Southern Bread » software

FrequentZ – Guitar Tuner Software

Dave — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 17:04:00 +0000

I’ve been wanting to write a guitar tuner application for a long time and I finally got around to starting it over the Christmas holidays. I’ve finished it up enought to call it version 1.0 and release it. It’s nothing real fancy to look at, but it gets the job done and it’s free. For now the tunings are hard coded into the program but hopefully as I refine it I’ll put them out into a user editable config file for adding custom tunings yourself. Let me know of any bugs you find and feel free to send me suggested tunings for inclusion as well. Include the MIDI note numbers if possible. As usual, it’s written in masm32 assembly language. Enjoy!

Screenshot:

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The Iron Bowl Scorinator

Dave — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 10:58:00 +0000

It’s rivalry week in college football. While the rest of the country(and ESPN) is enraptured with Ohio State vs. Michigan, in Alabama one rivalry is king. Alabama vs. Auburn. The Iron Bowl. And in honor of Iron Bowl week, I humbly present to you the Iron Bowl Scorinator. It’s a program I wrote a couple of years ago that you can use to torment your friends with. Just put this executable on their computer and put a shortcut to it in their startup menu with the appropriate switches in place. They will be presented with the score of the game and your team’s logo and fight song blaring through their speakers.

Here is what it looks like in action:

I would be happy with that score.

So if you’re an Auburn fan and they win 44-7 just run it like this:

> c:\ironbowl.exe /w-au /s-44-7 /f

Or an Alabama fan would do this:

> c:\ironbowl.exe /w-ua /s-44-7 /f

You can hit escape to close it. The /f switch makes it where it will go through at least one iteration of the fight song before allowing them to escape. Whatever you attach to the /s- switch will be displayed on the screen, so you could put anything you like as long as it’s not too long. Use the /? switch to get a list of options and usage info. As always, it’s written in assembly so it’s sure to crash your computer faster than any other language. :)

Download it: Ironbowl.exe

NumPad – Pad Numbers in Filenames

Dave — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:33:00 +0000

One of the most annoying things with mp3’s (other than DRM of course) is consecutive numbering. The sort algorithm on Windows and most mp3 players sorts as it goes through the filename one character at a time. So if you have 12 files named “file-1.mp3 … file-12.mp3″, they will sort like this:

file-1.mp3
file-10.mp3
file-11.mp3
file-12.mp3
file-2.mp3
file-3.mp3
file-4.mp3
file-5.mp3
file-6.mp3
file-7.mp3
file-8.mp3
file-9.mp3

That is obviously not what anybody wants. To correct this, consecutively numbered files must be zero-padded in order to sort correctly. So the previous list would need to look like this:

file-01.mp3
file-02.mp3
file-03.mp3
file-04.mp3
file-05.mp3
file-06.mp3
file-07.mp3
file-08.mp3
file-09.mp3
file-10.mp3
file-11.mp3
file-12.mp3

I run into this problem often enough that I started looking around for software that would pad the numbers in filenames automatically for me. I couldn’t find anything out there that would do it in an automated fashion so I wrote a perl script to do it. I wrote it in Perl so that I could run it under Linux as well. I frequently need to have jpeg’s consecutively numbered as well so that was important. Here is the script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $dirname = $ARGV[0] || "";
my $change  = $ARGV[1] || "no";
my $ext     = $ARGV[2] || ".mp3";
my $padsize = $ARGV[3] || 4;

##: Give usage if no arguments are defined
if ($dirname eq "") {
  print STDOUT "Usage: numpad.pl \"directory\" [change?] [.ext] [padsize]\n";
  print STDOUT "  [change?] - default is \"no\" - should I actually rename the file\n";  
  print STDOUT "  [.ext] - default is \".mp3\" - what files should be acted upon\n";
  print STDOUT "  [padsize] - default is \"4\" - how many digits should I pad to\n";
  print STDOUT "\n";
  print STDOUT "Example:\n";
  print STDOUT "  numpad.pl \"c:\\mp3\\album\" yes .wav 5\n";
  exit(1);
}

##: Change to the directory asked for
chdir($dirname) or die "Couldn’t change to directory ’$dirname’: $!";

##: Open and read in the directory based on the fileglob given
opendir(DIR, "$dirname") or die "Couldn’t open directory ’$dirname’: $!";
my @files = grep { /.*$ext/ } readdir(DIR);
closedir DIR;

##: Loop through the file entries and mod them
foreach my $file (@files) {
  my $newfilename="";

  ##: Cut off the extension, to be put back on later
  $file =~ s/$ext//g;

  ##: Split the filename into an array using any number as a separator
  my @fnparts = split(/([0-9]*)/, $file);

  ##: Loop through the array and pad any numerical elements
  foreach (@fnparts) {
    my $result = $_;
    my $number = 0;
    if($result =~ m/[0-9]+/) {
      $number = sprintf("%0".$padsize."d", $result);
      $newfilename.=$number;
    } else {
      $newfilename.=$result;
    }
  }
  $newfilename.=$ext;
  $file.=$ext;
  print STDOUT "$file\n  -> $newfilename\n";
  if($change eq "yes") {
    rename($file, $newfilename);
  }
}

Just save this code as a file named numpad.pl. If you run it on Windows, you will have to either install a perl interpereter first(get the MSI package from ActiveState) or download the native executable version below that was compiled with Perl2Exe. If you use the interpreter method you would need to execute perl and pass the script name to it as the first argument. Like this:

c:\> perl numpad.pl "c:\mp3\album" yes .wav 5

That example would zero-pad all the files in the c:\mp3\album directory that end with .wav, making any number it finds in a filename at least 5 digits long. This script should handle any files you give it; not just mp3’s. You can also re-run it with a different padding amount and it will redo the padding if you put too many on the first time. If you tell it “no” as the second argument, it will just show you what it would do instead of actually doing it. As always, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Native Exe Version: numpad.exe
Perl Source Version: numpad

Firefox Fed-Ex search Plugin (v0.2)

Dave — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 09:09:00 +0000

FedEx changed their package tracking CGI around and is expiring the old tracking URLs. I updated the search plugin on MyCroft so the latest version should be available in the next day or so when they approve it. At some point the old one will stop working so you will want to update it.

Get it here

Groupwise Address Book Converter

Dave — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 10:38:00 +0000

Here is a little script I cooked up to help us with the migration from Groupwise to Exchange a couple of months ago. It will take a .nab file exported from Groupwise and convert the field names into Outlook compatible names so the Outook import wizard will map them properly into the contacts list. It will replace the contents of the input file. It also strips out any of the old “internet:” prefixed addresses left over from older versions of Groupwise if you have any. This was a real lifesaver for me when doing the conversion.

Const ForReading = 1
Const ForWriting = 2

Set objArgs = WScript.Arguments

Dim arrFieldSearch
Dim arrFieldReplace
arrFieldSearch = Array("@DOMAIN.GWIA",".DOMAIN.GWIA",
  ".GWIA.DOMAIN","internet:","Internet:",
  "INTERNET:",":::TAGMAP:::0FFE0003:***",
  "3001001E:Name","3A08001E:Office Phone Number",
  "3A18001E:Department","3A23001E:Fax Number",
  "3003001E:E-Mail Address","3A06001E:FirstName",
  "3A11001E:LastName","3A17001E:Title",
  "3A29001E:Address","3A27001E:City","3A28001E:State",
  "3A26001E:Country","3A2A001E:ZIP Code","3002001E:E-Mail Type",
  "3A19001E:Mailstop","3A09001E:Home Phone Number",
  "3A1C001E:Cellular Phone Number","3A21001E:Pager Number",
  "3A1A001E:Phone Number","600B001E:Greeting",
  "600F001E:Owner","3A16001E:Organization","3004001E:Comments",
  "3A00001E:User ID","6604001E:Domain","6609001E:Additional Routing",
  "6605001E:Post Office","6603001E:GUID","6607001E:NDS Distinguished Name",
  "6608001E:Network ID","660D001E:Internet Domain","8000001E:Pumatech_ID"
)

arrFieldReplace = Array("","","","","","","Category","Name",
  "Company Main Phone","Department","Business Fax",
  "E-Mail Address","First Name","Last Name","Job Title",
  "Business Street","Business City","Business State","Business Country",
  "Business Postal Code","E-Mail Type","Office Location","Home Phone",
  "Mobile Phone","Pager","Business Phone","Title","User 1","Company",
  "Notes","User 2","User 3","Office Location","Post Office",
  "6603001E:GUID","6607001E:NDS Distinguished Name",
  "6608001E:Network ID","660D001E:Internet Domain","8000001E:Pumatech_ID"
)

For F = 0 to objArgs.Count - 1
  strFileName = objArgs(F)
  WScript.echo F & ". " & strFileName
  
  Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
  Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strFileName, ForReading)
  
  strText = objFile.ReadAll
  objFile.Close
  
  i = 0
  For Each strSearchFor in arrFieldSearch
    strReplaceWith = arrFieldReplace(i)
    strNewText = Replace(strText, strSearchFor, strReplaceWith, 1, -1, 1)
    strText = strNewText
    i = i + 1
  Next
  
  Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strFileName, ForWriting)
  objFile.WriteLine strNewText
  objFile.Close
Next

WScript.echo "Finished Conversion!"

Just copy the code into a file called “abconvert.vbs” and put it into your “Send To” folder. Then just right-click on an exported .nab file and send it to the script.

SoftScan and SSReader

Dave — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 11:29:00 +0000

Here is a simple pair of programs that make administering licensing a little easier for sysadmins. SoftScan will simply enumerate the Uninstall key in the registry and dump it all to a file. This is the same key that Add/Remove Programs draws it’s info from. It also dumps the version of Windows being run as well as all the installed PCI devices it can find.

The other program called SSReader will then take all the dump files produced by SoftScan in a directory and aggregate them to produce a count of how many installations of each piece of software there are. I use it here at the office by putting SoftScan in the global login script. Then any time I want to know how many installs of a certain piece of software I have, I just fire up SSReader and check. I then know how many licenses I need to buy if I’m over.

SoftScan Usage:

softscan.exe /p-c:\path\to\store\report

There is also a /q switch that will make SoftScan not display a progress bar, and a /? switch to get usage info.

SSReader Usage:

ssreader.exe

Just double-click it and go. When you first start SSReader it will ask you to choose a directory. Just choose the same directory that you use in the /p- switch of SoftScan. There is a filter box at the top of the SSReader window. When you type in the box, it narrows the displayed programs down in realtime.

This isn’t exactly Beta software but I wouldn’t call it stable either. If you find any glaring problems with it please shoot me an e-mail. I’ll release the masm32 source at a later date after I clean it up.

Download current SoftScan Binary
Download current SSReader Binary

PodWrangler – Source Code

Dave — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 08:14:00 +0000

I’m working on cleaning up the PodWrangler source code right now so I will post it with the executable soon. I need to be sure it’s clean and that I don’t leave any glaring buffer overflows in it. I am also working on the .pcast file support. I will post it all when it’s done. I hope to GPL it when I finish so I will have to put the source out. I hope to reduce the size of the executable a little too by doing some more intelligent GDI to paint the windows. That will help reduce the size of the resource section.

MS Licensing Craziness

Dave — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 14:30:00 +0000

I have been sorting through SKU’s all day trying to come up with a
purchase order for our firm’s upgrade to Exchange. We are moving to
Exchange from Groupwise 5.5. In the process we are upgrading everyone
to Microsoft Office 2003. While I was trying to figure out what all we
needed to get a final price I realized that the boxed versions of
Office are actually cheaper than their licensing counterparts because
in licensing their are no “upgrade” versions, only the full product.
Why would I buy into a licensing program that forces me to upgrade
every 3 years when it costs more than buying it off the shelf with no
expirations to worry about. Man, that makes no sense. Microsoft
should either get rid of the boxed upgrade versions or offer incentives
to non-licensing customers to enter the program for the first time.
Either way you slice it, Office is one expensive piece of software.
$400 per computer bites.

IpWatch Dynamic IP Mailer

Dave — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 10:16:00 +0000

If you are a DSL user but need to get access to your own machine remotely from time to time you might find this program useful. You simply run this little executable and it will e-mail you it’s IP address on a schedule you define. If you are behind a NAT type DSL router and don’t have direct access to your real IP address you can simply look in the e-mail headers and you should see your real address in their in the return path. I haven’t used it in a while since I use DynDNS now but somebody might find it useful. The full masm32 source code is included.

Download binary and source: ipwatch-v1.9.zip

Stand to Reason Podcaster

Dave — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 09:32:00 +0000

I have written a program to automatically download the Stand to Reason talkshow whenever their podcast is updated. It sits in your system tray and checks the podcast feed every 6 hours, automatically downloading if a new one gets added. The program consists of one tiny executable file. I write all my windows software in assembly language so it is small and fast. There is no “installer”. To install it just download the program and save it on your desktop. Double-click on it. The first time you run it, it will ask you if you want it to auto-start when you boot up windows. If you say yes it will move itself to your windows directory and place an entry in your registry’s run key so it will start every time you boot windows.

The default directory where it stores downloaded shows is on your desktop. If you want them stored in a different folder just click on the strCast icon on your taskbar and choose “Download directory…” and pick which one you want. You can also force it to manually check for a new show if you think one has been posted already and you can tell it to check for updated versions of strCast from this website. I hope you find this program to be useful and thanks again to STR for such a great ministry and a great podcast.

Screenshot:

Download current version: strCast.exe