Guy Rutenberg

It has been three years since I’ve released the original version of cssrtl.py (and two since it’s re-release). The old version did a nice job, but experience gained during that time led me to write from scratch a new version. I’ve detailed more than a month ago, the basic principles and ideas that guided me to design a better tool to help adapting CSS files from left-to-right to right-to-left.

The guidelines weren’t just empty words, they were written while working on the Hebrew adaptation to the Fusion theme and in the same time writing a new proof-of-concept version of cssrtl.py. The original intent was to release a more mature version of that code when it will be completed. However, due to the apparent shortage of time in the present and foreseeable future, I can’t see myself complete the project any time soon. So following the “release early” mantra, I’ve decided to release the code as-is. As I said, the code is in working state, but not polished, so it may be of benefit but may contain bugs. If you find any bugs or have any suggestions, I would be glad to hear.
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Sometime ago I worked with a friend on building an Oware game. I was supposed to build the AI engine, and he was supposed to build the user interface to it. Unfortunately, while AI engine interface I designed and a simple alpha-beta pruning engine was implemented, the project was never completed.

Screenshot of game session

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I’ve ported the Fusion theme by digitalnature to RTL, and adapted it to Hebrew.

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When working on Open Yahtzee 1.10 (or what ever I’ll call the version after 1.9), I’ve written a simple histogram widget to be part of the new statistics dialog. I should emphasize the simple part, this widget was mean to display a simple histogram without requiring any special bloated ploting libraries. It doesn’t support all the fancy stuff, just plain histogram.

I’ve figured that a simple pie plot would better serve Open Yahtzee’s needs, so unfortunately this code will not be released as part of the program. While the code is not perfect, it’s functional and serves a good example of a custom widget. So I’ve felt pity letting it fall into oblivion in Open Yahtzee’s SVN repository, and I’ve thought it might come handy to someone else (or at least for me) if it will be easily accessible.

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About a year and a half ago I’ve released cssrtl.py, a script that translates CSS code to RTL. The script was designed to be fully autonomous, however translating CSS code is a complex task, as not all the information needed to make the translation is available in the CSS files. While cssrtl.py did a very good job on some tasks it lacks on several issues:

1. When a design update is released, one cannot use previous translation work.
2. When things don’t go smooth, it’s hard to find out why.
3. Complex CSS can’t be translated automatically, as it requires understanding of the structure of the corresponding html files and how the CSS will be used by future code.

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I’ve decided to give Qt a try after long time of wxWidgets programming. When I learn to a new language or how to use a new library I always like to build some small projects to get my hands dirty with. This time I’ve built small checksum calculator – Hash Puppy (in fact, first I had the name then I’ve decided I must use it for some new project).

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When I first scratched the itch of calculating checksums for every file in a tar archive, this was my original intention. When I decided I want the script in bash for simplicity, I forfeited the idea and settled for extracting the files and then going over all the files to calculate their checksum value.

So when Jon Flowers asked in the comments of the original tarsum post about the possibility of getting the checksums of files in the tar file without extracting all the archive, I’ve decided to re-tackle the problem.

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InfiniteTTT 0.6 was released today. The main change in the new version is that the game is now multi-threaded.

InfiniteTTT is a variation of Tic-Tac-Toe which is played on an infinite board.

The new version has new multi-threaded AI engine, and several minor fixes and improvements. The changes improved the user experience and made the game more responsive. The new release contains binaries for Windows, source package and a Gentoo ebuild. Packages for other Linux distributions will follow soon (help will be appreciated).

To download the new version visit InfiniteTTT’s download page.

Update: I’ve released tarsum-0.2, a new version of tarsum.

Some time ago, I got back a hard disk back from data recovery. One of the annoying issues I encountered with the recovered data was corrupted files. Some files looked like they were recovered successfully but their content was corrupted. The ones that were configuration files, where usually easy to detect, as it raised errors in programs that tried to use them. But when such error occurs in some general text file, (or inside the data of an SQL dump), the file may seem correctly fine unless closely inspected.

I have an habit of storing old backups on CDs (they are initially made to online storage), I do it in order to reduce backup costs. But the recovered/corrupted data issue raised some concerns about my ability to recover using this disks. Assuming that I have a disk failure, and I couldn’t recover from my online backups for reason, how can I check the integrity of my CD backups?

Only storing and comparing hash signature for the whole archive, is almost useless. It allows you to validate whether all the files are probably fine, but it can’t tell apart one corrupted file in the archive from a completed corrupted archive. My idea was to calculate checksum (hash) for each file in the data and store the signature in a way that would allow me to see which individual files are corrupted.

This is where tarsum comes to the rescue. As it’s name applies it calculate checksum for each file in the archive. You can download tarsum from here.

Using tarsum is pretty straight forward.

tarsum backup.tar > backup.tar.md5

Calculates the MD5 checksums of the files. You can specify other hashes as well, by passing a tool that calculates it (it must work like md5sum).

tarsum --checksum=sha256sum backup.tar > backup.tar.sha256

To verify the integrity of the files inside the archive we use the diff command:

tarsum backup.tar | diff backup.tar.md5 -

where backup.tar.md5 is the original signature file we created. This is possible because the signatures are sorted alphabetically by the file name inside the archive, so it the order of the files is always the same.

Note that if you use an updated version of GNU tar, tarsum can also operate directly on compressed archives (e.g. tar.bz2, tar.gz).

This new release of radio.py brings more predefined stations and the much wanted recording feature. radio.py is a python wrapper for mplayer, designed to provide an easy-to-use interface for listening to radio from the command line. And indeed using radio.py is very easy, just pass the station name.

radio.py Classic FM

To read more about radio.py and the existing features go to radio.py – a Wrapper Script for Listening to Radio in Linux.

New stations in this release include Ram FM, Classic FM, Radio Caroline and update to all the radioIO stations. So overall this version of radio.py comes with 81 predefined stations. To see the full list of recognized station run radio.py --list. If your favorite station is still missing you can add via configuration files, ans described in here. If you will send a comment with the name of the stations and its website, I’ll add it to the next release.

The other important new feature is the ability to record radio streams to mp3 directly from radio.py. This is done using the --radio command-line switch. For example the following

radio.py CNN --record cnn.mp3

will record the radio stream of CNN to a file called cnn.mp3. To stop recording just press ‘q’. This option also be used with the --sleep and --wake-up to time your recordings. For example if you want to record a show that start in 30 minutes and is 60 minutes long you should do

radio.py BBC1 --record bbc1.mp3 --wake-up 30 --sleep 60

You can download the new version from here. Installation is pretty straight forward, just untar the archive and put the radio.py some where in your path (e.g. /usr/local/bin/) and the package is installed.

As always if you want new stations added to the next release, send a comment with the station details (at least name and website).

UPDATE 14/12/2008: I’ve changed the download link to point to radio.py’s SourceForge project page.