Renaming files

When I travel, I always have at least two CF cards to take some, well most of my family say A LOT (but who cares...), pictures. My problem is always the numbering of the files, because I have set my camera to restart the numbering for a new card. Why, I don't have a clue, but it's like that... perhaps I should change my setting, but then you wouldn't be reading this blog message.

So my issue is that I want to put all files in one directory but then I have conflicting files because there will be 2 files named bla00001.jpg. So I have to add a fixed number to each file name of the second, third,... CF card in order to avoid these conflicts.

Perhaps my solution isn't the shortest, nor the best, but at least it works for me. The solution described here is originally created by my ex-colleague Erik.

So my camera produces the following file name format: DSC000001.JPG
Let's say that the highest number on my first CF card is 313, the first file name of the second CF card must then be 314, i.e. DSC00314.JPG.

So create a file somewhere on your hard drive, for example in /home/myworkspace/Pictures/rename.sh

Add this code to your file:

#!/bin/bash

for file in `ls *.jpg`
do
    numberpart=`echo ${file} | sed 's/DSC[0]*//g'`
    let number=`echo ${numberpart} | sed 's/\.jpg//g'`
    let number=number+313
    filename=DSC00${number}.jpg
    mv ${file} ${filename}
done


Save the file and make it executable via chmod +x rename.sh

Before testing it, make a backup of your pictures directory of which you need to rename the files!!!

Put the script in the directory and run it (./rename.sh)

Now I can put all my pictures in one dir, /me happy

Sound through HDMI cable

Recently I got myself a fine new full HD television. My laptop has HDMI output so I immediately wanted to watch some movies on my new television. Unfortunately the sound still came through the lousy laptop speakers. Some googling made me a happy man :-)

My system is an HP dv7 1140eb with nVidia 9200M GS running Ubuntu 9.10.

So this is what I had to do to get video and sound to play on my television through my HDMI cable:

1) Update the nVidia drivers to the latest (I used the nvidia drivers from nvidia.com). Go into
2) open sound preferences (system > preferences > sound): on the hardware tab, check if there is a profile Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output. If so select that profile
3) open alsamixer in shell, go to S/PDIF 0 and 1 with RIGHT arrow and unmute by pressing m.
4) test

if there is still no sound via your tv speakers continue, otherwise: w00tness!

1) upgrade alsa version to version 1.0.22:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6589810#post6589810
This procedure might take some time (in my case appx 15 minutes)
2) open the sound preferences (system > preferences > sound): on the hardware tab, select the proper Profile, in my case Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output (original value: Analog Stereo Output)
3) open alsamixer in shell, go to S/PDIF 0 and 1 with RIGHT arrow and unmute by pressing m.

That should do the trick. I hope this information helps other people.

Bye Bye til the Next Time

Help no sound in flash apps :-(

Today, on my Ubuntu 9.10 I was trying to watch a youtube video, unfortunately my flash completely freaked out and unfortunately there was no sound either. In the past I used to reboot my machine and then the issue was solved, however, since I had so many apps open, I didn't want to reboot.

So here's how I got it back working:

1. lsof | grep pcm
2. kill the results for pulseaudio and firefox
3. restart alsa: sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart
remark I killed firefox too because when I then restart firefox it asks me to restore the previous session, so I have all my pages (even in different windows) open again upon starting firefox

w00t, youtube, here I come !

However, if it's still not working after this, most likely there has been a kernel update. Then I used this procedure and then everything worked again:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6589810#post6589810
This procedure might take some time (in my case appx 15 minutes)

This procedure could perhaps solve a lot of threads on ubuntu forums like "no sound in flash", "flash makes FF crash", etc...

Get code blocks easily in your blogs

In my previous blog I added some Python code. But when I published my code all code was aligned to the left-hand side. Unfortunately indentation is very important for Python so some googling got me to this site:

http://www.simplebits.com/cgi-bin/simplecode.pl

Add your code and click Process and then remove all br tags (e.g. by using vim)

Copy this result in the html version of the blog.

Python File Manipulation

Last week I ripped one of my dvd movies to have a backup. Unfortunately I forgot to add the dutch subtitles but I was too lazy to start all over again. So a simple google search gave me the dutch subtitle files, unfortunately not in sync with my dvd rip.
The subs appeared 1 min and something too fast, so my first intention was to manually edit the file... to no avail, after 2 or 3 lines I already gave up. This was going to take too much time: 1536 subtitles, appx 10s per subtitle... over 4 hours of work.
Ok, what could I do to get the subs synced? I think it's fairly easy by using bash scripting in combination with sed and awk, but I have no experience in bash, so that solution was out of the question.
What else could I do to get this file updated, and that's where Python came to the foreground, the only programming language I know a little, but enough to give it a try. The code in this blog has not indentation, so if you want to use this code, you only need to adjust the correct indentation.
The structure of the file looks like:

1518
02:26:23,091 --> 02:26:24,978
subtitle here

A first thing was to detect the lines that contain the start and end time of the subtitle. In the example above it's line 2 but of course I can not select the time lines by line number. The detection however, is fairly easy to do by using a regular expression.
This is the regex I use: ^(0[0-2])

The mechanism I use to update the file is as follows:
1. Read the source file
2. Check if line match the regular expression
2.1. if match: update the line by adding time to both time-stamps and write to an output file
2.2. if no match: write the line to the same output file.

Fairly straight-forward, isn't it?

When a line matches the regex, I need to filter the start and end time. Luckily these times are always in the same positions so I sliced the lines to get start and end time.
Once I have those times I do some calculations to calculate the new time and then I write the file to the new output file.

finput = open("/home/input", 'r')
foutput = open("/home/newsubtitles", 'w') #new empty file
for line in finput:
    if re.match(regex, line):
        start = line[0:12]
        end = line[17:29]
        newstart = addTime(start)
        newend = addTime(end)
        #replace start and end by newstart and newend
        line.replace(start, newstart)
        line.replace(end, newend)
        #write updated line to output file
        foutput.write(line)
    else:
        #in case of no match, just write line to output
        foutput.write(line)
#when all lines are copied, close file
foutput.close()


So in this file section I use the addTime function. This function expects a string
and will return a new string. This string is always of the format hh:mm:ss,xxx where xxx are the milliseconds. Unfortunately the separator isn't always the colon, so I have to slice up the input string to get the hour, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. Then I add to milliseconds, seconds and minutes the necessary time
and check if adding these times don't pass the normal hour times, since 64s does not exist in the real world. For example if number of seconds exceeds 59s, I add 1 to number of minutes and substract 60 from the number of seconds.
In the code below the "add*" variables are constants, defined somewhere else, so you can update to your own needs.

def addTime(time):
    hh = int(time[0:2])
    mm = int(time[3:5])
    ss = int(time[6:8])
    milli = int(time[9:12])
    milli = milli + addmilli
    ss = ss + addss
    mm = mm + addmm
    if milli > 999:
        milli = milli - 1000
        ss = ss + 1
    if ss > 59:
        ss = ss - 60
        mm = mm + 1
    if mm > 59:
        mm = mm - 60
        hh = hh + 1
    newtime = updateTime(hh, mm, ss, milli)
    return newtime

The updateTime function makes that all hh, mm and ss are always 2 digits and milli is always 3 digits.

def updateTime(hh, mm, ss, milli):
    milli = str(milli)
    if len(milli) == 1:
        milli = "00%s" %milli
    elif len(milli) == 2:
        milli = "0%s" %milli
    ss = str(ss)
    if len(ss) == 1:
        ss = "0%s" %ss
    mm = str(mm)
    if len(mm) == 1:
        mm = "0%s" %mm
    hh = str(hh)
    if len(hh) == 1:
        hh = "0%s" %hh
    newtime = "%s:%s:%s,%s" %(hh, mm, ss, milli)
    return newtime


We're there, I'm quite sure that this script could be done in less code by an experienced programmer, which I'm not. But at least it worked for me and it took me less than 1 hour to get this working, so it gave me time to write this blog and even then I would still be changing the file manually and probably with more mistakes.

Final code:

import re

regex = "^(0[0-2])"
input = "/home/dewolfth/input.txt"
subs = "/home/dewolfth/mymovie.txt"
addhour = 1
addmm = 1
addss = 7
addmilli = 500

def updateTime(hh, mm, ss, milli):
    milli = str(milli)
    if len(milli) == 1:
        milli = "00%s" %milli
    elif len(milli) == 2:
        milli = "0%s" %milli
    ss = str(ss)
    if len(ss) == 1:
        ss = "0%s" %ss
    mm = str(mm)
    if len(mm) == 1:
        mm = "0%s" %mm
    hh = str(hh)
    if len(hh) == 1:
        hh = "0%s" %hh
    newtime = "%s:%s:%s,%s" %(hh, mm, ss, milli)
    return newtime

def addTime(time):        
    hh = int(time[0:2])
    mm = int(time[3:5])
    ss = int(time[6:8])
    milli = int(time[9:12])
    
    milli = milli + addmilli
    ss = ss + addss
    mm = mm + addmm
    
    if milli > 999:
        milli = milli - 1000
        ss = ss + 1
    if ss > 59:
        ss = ss - 60
        mm = mm + 1
    if mm > 59:
        mm = mm - 60
        hh = hh + 1
                
    newtime = updateTime(hh, mm, ss, milli)
    return newtime    

def main():
    finput = open(input, 'r')
    foutput = open(subs, 'w')
    for line in finput:
        if re.match(regex,line):
            start = line[0:12]
            newstart = addTime(start)
            end = line[17:29]
            newend = addTime(end)
            line = line.replace(start, newstart)
            line = line.replace(end, newend)
            foutput.write(line)
        else:
            foutput.write(line)
    foutput.close()
            
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()



From techn writer to software developer and back and ...

The last weeks I have been lucky to do some development. Even though the tasks I did, would be for a sr developer some minor work, the job helped me getting a better view over our software. All development I did was in Python.
My first job was to refactor a wizard so that it became consistent to the new specs of the software.
After this refactoring work, I refactored the same wizard again and two others so that these wizards became available in the web interface.
A lot of development and testing later, I succeeded in all my tasks, I even did some bug-fixes, w00t.
But time has come that my engineering tasks are over, and that I'm back in my natural habitat of writing documentation. I'm a tech writer after all...

So what did I learn during these last weeks as developer?
First I have to admit that I really enjoyed my time as engineer. Not that I've become an experienced engineer (pretty far away from that level), but I just like to learn new stuff. And just like everything, you learn by doing so. So I'm glad that my manager gave me the opportunity to spend some time in development, since I don't have too much time in private to become a developer.

I have learned quite a lot about Q-layer's Q-Action/Workflow mechanism and using variables in that system. Even though it's quite complex, imho it's a great system.
Once you get to know the terminology and mechanism, it goes quite fast to create your own Q-Actions, annex workflows.

So before returning completely to tech writing mode, I was thinking, why not write a short message before I start documenting the things I learned the passed few weeks...

Bye bye til the next time!

Reading manuals is not wasting time... sometimes

I wanted to test Oracle's Enterprise Linux (Unbreakable Linux). On the website of Oracle I couldn't find one big iso, so I downloaded the 5 CD iso images.

As I don't have enough computers, I use VirtualBox. Since I thought that it was not possible to install an OS via multiple iso images with VirtualBox, I did the following:

I merged the 5 iso images into one big iso image. Don't worry, this doesn't require complex manipulations, this is what I did:

1. copied the first iso to a new iso image: "cp first.iso new.iso"
2. executed the next command: "cat second.iso >> new.iso"
This just appends the second iso image to the copy of the first iso image.
Repeat this for the other iso images ("cat third.iso >> new.iso", "cat fourth.iso >> new.iso", and "cat fifth.iso >> new.iso")

Unfortunately, during the installation of Enterprise Linux, the wizard kept asking for Installation CD 2... No luck for me.

Back to installing via the 5 iso images then. And after a tip I found out that it is easy to switch from iso image during the installation.

First make sure that all iso images are loaded in VirtualBox.
Then create the a virtual machine and let it boot from the first iso image.
When the install wizards asks for the second iso image, click Devices in the VirtualBox menu, and select Unmount CD/DVD-ROM.
Then Devices > Mount CD/DVD-ROM > CD/DVD-ROM Image and select the second iso image.

Simple as that... perhaps I should try reading manuals...