyms in this post: “How to create a good XML-based API for MRTG sensor data”.

MRTG

MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is a tool to monitor the traffic load on network-links. It is widely used around the world to generate web pages containing images that provide a live visual representation of this traffic. MRTG is mainly a Swiss open-source product written by Tobias Oetiker from ETH Zurich with some help from others.

When used in its basic form (without RRDTOOL), it generates output like the following:
Flickr: #photos per hour

MRTG “API”

While MRTG was developed with network devices (routers) in mind, it can be used to show the trend of any numeric value over time. For that, it has a very simple input API: it expects 4 lines of text:

Line 1: current state of the first variable, normally 'incoming bytes count'
Line 2: current state of the second variable, normally 'outgoing bytes count'
Line 3: string (in any human readable format), telling the uptime of the target.
Line 4: string, telling the name of the target. (*)
So there’s maximum 2 variables, which should be the same order of magnitude (or the automatic scaling of the Y-axis will make the smaller one undistinguisable of 0). The uptime and name show up in the “at which time ‘rou-rz-gw.ethz.ch’ had been up for 160 days, 8:02:55.” in the header of the HTML page.

MRTG in XML

In this world of REST, XMLRPC and SOAP interfaces, this seems so limited. Let’s try to make an XML format that allows the following:

  • it should minimally contain the four data lines cited above
  • it should be possible to add any parameter that influences the MRTG result (HTML and/or image) so that the XML as such is enough to define the whole MRTG configuration

This could be a minimal implementation: Continue reading ‘MRTG data in XML format’