Scott's Blog

I've been busy and did lots of updates to key-mon , my keyboard status monitor. The big news is that it's now resizable! Normal size: Small size: Larger size: It can be scaled to any size not just three, here it is at 2x without the mouse and showing the meta (Windows) key: Heathenx is helping me get nicer looking images, especially at smaller sizes. For the really small sizes I needed to change the look a bit,  so now I have two sets of SVG files, one for the normal size and another for the smaller size. Creating the different sizes was a bit of a pain. GTK wants to read the svg from disk so any changes made to svg needs to be dumped to a temporary file.  Also GTK doesn't seem to have a parameter to load and resize, so I end up manipulating the svg so that it is scaled larger or smaller. The extra work was worth it, I think.  Some screencasts today are high resolution, so the key status monitor will be tiny.  Other screen casts are very small, ...

This weekend I was watching screencasters.heathenx.org a video podcast about Inkscape with the  Miro player. Heathenx had to apologize that his key status monitor wasn't displaying mouse activity.  This wasn't the first time I've seen problems with this utility, earlier in the year Meet the Gimp also had some problems getting it to work. I downloaded the program  and put in on my machine, and sure enough the mouse wasn't working for me either. Looking at the output, it complained that I have more than one mouse and it was going to pick the last one.  It lied, I looked at the code and it actually picked the the first one. I changed the code so that it did pick the last mouse and it worked.  I thought of submitting a patch, but I realized that arbitrarily picking the last one might break the program for others for which it was working. To my delight the code was written in Python, using PyGTK . It wasn't even that much code, I could probably write a simil...

The other day I was going through some of my files and noticed that some files had the DOS style CR/LF lines, ugh. I couldn't remember what the standard tool in linux is to convert this, turns out it's dos2unix which is linked to fromdos command. The package is called, forgettably, tofromdos, i.e. to install it you need to call: sudo apt-get install tofromdos For such a simple utility it doesn't provide very much, there's no man page and only -h works and not the more common --help, but it does work as advertised. I was surprised that it isn't included in the standard Linux install.

I released another open source program called Clipboard Modifier . I guess I'm amortizing all the effort it takes to open source a program my doing them back-to-back, when all the details are still fresh in my mind. This little utility uses wxPython and modifies your clipboard using plugins that you provide. I needed this at work to copy and paste a spreadsheet into a Wiki. Wiki's aren't very good at making tables and this little program leverages the capabilities of a spreadsheet to insert columns rows, etc.. Basically, I create the spreadsheet in OpenOffice and then using Clipboard Modifier copy and paste a wiki style table into the Wiki. To make the program a little more complete, I've also added some other plugins. For example, there is one that takes some text and converts it into something that Java or Python would like (in double quotes, etc.). I have more ideas of this type. Looks like I'm going for quantity, instead of quality.

I just finished posting mm2s5 to code.google.com this weekend. It's a small Python utility to convert a FreeMind mind-map (.mm) file into an S5 presentation. It was a little hack that I put together to make presentations quickly and somebody else found it useful, so I decided to put it on the net. You can see an example presentation here and a picture of what that same presentation looks like in FreeMind here .