automaticable

In the latest Ubuntu newsletter, a new link was posted for the Hardy Heron release countdown script.  The beta version is already available, and we are under a month away from the final release.  Hardy will have the latest Firefox 3 pre-release, as well as major updates to GNOME, the Linux kernel, and much more.  This is another step closer to a general-purpose free operating system that “just works”.  Get excited.

[ Hardy Countdown Timer ]

About a month ago, I received a notice in the mail from my ISP, Insight, with news that they had been bought-out by Comcast.  They promised that there would be no changes in my service and the transition would be seemless.  Everything would work as it had, except they would charge a little bit more.  Great.

They’re in the midst of transferring services to Comcast, set to be complete sometime in April.  Everything was fine on our end until our internet went out a few days ago.  After a few hours of toying with it, I decided it had to be Comcast’s issue.  I tried rebooting the router, renewing the IP, and even connecting my computer directly to the modem– nothing worked.

Finally, I called Comcast and talked to one of their “specialists” from Indiana (better than India, right?).  He dialed into the modem, and was able to get a computer hooked up through the modem, but still not through the router.  We made an appointment to have somebody come out.

Two days later, somebody from Comcast came out and tinkered with things for about an hour.  With all of the toys in his magic bag, he still couldn’t get the router working.  Moreover, we were able to hook up a different router, and that one worked.  We chalked it up as a faulty router, and he was on his way.  But something was still fishy.

We bought the router about 5 months ago, and everything had been working on it perfectly.  I installed the DD-WRT firmwire for even more control.  Everything looked good on it, except we couldn’t get an IP from the modem.  After doing a little research, it seems that Comcast has some trouble with DD-WRT routers.  The solution was to change the router’s MAC address from the default DD-WRT address to something else.  Many users clone their laptop’s MAC, but I used one from an older router.  A quick reboot afterwards, and we’re back up.

It’s hard to say whether it’s an incompatibility issue, or Comcast is actively blocking this alternative firmware.  I’ve generally had bad experiences with Comcast, so I choose to believe the latter.  Anyway, I’m glad we got things worked out, because I wasn’t too excited about going through the warranty process with Linksys either.

We’ve released our second iteration of Wosaic just in time for the Engineering Open House at the University of Illinois. At the Engineering Open House, we created over 120 mosaics for people, and won 3rd place for the non-technical theme.

This new release represents a major rewrite in the code for the GUI and general control flow. While this won’t be immediately apparent at first glance, this means major efficiency gains and better stability. You can now create multiple mosaics in the same session, and even cancel processing mid-generation. Also, the resolution parameters don’t take effect until saving, which means you can save a Mosaic at a variety of different resolutions.

For more details, check out the Release Notes, which also contains links to other useful wiki pages. Or, head straight for the download page to grab a copy of the latest version. Keep reading below for a walk-through to create your first mosaic.

Continue reading “Wosaic 1.0 beta– Faster, Cleaner Mosaics From Your Own Photos”

So I wrote a pretty interesting one-line command for a specific task today. Here it is– can you guess what it does?

awk '1 {system("lwp-request -Sm HEAD " $0)}' \

input.txt | awk '/200 OK/ {print $2}' > output.txt

Yeah, me either if I were just looking at it. But let’s break it apart, piece-by-piece. You’ll notice that’s its essentially two commands, strung together through some piping and redirection (the “\” character is just to break the command up in two lines). It’s broken up like so:

{command1} | {command2} > {file}

This says to execute command1 first. Then pipe it’s output into command2 as input. Finally take the output of command2, and throw it all into a file. So we start with the first command:

awk '1 {system("lwp-request -Sm HEAD " $0)}' input.txt

So what the heck does awk do? Well, it’s basically a utility to read in input text, do some filtering on it, and then execute a specific task (or tasks) based on the results. In this case, it has the form:

awk 'filter {command}' input

Skipping first to input, we see that the text we want to process comes from a simple text file– in this case, input.txt. filter is what decides which lines of the input actually get used. Generally it’s in the form of a regular expression, and the matching lines are processed. In our case, we just use 1, which means everything matches, and we will process all lines. Next to the command:

system("lwp-request -Sm HEAD " $0)

In awk, the system command actually specifies that the parameter command should be executed in a sub-shell. The parameter is a quoted string, and using $0 means that we should use the first token of the matching line each time. So the function we really want to look at is:

lwp-request -Sm HEAD {token}

The lwp-request command, as seen here, is a command-line utility to send HTTP requests to a server, and observe there response. It has one required argument, which is the URL to query. Since we don’t see that explicitly here, that must be coming from the token we parsed from our input. We also specify two other parameters. -S tells the program to “print the response chain,” meaning that it will show any redirection or authorization handled automatically. Also, we use -m HEAD, which specifies that we are interested in the header data from the HTTP response. So far, pretty confusing, right? Well, let’s see what a sample query looks like:

$ lwp-request -Sm HEAD http://google.com
HEAD http://google.com --> 301 Moved Permanently
HEAD http://www.google.com/ --> 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Connection: Close
Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2008 01:27:27 GMT
Server: gws
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Client-Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2008 01:27:36 GMT
Client-Peer: 64.233.167.104:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=4b507d757f70e13b:TM=1203730047: (...)

Interesting, sort of. Anyway, let’s move on. So that little piece of code is getting executed for the first token of every line in our input file. Then, the output is getting “piped” into our next command:

awk '/200 OK/ {print $2}'

We’ve seen awk before! This time, though, we don’t specify an input file, because the input comes directly from the previous command. Our other parameters have changed as well. The filter is no longer 1, but rather /200 OK/. This is a true (albeit simple) regular expression, and matches any line that contains the string “200 OK”. Only lines with this string will be processed. Which brings us to our command, or action: print $2. print means to simply output what follows. In this case, $2, which represents the second parsed token. awk is going to consider everything that is piped in from command1, filter out lines it doesn’t care about, and execute the action on the filtered set. Looking at our sample output above, the only matching line is:

HEAD http://www.google.com/ --> 200 OK

This line will be used in the command, print $2. The command simply prints the second token (separated by a space) on the line, so it outputs:

http://www.google.com/

The final piece of our code redirects command2‘s output into a file, output.txt. And that’s it! So putting the pieces together, let’s look at what is really happening here:

• We read in data from an input file for parsing. We can infer that each line contains a URL, which is needed later
• Each URL is passed to the lwp-request command, which outputs header information from the server
• We filter the response information down to only the bits we care about. In this case, a new URL
• Finally, we output each of these “new” URL’s to an output file.

So, that’s the whole one-liner. A little more compactly, it’s a piece of code that takes a list of input URL’s, and outputs the URL’s that each one redirects to. It’s a pretty specific snippet, and has absolutely no error-checking, so is definitely prone to bugs. But, it worked for me the one time I needed it, and it was enough to show off.

On a side-note, this little piece of code made the difference between hours of mindless data-entry, and automated awesomeness.

My recent changeover to Ubuntu Linux has had me searching for easy replacements for all of my Windows programs. The Linux community has made this a pretty easy task, especially with Ubuntu. Ubuntu provides you with Gimp (Photoshop), Firefox (Internet Explorer), Thunderbird (Outlook Express), and the OpenOffice Suite (Microsoft Office Suite). One thing they do not provide you with, however, is an easy replacement for Adobe Flash. Adobe Flash was one of my commonly used programs on Windows, because I do a lot of intro movies for my youth group. Not having a replacement for it was a major downfall for Linux.

Seeing this problem, for about two weeks I searched around for a good replacement for it. I ran across programs such as Flash-4-Linux and OpenLazlo. I heard good things about both of these programs, but found that the install was a bit difficult for a Linux newbie. Then I ran across a program called Synfig. It looked like it had good documentation, and a pretty easy install. All you had to do to install was open up a terminal and put in:

sudo aptitude install synfigstudio

After installing Synfig and opening it (Applications > Graphics > Synfig Studio), I found that I really liked the interface. The synfig interface is broken up into multiple windows, much like that of GIMP. This makes it very easy for me to customize it to my specific needs and project. I also noticed that it had a very easy tool selection menu. Choosing a brush, color, and all the other properties of the brush is very simple.

One of the main features I found in synfig that I have come to love is the different keyframe setup from Adobe Flash. Instead of having the keyframes, time, motion tweens, and everything else all bunched up onto a single window like Adobe Flash, synfig seperates all of these components. This means that creating keyframes is a much simpler process, and is much easier to get them at the precise moment you want.

The only downfall, however, is that Synfig is not made to do intense visual editing. Synfig only allows you to go about as complex as creating a simple gradient. Anything greater than that, such as opacity, blending, or even just adding text is not implemented. This means that if you want to make a very nice looking flash movie, you’ve got to couple Synfig with GIMP.

I would say that, if you are a fan of Adobe Flash, you should definately give Synfig a try. It is a great alternative for Linux, it’s got plenty of documentation, and the interface is very simple. Check out the website to get started, or use the terminal command above.

Ever wondered what you could do with all the hundreds of digital pictures that you’ve accumulated? Why not make a mosaic?

Wosaic is a software project that I started working on as part of a programming class. My partner and I enjoyed making it so much, that we continued working on it, and today we had our first “public” release. From the project webpage:

Wosaic is an open source project that allows you to recreate an existing image by using many smaller images, as shown above. It was started as a project for CS 242 – Programming Studio at UIUC, and will be continuing on to Engineering Open House in the Spring of 2008.

Wosaic is not the only program of its kind. Several other solutions already exist, however Wosaic aims to be free, easy to use, fast, and accessible. These qualities are yet to be found in any single existing solution. We’re also aiming to make use of interesting sources for images. Currently, we support Flickr, Facebook, and local sources, but we hope to expand this to possibly include images from Picassa, and hopefully other sources as well.

Features

• Easily create a mosaic out of an image on your disk
• Utilizes Flickr, Facebook, and local directories for images
• Supports concurrency to provide fast results
• Shows progress by constructing the mosaic right before your eyes!
• Programmed in Java
• It is FREE and released under the GNU GPL v2.

We’re really excited about the release. It’s a beta version, so it’s not quite as polished as we expect future releases to be. But, give it a try– we’d love to hear your feedback. Binaries for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux can be found on the downloads page, and documentation for installing and using Wosaic is available in the wiki.

I recently discovered via the Ubuntu Geek blog, a simple tool for customizing your GRUB boot menu. If you’re not familiar, the GRUB menu is the screen you see shortly before your Linux OS starts up. In a dual-boot setup, it is particularly important, because this is where you choose which operating system to boot to. Generally the setup is done via editing the file /boot/grub/menu.lst, but using the program makes it much easier. Continue reading “Customize Your Dual-boot: GUI Frontend to GRUB”

I’m sure that you have noticed that now-a-days almost everything can be found in an open-source version. Everything from software for your computer, to textbooks for school can be found free and open source. Now you can even get the awesome perks of open source on your very own iPod!

Rockbox is open source firmware for your iPod, or many other types of mp3 players. This means that everything is free, new, and extremely customizable. Rockbox has everything from awesome themes, to an iPod version of Doom. With Rockbox the limits of your pocket music player are endless!

Installing Rockbox on your mp3 player is fairly simple. You can either go the automated route, or the manual route. Personally, I went the automated route, even though it is not guaranteed safe. In most cases, it is still probably safer than digging around in your iPod’s file system. To get the automated installer go here. Then installing is as simple as running the file, choosing your player, and pressing go!

Upon starting up my iPod (4th Gen Grayscale, and uber old) I found that the Rockbox display was pretty bland. This was a pretty quick fix, though. Simply go to the settings menu and choose one of the many pre-made themes for your player. You can also choose from different sizes and different fonts in your settings menu.

The interface while playing music with Rockbox, although odd when first starting with it, is actually pretty great. It displays all of your track info, including artist name, song name, album name, next song, and other information about your kbps on the current song. By holding down the Menu button it takes you to an easy to use interface for choosing your shuffle, repeat, and other listening settings.

For all of you people that are not just contented by just listening to music wherever you go, Rockbox also comes with tons of games. You can play everything from dice, to chess, to Doom! Simply go to Plugins > Games and choose your favorite game. For most games, your music will continue to play while you play the games.

Open source things, although usually pretty good, are not entirely without flaws. Twice in my three days of using Rockbox, I found that it was saying I had run out of battery. After getting this message I would have to do a manual restart (menu + select for 6 seconds) and it would restart just fine. If you find that you can’t get Rockbox working, it is fairly simple to get back to the original firmware. Turn off your player, and turn it on. As soon as it turns on switch on the hold button and it should restart to the original firmware.

The Breakdown:
Pros:
- Open Source goodness ensures easy customization.
- Themes, fonts, and sounds for every personality out there
- Easy installation, and just as easy uninstallation
- Plenty of documentation on the website, if you get stuck

Cons:
- Having two seperate firmwares will use extra space
- Seems to have bugs telling how much battery is remaining
- Many themes have an odd number-based volume display
- Although it won’t break your warranty, you will not be able to get any support while you are running Rockbox

All in all, Rockbox is definately worthwhile if you want to get away from the crowd, and make your mp3 player very personalized. Easy installation, easy customization, and easy interface makes it a win win win decision. Check out http://www.rockbox.org/ to get started.

(screenshot source)
I’ve always been a little unorganized with my DVDs– some are in their original cases, some live in a case amongst some other software CDs, some are just completely lost. I’ve been meaning to get organized with my DVDs, but I just never got around to it.

Instead, I decided to back them up on my computer. This is convenient because I generally watch them on my computer anyway. Also, I’ll never have to worry about them getting scratched or lost.

Which brings me to dvd::rip, the DVD ripper of choice on Linux. I started using it earlier this week, and am very happy with it. It’s a little rough around the edges, because it’s so feature-rich. The program itself is basically a GUI wrapper for a number of command-line utilities, and each option refers to a command-line flag you can set. As a result, you can very carefully fine-tune the results of your rip– from target size, to resolution, to subtitles.

One of it’s best features, in my opinion, is it’s “Cluster” daemon. Basically, you are able to distribute the job of transcoding the video amongst as many machines as are available. The job is broken up into parts, and many computers can get the job done together much quicker. Furthermore, you can schedule many jobs on the cluster, which will all be pooled together and processed by the cluster. Once again, it’s an advanced setup, but I was able to backup 10 DVDs overnight.

Ok, so I found another interesting little feature in Ubuntu by accident today. I was trying to drag a window across the room, and it would jump sporadically, moving only to the edge of another window. It was really weird, until I realized that my shift-key was stuck down. Apparently, if you hold down shift and drag a window, it’ll only move to the edges of other windows– cool for tiling a lot of programs on your screen.