The Author – Bart Busschots
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Aug
30
My Perl Image Processing Scripts
Filed Under My Projects, Photography, Software Development, Computers & Tech on August 30, 2008 | 6 Comments
Update (18 June 2012) – A more up-to-date version of these scripts can now be found here.
My Myers Briggs personality profile insists that I “prefer economy of effort”, you can probably translate that to “is a lazy sod”. Because of this I like automating repetitive tasks. It all started when I wanted a quick and easy way to prepare my images for posting to my website. I wanted them resized with my URL and the Creative Commons icon added in, and I wanted to be able to process a whole directory of images in one go. I started by playing around with the GD libs in PHP, but soon realised it would be quicker and easier to use Perl to shell out to the command line tools from Image Magick. At the time I wrote a post on my choice to do this which also contained the initial code. That code has been expanded and evolved since, and now includes functions for rendering nice (in my opinion) borders and titles on my better images. If you want to see examples checkout the Photo of the Week category on this blog..
[tags]Perl, Image Magick, script, programming, image processing[/tags]
Dec
22
Rogue DHCP Detection Plugin for Nagios on RedHat
Filed Under My Projects, Security, Software Development, Computers & Tech on December 22, 2006 | 9 Comments
I’m pretty sure this is useless on most versions of Linux because the default DHCP plugin that comes with the Nagios Plugins distribution has this functionality and seems to work just fine everywhere except on RedHat-based distros like RHEL, Centos and Fedora Core. On these systems the default plugin does not seem to work and fails to detect any DHCP servers. This plugin is different to the one I gave instructions for before which tests whether a particular DHCP server is answering requests, this plugin finds rogue servers, it will not alert you if any of your actual DHCP servers are down. Hence, you should probably install both. This plugin is not very polished, it is rough and ready but I know it works on RHEL4. If you’re running a different system you may have to do some minor tweaks but this should serve as an excellent starting point none-the-less.
[tags]Nagios, DHCP, RedHat, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Linux[/tags]
Apr
22
Developing My First Dashboard Widget – Unix Time Stamp Converter
Filed Under Computers & Tech, My Projects, Software Development on April 22, 2006 | 3 Comments
I recently did a post on Dashboard Widgets for techies and am working on another about Dashboard Widgets for developers. There was one important widget missing from my list of widgets for techies, one for converting Unix Time Stamps to human readable dates and vica-versa. The reason it was missing was because I couldn’t find one anywhere on the Apple site! I find this strange because I regularly need to deal with Unix Time Stamps in things like logfiles and raw data in Databases, hence I’d have expected others to need this too and hence for there to be a widget for it. Well, I decided to remedy this omission by writing my own Widget which I’ve now submitted to Apple for addition to their Widget Downloads Page. I’ve decided to release it as GPL so you can get it on the downloads page of my home page.
So, how easy was it to develop my first widget? Trivial! I went from deciding to write the widget to a fully working first implementation in about 2 hours including all reading and experimenting that I had to do to get started. IMO that’s not bad at all, in fact I can’t think of any other platform I’ve ever used where I was able to do something useful as quickly.
So, what’s involved in writing a Dashbaord Widget? TBH very little. If you are up to speed with client-side web technologies then you’ve pretty much got everything you need. Yes, there are some extensions to these technologies involved to allow you to interact with the OS and the command-line and also for 2D graphics with Quartz if you want to get fancy but they are very easy to get to grips with and there are some excellent guides on Apple’s Developer Site.
A Dashbaord Widget is basically a web page written in XHTML that is skinned with CSS and made interactive with JavaScript. There really is nothing more to it than that. If you want to give this a go yourself the links below are all you’ll need.
- Apple’s Dashboard Developers Page
- Apple’s Dashboard Programming Guide
- Apple’s help topic on getting your Widget to flip
As I said I had a fully functional Widget in two hours, took me a little longer to get it to do cool stuff like flipping round to show the credits on the reverse side and getting it skinned in a way I was happy with but all in all that Widget was no more than 5 hours work including all the fiddly graphics and layout stuff. A screenshot of the finished product can be seen below.
