Code by Jean-Marc Liotier

When scratching my itches I sometimes end up cobbling together new tools because the ones available do not satisfy me. They work for me. Best case is that they will work for you, but that may be a bit too hopeful. But who knows... Maybe someone who has similar problems will find bits of them somewhat useful. In any case, that is why I leave them here - I know they are horrendously written and make it quite evident that I'm a clueless hack, but such was the state of my knowledge at the time of their writing... Now I'm more experienced, but only because I took opportunities for clueless experiments !

News and updates about this code are announced on my blog.

Web plumbing

• latitude2brightkite.sh Checks in your Google Latitude position to Brightkite using the Google Public Location Badge.


• Laconica2IRC is an RSS to IRC gateway customized for the Laconi.ca microblogging service.


• Proof of concept of notifying an IRC channel from PHP. Based on the examples packaged with Net_SmartIRC which is available in Debian as php-net-smartirc.


• Jabber presence indicator in a web page. It is made possible by class.jabber.php, a Jabber library for PHP. I customized one of the examples provided with class.jabber.php. It has many rough edges such as the user’s name sprinkled across the markup code instead of being a proper parameter, or the page’s presence being sent to the polled account instead of being hidden. And it is quite slow because it queries at load time. But I like it better than the example packaged with class.jabber.php. The original announcement of the Jabber presence indicator in a web page is available on my blog.


• bipIRCnickmailnotify.sh sends bip IRC proxy log lines by mail when a specific string is mentioned by other users. Uses since - a unix utility similar to tail that unlike tail only shows the lines appended since the last execution.

Applications

• My modified Wondershaper for better VOIP QOS is available here. It works just as advertised : with the right priorities set, lots of background traffic on the uplink have no perceptible effects on voice quality.


• Patch that modifies Pligg's 9.7 submit.php to provide post submission restriction by user level and IRC notification of posts :
  • The original submit.php from Pligg 9.7
  • submit.php from Pligg 9.7 patched by to provide post restriction by user level and IRC notification of post
  • diff between the above files.
  
  
• Lilina modified to output RSS as well as HTML. Lilina is a RSS aggregator that I extended using Feedcreator to make it output its feed as RSS as a supplement to its excellent HTML interface. The original announcement of Lilina with RSS feed is available on my blog.


• Wdict was a little CGI Dict wrapper I once wrote. I do not know why anybody could still be interested in this insignificant piece of lousy insecure code, but I still get hits daily so maybe it is still useful to some people for some very mysterious reasons...

Systems administration scripts

• Munin monitoring plugin script to monitor the number of users in an IRC channel
   
• lbdb-fetchalladdresses-daily.sh fetches all addresses contained in the messages in a maildir hierarchy not older than a certain age and stores them in the lbdb m_inmail database. If you do not have an existing lbdb database, you should run lbdb-fetchalladdresses-firsttime.sh first.


• teach-sa.sh is the way I feedback my users spam and ham to Spamassassin for learning. This really is a marginal hack because it automates things that you may really want to keep under human control. In case you wonder, yes I really do use this in a production environment and it works as advertised.


• go_awstats.sh completely automates the trivial yet tedious task of Awstats batch Apache log reports production, and it even does it somewhat smartly - I'm talking about the "only rebuilding what needs to be rebuilt" part, not the code itself which is plain stupid. Also in production here as the sample output testifies.

Digital photography utilities

• dir_date_serial_rename_all.sh is a small shell scripts that automates my habit of picture files renaming. I believe I have found a good choice of meta-information to pack in the file name and make it both unique and useful to humans.


• iptc_tag_qnd.sh is a trivial, quick and dirty way to tag a bunch of files with the generic IPTC metadata of your choice. Edit the script to your taste with your own data and you are set. Yes it is most trivial, but it is news to me and it is all I need... So there - scratching your own itch and all that...


• OneTouchPhotoDumpToJournal.sh is a trivial script that saves me much manipulation each time I come back to my workstation with removable media full of photos. It copies all images from a removable media to the directory of the day (created on the fly if not existing), autorotates them and sets the permissions right. OneTouchUbuntuAutomountedCFDumpToJournal.sh does the same but it does not handles the mounting and unmounting because it assumes a removable medium that Ubuntu mounts automatically. As a bonus there is a very slight addition of polish. I should backport some of the polish to the other script, but since I no longer use it and received no feedback about it my motivation is quite low.

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