So I figured, hey I know enough bash to at least get something rolling in order to do this. Of course I had to keep looking stuff up in reference guides and on websites, because there’s no way I can remember it all. Basically, it came down to 4 key tools for going the bash route.

1. sed – to strip brackets, slashes, colons, spaces, and other undesired characters in order to make the strings easier to deal with
2. awk – to find the location of decimal points or other characters
3. cut – to get characters to the left or right of decimal points
4. bc – to calculate and convert the milliseconds to human readable form

I finally got it to work reliably tonight.
It was a horrid process that took forever. What a waste of time. But hey, that’s all part of the RTC experience!
So here it is, please excuse the bad variable names and sloppiness. I was too pissed to give a ****.
Note: I renamed this to xmms2tracklensafe and cut out all the curse words and tried to put some sense into the comments.

#!/bin/bash
tmpfileinfo=xtemp14251.tmp
tmpfile=xtemp91839.tmp
#use xmms2 info here
xmms2 info > $tmpfileinfo
vargrep=$(grep "duration" $tmpfileinfo)
echo $vargrep > $tmpfileinfo
#chopping the brackets, slashes, and spaces out of the string
sed -i 's/\[//g' $tmpfileinfo
sed -i 's/\]//g' $tmpfileinfo
sed -i 's/\///g' $tmpfileinfo
sed -i 's/'\ '//g' $tmpfileinfo
#convert the = to an X, easy to find
sed -i 's/\=/X/g' $tmpfileinfo
#for an mp3 - pluginmaddurationX
sed -i 's/\pluginmaddurationX//g' $tmpfileinfo
#for a flac - pluginflacdurationX
sed -i 's/\pluginflacdurationX//g' $tmpfileinfo
#God knows what other codecs there might be
#prints the time in milliseconds
echo "$(cat $tmpfileinfo) ms"
vargrep2=$(cat $tmpfileinfo)
varx=$vargrep2
#convert the time to minutes
var2=$(echo "$varx/1000/60" | bc -l)
echo $var2 > $tmpfile
#we are left with a fraction of a minute, which occurs after the decimal, we need to find the decimal point
var3=$(awk 'BEGIN { print index('$var2', ".") }')
#get the characters after the decimal point, this is our fraction of a minute
var4=$(cut -c $var3- $tmpfile)
#convert that fraction of a minute into seconds
var5=$(echo "scale=1; $var4*60" | bc -l | xargs printf "%1.0f")
#simply subtracting a 1 from the index of the decimal point, to be used in order to retrieve the number left of the decimal
varcut=$(echo "$var3 - 1" | bc -l | xargs printf "%1.0f")
#gets the number to the left of the decimal
var6=$(cut -c -$varcut $tmpfile)
#now we need to deal with the decimal in the number that has been converted to seconds
var7=$(awk 'BEGIN { print index('$var5', ".") }')
varcut2=1
#I honestly don't remember why I did this.  I think I needed it before I started adding | xargs printf "%1.0f"
if [ "0" != $var7 ]
	then
		varcut2=$(echo "$var7 - 1" | bc -l | xargs printf "%1.0f")
fi

echo $var5 > $tmpfile
#now we get the seconds as a whole number, by getting the characters left of the decimal
var8=$(cut -c -$varcut2 $tmpfile)
var8=$(cat $tmpfile)

#need to prepend a 0 to the seconds if they are under 10
if [ $var8 -lt 10 ]
	then
		var8="0$var8"
fi

#print out the time in human readable form, minutes : seconds
echo "$var6:$var8"
#clean up the temp files
rm -f $tmpfile
rm -f $tmpfileinfo

Wow, what a pain in the pee-hole. It took me several hours over two nights and I even lost some sleep over it. So, I decided to try it Jeff’s way, using Python, since he brags about it so much. I had never used it before, and now that I have, I think I’ll be using it a lot! A lot of you are saying, “Well yeah, duh. Idiot.” or something more insulting, and I fully accept that. In fact, I encourage it!

First, we have the simple bash script that is used to execute the entire process from the command line.

#!/bin/bash

tmpfile=assscrambler124524.tmp
xmms2 info > $tmpfile

python ~/scripts/xmms2len.py

rm -f $tmpfile

And now we have the giant, complex, and horrendous python script.

file = open('./assscrambler124524.tmp')
for line in file:
	if(line.find('duration',0) > -1) :
		#print(line)
		s = line
		searchstr = 'duration = ';
		x = s.rindex(searchstr, 0);
		if(x > -1):
			timeMillis = s[x+len(searchstr):len(s)].strip()
			#print(timeMillis)
			timeConverted = float(timeMillis)/1000/60
			#print(timeConverted);
			stime = str(timeConverted)
			decIndex = stime.rindex('.', 0)
			timeFraction = float(stime[decIndex:len(stime)])
			seconds = int(round(timeFraction*60,0))
			strseconds = str(seconds)
			minutes = stime[0:decIndex]
			strminutes = str(minutes)
			if(seconds < 10) :
				strseconds = '0' + str(seconds)
			print(timeMillis + ' ms\n' + str(minutes) + ':' + strseconds)
			break

Wait, that’s it? Just some simple searches, substrings, calculations, easy conversions between types, and that’s all? Not to mention the incredibly easy way to open a file and iterate through its lines.
Now, I commented out some print statements here, and I could have compacted it more, but I wanted it to be reasonably clear. The point of course, and 95% of you know probably know this already, is that python kicks bash’s ass when it comes to things that should be, well, programs. Of course bash scripts will always have their place, and they are necessary for so many things. I still love bash and am very fond of it, but from a programming perspective, it just doesn’t “cut the mustard”, as Jeff would say.

Well, that’s it for my exciting Friday night. Someday I’ll get my crap together and talk more about my xmms2 setup, the xmms2 python equalizer, the xmms2 scrobbler for last.fm, and the other scripts I’ve written for xmms2.

Cya!

My main reference for python: http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~warner/prog/python.html


#!/bin/bash

echo $WORD > $TEMPFILE
aspell -c $TEMPFILE
cat $TEMPFILE
rm -f $TEMPFILE
rm -f $TEMPFILE.bak


I named this script “spell”. Simply use it like so:

$ spell reccomend


Aspell will run and you can make your changes.

reccomend

1) recommends 6) commend
2) recommend 7) recommenced
3) reckoned recommended
4) regiment 9) Redmond
5) recombined 0) rejoined
i) Ignore I) Ignore all
r) Replace R) Replace all
a) Add l) Add Lower
b) Abort x) Exit


In this case, if I type “2″, the correction will be made, aspell will exit and the spelling I chose gets printed out.

Here’s an example of how to use it with a sentence.

$ spell "I go to the storede and buy beakh clotes"


Now aspell will take you through each misspelled word. After you finish the corrections it will exit and print out the corrected sentence or series of words.

I go to the store and buy beach clothes


What’s needed (for a poor windows user):

• Mcabber, a jabber client from http://mcabber.com
• Cygwin, http://cygwin.com
• Ssh package for cygwin, if you need to install mcabber elsewhere and then connect to it remotely.

If cygwin and ssh are new to you, read this to get up to speed.

If you are setting up mcabber on a host machine, you’ll want to setup ssh as a service or daemon on that machine as well. Use the ssh-host-config script to do that.

Quickly, here’s how to get going.

1. Get the latest updates for cygwin using the cygwin setup program. I was missing the latest glib and I didn’t have pkg-config.
2. Download the mcabber source from the website. Run the configure script with no arguments. Take note of any errors; they are most likely related to missing libraries. Get these libraries with the cygwin setup program.
3. Once configure is successful, you should be able to run make, and then make install with no problems.
4. Create a mcabberrc file in the directory ~/.mcabber, note that the filename is “mcabberrc” and not “.mcabberrc”.
5. Put the following into the mcabberrc file to configure it for Google Talk.

set username = <your username at gmail dot com>
set server = talk.google.com
set ssl = 1
set ssl_verify = 0
set port = 5223

That’s all there is to it. Type mcabber and it should prompt you for your password and then connect.

You’ll see 3 different “panes” or frames and the command prompt at the bottom. Scroll through your contacts with Page Up and Page Down. When you’ve selected a contact, just start typing in the command prompt to send messages. The program commands start with a “/” character, type “man mcabber” for a complete list of commands. If you’re in mcabber, you can type “/help” for help on specific mcabber commands.

That’s all for now!

-eokuwwy

Create a .pinerc file, maybe a custom one for gmail like .gmailpinerc

POP3

smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com/user=user@gmail.com/ssl

inbox-path={pop.gmail.com/pop3/ssl/user=user@gmail.com}inbox

IMAP

smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com:587/tls/user= user@gmail.com

inbox-path={imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/novalidate-cert/user= user@gmail.com}inbox

There are a host of other options that can be configured, but this is a good start.

The answer is YES!

The Translate Word and Graphical TW project is your gateway to having superior translation capabilities right in your CONSOLE!

Download tw from http://savannah.nongnu.org/files/?group=twandgtw.
I’m using tw-0.1.3.tar.bz2.

Major Dependencies
elinks
http://elinks.or.cz/download
I’m using elinks-0.11.5.tar.bz2.

I’m using Cygwin and I was missing the following:
curl
libiconv
util-linux random utils (For the getopt() function)

The above Cygwin packages can easily be obtained through the Cygwin setup program.

1. Extract elinks. Build it starting with “sh configure”. Then type “make”. After it finishes, type “make install”.

2. Repeat step 1 with tw.

3. Type “tw -h” to test that everything is installed correctly.

4. If everything went well, try typing “tw en-es hello” and you should get the following output:
hello : hola

You’re all set! Now you can quickly translate between many languages straight from your bash shell. Type “tw -l” to see a list of “all” the languages.

Customized Script for Google Translate

Google’s translate service is one of the most comprehensive language translators available. A major benefit of using Google’s translation service is that you can pass in as much text as you want; simply surround the text with quotes. Even though tw does not list all of the languages that Google supports, it is still a bash script that parses input parameters, and it does not do any validation. You can append anything you want to the argument “translate.google.com”. For instance, Croatian is not listed as one of the languages (“hr”). However, all you need to do is append the appropriate language pair to the end of the argument string, like so:
$ tw translate.google.com.en-hr hello
zdravo

To make this a bit more user-friendly, I have created a simple wrapper script (twg) for tw that only uses Google’s translate service. It works just like tw, except you do not have to type “translate.google.com”. You only need to put in the language pair. For example:
$ twg en-es “Hello World”
Hola Mundo

Type “twg -l” to get a complete list of supported languages. You can find more details about featured languages at http://www.google.com/help/faq_translation.html#langpairs.

#!/bin/bash
# author: eokuwwy
# http://reverttoconsole.com
# description: customized tw wrapper script that uses google translate</code>

if [ "$1" = "-l" ];
then
echo "Arabic=ar";
echo "Bulgarian=bg";
echo "Catalan=ca";
echo "Chinese=zh-cn";
echo "Chinese=zh-tw";
echo "Croation=hr";
echo "Czech=cs";
echo "Danish=da";
echo "Dutch=nl";
echo "English=en";
echo "Filipino=tl";
echo "Finnish=fi";
echo "French=fr";
echo "German=de";
echo "Greek=el";
echo "Hebrew=iw";
echo "Hindi=hi";
echo "Indonesian=id";
echo "Italian=it";
echo "Japanese=ja";
echo "Korean=ko";
echo "Latvian=lv";
echo "Lithuanian=lt";
echo "Norwegian=no";
echo "Polish=pl";
echo "Portuguese=pt-BR";
echo "Romanian=ro";
echo "Russian=ru";
echo "Serbian=sr";
echo "Slovak=sk";
echo "Slovenian=sl";
echo "Spanish=es";
echo "Swedish=sv";
echo "Ukranian=uk";
echo "Vietnamese=vi";
elif [ "$1" = "-h" -o -z "$1" ];
then
echo "Usage: twg [sourcelang-destlang (i.e. en-es)] [term]";
echo "twg -h (shows help)";
echo "twg -l (shows language list)";
else
tw translate.google.com.$1 "$2";
fi

Happy command line translation! Now jailbreak (at your own risk) your iPhone/Blackberry/PDA and put tw on there!

$ twg en-es “peace out”
a la paz
-eokuwwy

First of all, the main screen escape key is ctrl-a. That’s all well and good, unless you’re an emacs user, then it’s downright offensive (ctrl-a is the emacs command to go to the beginning of a line- one I happen to use a lot). Fortunately it’s easy enough to change. I added a screenrc file that looks like this:

# ctrl-/ is my preferred shortcut key
escape \034\034
# turn off visual bell
vbell off
caption always "%H %= %-w%L>%{= BW}%n*%t%{-}%52<%+w %L="
startup_message off
deflogin on
shell -/bin/bash

It’s easy enough to switch between screens from a single (rxvt) shell now, but as an emacs user I naturally enjoy having my screen split so I can multitask. It took me a while to figure out how to do that effectively with screen.

ctrl-/ S splits the screen.
ctrl-/ n switches to the next screen, but does it within the current region, so it’s not like M-x o in emacs.
ctrl-/ tab switches between the split regions, just like M-x o in emacs.
ctrl-/ X “unsplits” the screen.

References

• A Quick Tutorial
• Some good screenrc tips
• Screen Cheat Sheet pdf

For a while I used Notepad++ for macros. Macros are easy to use with Notepad++, but unfortunately you’re limited to trivially simple macros- for example, you can’t “search” your way through a file changing every double-quote to a single-quote. In Emacs, you can do whatever you do in emacs as a macro.

“C-x (” is analogous to the record selection in Notepad++. It means your next commands will be recorded as a macro.

When you’re done, “C-x )” tells emacs to stop recording.

“C-x e” runs the macro you’ve just recorded.

Once you create a macro, you’ll probably want to run it more than once… “C-u some-number your-command” will execute “your-command” exactly “some-number” times. This can be used to run the command “call-last-kbd-macro”. So, for example “C-u 1000 C-x e” will run the macro you just created 1000 times (or until the end of the file, whichever comes first).

XP will be the last Windows OS I will ever use.

That’s a big statement for me. I’ve been running GNU/Linux servers and some desktop OS for years, but I’ve never gone completely Windows-free. But it is definitely time. Aside: I know many readers use Macs. And I will concede there is a strong argument to be made to do that. But look, I’ll be honest- I just don’t have that kind of money to spend on a computer right now.

So it’s time to say hello to the GNU/Linux desktop.

Now, after thinking about this a little bit, I realized my goal is not to mimic Windows, and I’m not really interested in a rich UI look and feel. I don’t need to be “wowed” by the graphics; I want a new computing experience. In light of that, I decided to skip Ubuntu. I also didn’t want a million packages I knew nothing about. I wanted more control over my computing, and in light of that I decided to skip Fedora and Suse. In the end I installed Blag, which claims to use 100% free software, with the exception I suppose of the Linux kernel.

Anyway, it seems like a good place to start. I immediately tarnished this image by installing my jdk. I installed emacs, which for some reason worked via yum install emacs but not via the package manager. I’ve also installed easyeclipse expert java version.

I’ve had trouble getting the wireless working on my laptop, and also don’t seem to have any sound at the moment. I’ll let you know how it goes…

UPDATE
BLAG didn’t last long. I wanted to run eclipse, but the distribution I wanted to use required GTK+ 2.2.1. The only GTK+ reference I could find, the GTK+ website, had GTK 1.2 as the latest release. I fished around on a few different yum repositories without any luck. Also, the sound didn’t work in BLAG.

I’ve since installed Suse, and now have bluetooth, wireless, and sound. I’m using the KDE desktop instead of Gnome.

UPDATE
I just realized I was reading the latest gtk+ release as 2.1.4 instead of what it really is, 2.14. Wow, that really threw me off!