iPod Lyrics

Tired of manually downloading songs lyrics and copy-paste into plain-text files to view them in iPod's "Notes", I searched the web for a site that could do it for me. I only found some applications to download and use on my computer but it was not what I was looking for, so i wrote a simple python script to do the job.
After thinking a little about it I realized that I could simply write a "one page" website that sent request to my little script... so I did it and if you open you browser at http://ipodlyrics.x10hosting.com/ you'll find a beta version of it.

3mpty

Ingen: Opensource Modular Synth

After trying alsa modular synth and seeing it crashing every 2 mins, I decided to search the web for something better... and I found Ingen.

Ingen is a software that uses LADSPA and LV2 plugins, connected with each other, to create synths. LV2 is a new format of plugin, that probably will substitute the old and limited LADSPA if all goes right.
LV2 gives the programmer the possibility to create a custom GUI, just like VSTs do.

You can install Ingen from your distro's repository, but if the version you get is not up to date, you should checkout the latest from SVN: If you are able do deal with the console, the second is the better choice, because it means more stable software.

On this page there's the step-by-step guide to compile it from SVN.
(The build system, waf, needs python 2.x to work.)

If you get an error ending with

/giomm-2.4/giomm/error.h:97: error: expected declaration before ‘}’ token Build failed
-> task failed (err #1):
{task: cxx ConnectWindow?.cpp -> ConnectWindow?_1.o}

I managed (in a not so good way) to "solve" it:
Just open the file error.h (that should be in some folder like "/usr/include/giomm-2.4/giomm/") and skip the source to the line indicated by the number indicated (in this case, 97). After that, change the line from "HOST_NOT_FOUND," to "HOST_NOT_FOUND_," and do the same for the next line.
Then recompile with ./waf and all should work fine. After compiling, reopen error.h and revert the changes.

Now, a simple "sudo ./waf install" or "./waf install" if you are already root installs the app on your system.
To run it, if you don't see it on the app menu, open a shell and write "ingen -eg": this will start ingen with the graphical frontend.

As I wrote before, Ingen needs plugins installed on your computer, otherwise it is quite useless.
Here are some links to good plugins:

• Calf
• SWH
• Blop
• Misc LV2 plugins

Ingen automatically adds LV2 plugins in its menu, while for LADSPA ones you must right click->find.

If you have any problem or question, just leave a comment or write some line on Ingen's IRC channel on freenode.

I hope to write a short tutorial to describe how to create a simple synth with ADSR ampli.

3mpty

Python CGI Debugging howto: Part 2

Ok, in the previous post I wrote that probably there was a better way to display errors for cgi script in python, so, here it is:

import cgitb
cgitb.enable() #This enable it all

Two lines :)

Simply put them at the beginning of a script and they do all the work. It's also possible to output errors in a log file instead of displaying them in the browser of the user (just take a look at python documentation on cgitb.enable()), a far better solution for production environment.

Python CGI Debugging howto

I found this useful when you are trying to debug a python script running on a remote server (that has a previous version of python, in my case :( ).

To show the classic interpreter error messages just do this:

import sys
sys.stderr = sys.stdout

print "Content-type: text/html\n"

In this way, we set the errors to output text on the standard output (in other words, we redirect the errors to the standard output), then we print the standard HTTP header to inform the browser that the following text will be an HTML page (even text/plain works fine) and if we get an error, it will be in some part of the page source :D.

Simple, probably not the best, but it works.

KlonDuke 0.1

Here's my new useless software: KlonDuke
It's a graphical application based on the FLTK2 toolkit that lets you edit savefiles of the iPod game "Klondike".

(You must have already saved a game to use this tool)
It's really simple, just open it, click on "Open", select the "datafile" in the directory IPODDIR/iPod_Control/gamedata_RW/110xx (Where IPODDIR is the directory where the disk is mounted on unix-like systems or something like F: in Windows, and 110xx is the game ID starting by 110 with the last two digits changing from version to version), edit whatever you want (if it shows a wrong player name it's better that you simply close the program), click "save" and then "close" or "quit".

If something goes wrong you can delete the datafile from klondike's directory and the game will create a new one.

Screenshot:


Sources: klonduke-0.1.tar.gz
SHA1 Checksum: 334d212c228e354a9643693f1ecd51b7c028763a
Linux binary: klonduke-0.1_linux.tar.gz
SHA1 Checksum: 5441f93807876dda33dfb8b454a86717647fdd8b
Windows binary: I'm having problem with FLTK2 and MinGW
Mac binary: I don't have a Mac!

P.S.:
If you want to make a precompiled executable that isn't listed there simply leave a comment. I need a Mac binary and a MS VC++ one (VC is better than MINGW).

FLTK2 howto: Display images on widgets

I spent some time figuring out how to do this. Yes, you simply call:

widgetName->image(myPrettyImage);

But (at least for me) this did not work.
So I searched in the documentation but all seemed right.
The next logical step was "search on Google" (everyone should know that "he is your friend").

I read something on a forum regarding the function fltk::register_images() (Absolutely not documented) and I understood that it must be called before you use any other image-related stuff with fltk2.

So, if you want a widget to display your beautiful image you must code a main() like this:

#include "myMainWindowWithBackgrounImage.h"
#include <fltk/SharedImage.h>
#include <fltk/run.h>

int main()
{
    fltk::register_images();
    myMainWindowWithBackgroundImage win;
    win.show();
    return fltk::run();
}

You must then link the executable to libpng, libjpeg and libfltk2_images passing "-lpng -ljpeg -lfltk2_images" to the compiler.