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I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy. -- W.C. Fields


Changelog

[2004-02-27] Finally, distutils! Updated Cards.py, NLQ, and ini.py.
[2004-02-17] A flurry of patches and improvements later, EZGallery is at 0.5.

File Shredder - Drag, drop, gone forever.

About

File Shredder is a ROX wrapper for GNU shred, a file utility that will completely destroy the contents of a file. Even major governments will have a difficult time recovering information after it has been through shred.

FS provides a front end that can handle both files and entire directories. Just drag a file onto FS and kiss it goodbye.

WARNING: FS is permanent and unrecoverable. There is no 'undelete' when using FS. Try not to accidentally drop things on it, ok?

File Shredder is released under the GNU GPL.

Screenshots

Downloading

file_shredder-0.1.tar.gz [HTTP - gurno.com] (16k)

Links


Chood - From CD to OGG, directly.

About

Chood (the 'o' is for OGG) is a fork/derivative/whatever of Choad which is a very nice Perl program that creates MP3s. I modified it to create OGGs rather than MP3s. It's quite nice, give it a try...

Chood pipes the rip directly into the encoder, which means that you don't get 650 megs of WAV files sitting on your HD, either permanently or even in passing.

I tried to contact the author to see if he would accept an MP3/OGG unification patch, but I can't seem to contact him, so here you go. When he responds, I'm sure that Chood will go away.

Chood is released under the Perl license.

Screenshots

  • Screenshot 1 - Showing the CDDB and track information.
  • Screenshot 2 - In the process of ripping a CD. (It's really just the cdparanoia output you see here...)

Downloading

Chood-0.822-1.tar.gz [HTTP - gurno.com] (8.5k)

Choad-0.822 patch [HTTP - gurno.com] (1.5k) This will patch your copy of choad into chood.

Links

  • The (Official) Choad Homepage. For more and detailed information about the workings of chood/choad, go here.
  • Chood/Choad requires CDDB.pm.
  • Another command line ripper that supports both OGG and MP3, including many others is ABCDE. ABCDE actually has a wealth of nifty options, but I just don't care for the interface...

EZGallery - Photo galleries made easy

About

There are literally dozens of digital photo gallery things out there. Most of them are very good. However, I have this terrible affliction, you see: I'm lazy. Rather than set something up and maintain it and monitor lists for exploits, or sign up for something and spend all my time uploading and whatnot, I co-wrote a python program that will do all the conversion, HTML and twiddly bits for me, asking only that I provide an interactive description of the file. Then I take the result and cram it into my website.

Done. Now you can work on something more interesting...

EZGallery is released under the GNU GPL.

Screenshots

Remember: this is a python command line program - what you'll see is just a shot of it in action - the program doesn't really look like anything.

Demo

I've posted the HTML created in the above screenshots to a demo directory for you to look at. If you want, you can just look at the directory contents to see just what is created by ezg. (Answer: thumbs and an output file. That's it.)

Downloading

Links

  • Andrew Kuchling's gallery.py, which was sort of the inspiration for this.
  • Gallery - the big one. This is the one most in use. PHP. Pretty.

Jum - A Jumble(TM) solver

About

My local paper runs these things called 'Jumble's. For the most part, they are simple little anagrams to solve which lead to a larger anagram solution, which is usually some lame joke. After getting stuck and frustrated one too many times, I created this tiny script which will solve a jumble in under one-tenth of a second, which is pretty humbling.

You run it with jum anagram_here. It will spit out the correct word about 99%, depending upon the strength of the built in dictionary of your system.

Troubleshooting:

  • Make sure the dict location in the file is correct.
  • Check the python script invocation line (sh-bang) at the top.
  • Requires egrep. You most likely have this. Can be changed to grep with a few changes if you so desire.

Jum is released under the GNU GPL.

Downloading

1.0 [HTTP - gurno.com] (8k)

Links


Scrim - A Word Scrimmage(TM) solver

About

Not only does my local paper run 'Jumble's (see above), it also runs this thing called "Word Scrimmage". WS is a poor imitation of the 'Scrabble(TM)' brand of puzzles, with non-sensical scoring and impossible to beat words. However, I could see how the jum script could be easily modified to solve Scrimmages too, so I did it.

The puzzles still suck, though.

Scrim is released under the GNU GPL

Download

scrim-0.1.tar.gz [HTTP - gurno.com] (8k)

Links


Post2advo and Onlybody

About

These are two scripts that I use to post to advogato.org from the commandline - pretty much whenever I think of it and for whatever reason. It launches a vi session, converts the text to html, strips out the unneccessary gunk, adds a tag and tosses it on Advogato.

If you understand what that means, you might be interested in it. If not, keep looking.

These files are in the public domain.

Download

  • post2advo - a ksh shell script.
  • onlybody - a python script - returns only the HTML within the body tags.

Links


Vigen.py - A Vigenere Cipher

Coming soon from its other page.


NLQ - Natural Language Query

About

NLQ is a parser library for "Natural Language Queries" (NLQs). NLQs are simple questions like "Why is the sky blue?" or "How many feet in a mile?". NLQ doesn't answer the questions for you, rather it breaks them down, classifies them and tells what the imporant words are in that question. It's up to you to act on that information however you wish.

NLQ doesn't use sophisticated AI to determine this - it simply matches up the question with a predetermined list of possible question formats and throws away things it doesn't judge to be important. It's quick and it's dirty. But it works, and works surprisingly well.

If you run into a word that NLQ should be ignoring, but isn't, drop me a line with NEW IGNORE WORDS somewhere in the subject or body and I'll add them ASAP.

NLQ.py separates questions into one of seven "question types": UNKNOWN, KNOWLEDGE, COMPREHENSION, APPLICATION, ANALYSIS, SYNTHESIS, and EVALUATION. Please take a gander at the above link for a better explanation of these than I can give.

Examples

abg@stegosaurus ~/src/nlq $ ./nlq.py "Who is the greatest baseball player?"
type: 1
keywords: ['greatest', 'baseball', 'player']
abg@stegosaurus ~/src/nlq $ ./nlq.py "Why should I file my taxes?"
type: 3
keywords: ['should', 'file', 'taxes']
abg@stegosaurus ~/src/nlq $ ./nlq.py "Should I dye my hair pink?"
type: 0
keywords: ['dye', 'hair', 'pink']
  

Download

Links

Coming soon...


Mathfun

Coming soon from its other page.


Cards.py - A playing card class

About

Once upon a time, I thought that having a generic playing card class would help me write some personal projects. It might have, if I had ever gotten around to writing them.

This module implements two different classes, a playing cards class and a card deck class. The playing cards can be printed, compared against each other and more! It's really quite slick.

Version 1.1 finally moves to use the Python distutils and includes a whole slew of user patches.

Download


RotNN.py - Rot13 and more

Coming soon from its other page.


INI.py

About

Ini.py is a python library that parses windows INI files. Python already has one, of course, called ConfigFileParser (or something like that), but I found it not that user friendly and difficult to use.

So I wrote my own. It's pretty easy to use, but I've quit improving it, so it's not going to get any better. Chances are you'll be happier using the ConfigFile from your Python dist. This is here just for those too obstinate to follow my advice.

Download

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