My Contribution to the Public Domain




Well, here is my humble contribution to the Public Domain, sorted roughly in chronological order. I hope you will find some of the following helpful ...

Batch Convert a Number of Movies with Quicktime

Here is a little applescript that batch converts a number of movies into the format that you have used last time when you converted a movie using Quicktime.
Just unpack the gzip file (double-clicking should do it), then drag a number of movies onto the icon.

A few Basic Shapes as OmniGraffle Stencil

I have imported a few shapes from Visio into OmniGraffle and created a stencil of them. It contains a curly brace, a number of cloud shapes, and a number of block arrows. Just download the zip file, unpack it, and move the .gstencil file into ~/Library/Application Support/OmniGraffle/Stencils.

Move Off-Screen Windows to the Main Screen

Here is a little applescript that moves all windows that are almost or completely off-screen to a position on the screen (main display).
This can be very handy when you plug in your Mac laptop to different displays (such as projector and flat panel). Then, it often happens (to me, at least) that some windows get pushed to the very sides of the screen, so that only a few pixels of the windows remain on-screen.
I should mention that this version is based on the script provided by Jonathan Laliberte

Here is a little variation; the difference is: all windows that are more or less off-screen (no matter how much) are moved back so that they are completely on screen (if possible).

Counting Polygons in VRML / X3D

If you want to count the number of polygons in a VRML / X3D file without a VRML loader / brwoser, here is a little script.

Simplex Noise

Here is a port to GLUT of Stefan Gustavson's demo of "simplex noise", which was invented by Ken Perlin. My port compiles and runs fine under Mac OS X 10.4 on my Powerbook, and it should also compile fine under Linux (please let me know).

Klausur-Auswertung

(The following text is in German, because the Excel sheet is in German, too.)
Mit diesem Excel Sheet kann man Klausurergebnisse komfortabel auswerten, d.h., Noten erstellen und kleine Statistiken erzeugen. Hier sind 3 Beispiel-Snapshots: Bsp 1, Bsp 2, Bsp 3 (verschiedene Ausschnitte desselben Excel-Sheets).

Folgende Dinge berechnet das Sheet automatisch:

Alle diese Dinge werden automatisch berechnet, sobald man eine der Eingaben ändert (z.B. Punkte in einer Aufgabe, Schwellwerte, etc.). Folgende Daten muß man eingeben: Eine kurze Anleitung und Erläuterungen sind im Excel-Sheet enthalten.

Bemerkung: Beim Öffnen muß man "enable macros" anklicken (ansonsten funktioniert die Aktualisierung der Farbcodes der Noten nicht; alles andere funktioniert aber weiterhin).

Make Proceedings from many PDFs

This page explains an easy method to produce a single PDF (such as a proceedings) from a bunch of PDFs, such that the pages of the single PDF have headings and consecutive page numbers.

Print Your Mac's IP

This little script prints your external as well as your internal IP on the command line.

These two IPs might be different if you are behind a router or a NAT device. The script is written in Python (which is installed on your Mac).

Find Duplicate Files on the Mac

Here is a little command line tool for Mac OS X (10.4, Tiger) that finds duplicate files in a directory tree. Just put the binary somewhere in your PATH, e.g., ~/bin.

Details: Find files that are (byte-wise) identical, but are (possibly) scattered among different directories. This might happen, for instance, if you copy a large directory tree and (accidentally) resolve symbolic links during the copying.
The output (on stdout) consists of two lists (mainly): first a list of files that have been found to be equal, one file per line, and the last file within each group of equal files gets a period appended; second, the list of duplicates sorted by complete pathname.
Special files, like .DS_Store, are not considered. Also, special directories, like CVS, are skipped. In addition, only regular files are considered, no symbolic links or other special files.
The implementation uses a number of optimization tricks to speed up the search. On my G4, scanning a directory tree consisting of 40,000 files in total, containing 7,000 duplicates, took about 3 minutes.

And here is the source code as XCode 2.4 project.

Screen Saver for the Mac

On my Mac (at last ;-) ) I wanted a screen saver like the one I had on my Linux box. Since I couldn't find the one I wanted, I wrote it myself.

So, here is ArtSaver (version 1.7; see the ChangeLog for the changes over the previous version). It is like the built-in Slide Show screensaver on Mac OS X, but with many more options and features:

ArtSaver 1.7 works only under Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard); version 1.6.3 should work on both 10.5 and 10.4 (Tiger), but I couldn't test it.

Installation: just open the disk image, and copy ArtSaver.saver to the directory /Library/Screen Savers or ~/Library/Screen Savers (depending on write permissions and taste). Then go to System Preferences -> Desktop & Screen Savers.

ArtSaver should work out-of-the box with its built-in defaults. However, in ArtSaver's configuration you'll probably want to specify the directory where ArtSaver can find the images (default = ~/Pictures), and whether and how ArtSaver should display the image name. All other options in the other two sections probably work by default, but they are there if you need to change them.

When you close the configuration dialogue, the screensaver recursively scans the directory tree containing the files, and saves the list of images in a database (its plist file). (While doing that, ArtSaver still continues to display images from the old image list and a spinning bar). After that, everytime ArtSaver gets invoked, it will just read this list, and never has to go through the whole directory tree, which can be a huge time savings, if there are many images. Scanning a directory tree of 300,000 files (110,000 of which are images) takes about 1 minute on my Intel-based Mac Book Pro (both with or without using Spotlight).

If you enjoy this screen saver, I would really appreciate a donation. (It would also keep me motivated for further enhancements ;-) )
If you prefer not to use PayPal, you may also buy me something from my Amazon wishlist

Please notice that I put ArtSaver under a copyright and license that basically says it's free for personal use but not for commercial use.

And here is the source code as XCode 3.0 project.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please don't hesitate to send me an email at zach in.tu-clausthal.de.

Acknowledgement: goes to Stéphane Sudre: his code got me started, and he helped along the way by answering lots of questions. Also, i'd like to thank the kind people on comp.sys.mac.programmer.help, in particular, Michael Ash, Doc O'Leary, David Phillip Oster, Nick Hristov, Uli Kusterer, Patrick Machielse, Matt Neuburg.

Convert CSV to Mail Aliases

I transfered all my contacts from my good old Revo to a Siemens CX65. But I send my email under Linux using mutt. So here is a little Perl script that converts a CSV file into a file containing an email alias for each name. Prerequisite: the Perl module Text::xSV (see the man page perlmodinstall for installation instruction).

XScreensaver hack (on Linux)

Here is a little hack for xscreensaver that can run a slideshow on the background (root window) of your display. (But see the next item!) Special feature: it searches a complete directory tree for images.
Prerequisites: xv & perl.
Tested under RedHat 7.2 with xscreensaver 3.33.

Slide Show Screen Saver on Linux

I have added three options to chbg that can make it better at presenting a slide show. The options can (I use it together with xscreensaver to have it show some of my 26,000+ fine art images.)
Since I was not able to contact the author, and I can't check it in on sourceforge, I make the source available here.
Tested under RedHat 7.2 with xscreensaver 3.33.

Vim

vim 5.6 (1.5 MB) for SGI, IRIX 6.2 and higher.
Special feature: it has been configured so that you can type in Japanese characters (and probably other Asian languages) via XIM.
In more details, this is how I configured it: 
setenv CC cc; setenv CFLAGS "-O -n32 -xansi "
./configure \
	--prefix=/igd/a4/software/vim \
	--enable-cscope  --enable-multibyte  --enable-xim \
	--enable-fontset  --enable-perlinterp  --enable-pythoninterp \
	--disable-gtk-check
and this is the :version which this vim prints: 
VIM - Vi IMproved 5.6 (2000 Jan 16, compiled Feb  2 2000 23:41:28)
Compiled by zach@xxx, with (+) or without (-):
+autocmd +browse +builtin_terms +byte_offset +cindent +cmdline_compl
+cmdline_info +comments +cryptv +cscope +dialog_con_gui +digraphs -emacs_tags
+eval +ex_extra +extra_search -farsi +file_in_path -osfiletype +find_in_path
+fork() +GUI_Motif -hangul_input +insert_expand -langmap +linebreak +lispindent
+menu +mksession +modify_fname +mouse -mouse_dec -mouse_gpm -mouse_netterm
+mouse_xterm +multi_byte -perl +quickfix +python +rightleft +scrollbind
+smartindent -sniff +statusline +syntax +tag_binary +tag_old_static
-tag_any_white -tcl +terminfo +textobjects +title +user_commands +visualextra
+viminfo +wildignore +wildmenu +writebackup +X11 +xfontset +xim +brokenlocale
+xterm_clipboard -xterm_save
   system vimrc file: "$VIM/vimrc"
     user vimrc file: "$HOME/.vimrc"
      user exrc file: "$HOME/.exrc"
  system gvimrc file: "$VIM/gvimrc"
    user gvimrc file: "$HOME/.gvimrc"
    system menu file: "$VIMRUNTIME/menu.vim"
  fall-back for $VIM: "/igd/a4/software/vim/share/vim"
Compilation: cc -c -I. -Iproto -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -DUSE_GUI_MOTIF -DFUNCPROTO=7
 -D NARROWPROTO -I/usr/include/X11 -O -n32 -xansi  -I/path/include/python1.5
Linking: cc -n32 -o vim -L. -lXext -lXm -lXt -lXt -lX11 -ltermlib
 /path/lib/python1.5/config/libpython1.5.a -ldl -lm

Simplistic LaTeX to HTML Converter

yal2h ("Yet Another LaTeX to HTML converter")
A simple Perl script which takes a LaTeX file and spits out one HTML file. It doesn't have all the fancy features other converters have, but it's simple to use, and it works for me.

IGC (Go client)

igc v0.752 (500k)
The ASCII-based (text-based) Go client for IGS (Internet Go Server). It might even work for NNGS. (Someone on rec.games.go seemd to recall that igc was the first client ;-) )
See the ChangeLog for more information about what I improved and changed since version 0.751.

Tool to produce Diff's in HTML format from CVS

cvshtmldiff (little Perl script)
For HTML files under CVS control, this is a more comfortable diff utility than cvs diff or xdiff. It is not similar or comparable to cvs2html or cvsweb!
Usage: cvshtmldiff file.html.
This will produce another HTML file file_diff.html with the differences of file.html and one revision earlier highlighted by color.
Notice: this little script is not a HTML parser. It can be arbitrarily complex to produce correct HTML from a diff! Therefore, no attempt is being made to do that. ;-) If the results are unacceptable, you might want to try tidy on the resulting HTML file (can be obtained from www.w3.org).
See the comments at the beginning of the script.



 by ChangeDetection (it's free and it's private).
Gabriel Zachmann
Last modified: Thu Jun 26 18:51:01 MDT 2008