Sublime Porte

XP3eSD

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:45:31 +0000

This is a small utility to modify a Windows installation CD so that it can be installed onto an SD card (eg. for use in your SSD-based netbooks with little onboard storage). You just need to copy the contents of your CD to your hard drive, then run the utility and voila it will produce an iso ready to be burned to CD for installing Windows XP onto your computer so that it can then transferred to an SD card. The installation instructions are geared towards the Asus EeePC.

This how-to is based on the one here but instead the first 12 or so steps are replaced by a little utility that can modify all of the required Windows install files for you.

Note: This process will wipe all data from your 3epc, backup any personal files you want to keep.

Requirements

PC running Windows XP/2000 with a CD/DVD burner.
USB Flashdrive (Or some way to transfer files to the 3epc once Windows is installed)
SD Card, a fast SDHC is recommended of at least 2GB.
XP3eSD Utility
Hitachi Microdrive Filter Drivers
Partedmagic (or another bootable CD with disk cloning software)
Windows XP CD (SP2 Only Tested, may work with others)
Asus Eee PC (Of course!!)

Instructions:

Copy all files from your XP Install CD to a folder on your Hard Drive
Download the XP3eSD utility and run it to create a new install CD capable of installing Windows to boot off the SD card reader
Boot your 3epc from the CD made in step 2
Install Windows onto a FAT partition, deleting all the existing partitions
When windows boots for the first time turn off the swap file, system restore, and the screensaver.
Then stick your USB thumb drive into the EEE with the Hitachi Microdrive Filter.
Next copy the files from your thumb drive to the desktop and then properly remove the thumb drive.
Unzip the microdrive files to a folder on the desktop. And Insert your SDHC Card into the EEE.
You need to then Hit Start go to run, and type regedit. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\USBSTOR\
Inside that you should find a directory called something like Disk&Ven_USB2.0&Prod_CardReader_SD0&Rev_0100. Open it. Inside that you should find another directory wich is just a bunch of numbers. Open it. In the right pane you should see a key called “Hardware ID” Right click on it, and select modify. It should list about 7 lines of text. Copy ONLY the first line to the clipboard. Hit cancel, close regedit.
Open cfadisk.inf in the directory you unzipped the microdrive filter to. Edit the section called [cfadisk_device] so that rather than containing 11 lines, just have one line. The line begins with: %MicroDrive_devdesc% = cfadisk_install,
After the comma, hit ctrl V to paste what you coppied from the registry into the file then save the file.
Go to Device manager. Under disk drives, you should see SiliconMotion and USB2.0 Card Reader. Right click on the card reader and click update driver. Direct the driver updater window to the Hitachi driver you just edited. It won’t detect the driver automatically, you have to specifty that your supplying the disk for the hardware and force it to use the driver.
Reboot using the Partedmagic CD or USB Flashdrive.
Create a FAT32 partition on the SD card, same size as the one on the SSD in your 3epc
Use ‘fdisk -l’ to find out the partition names of your SSD and SD.
Type this command into a prompt: ‘dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1′ When it finishes (it will take some time) type this command: ‘dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1′ (Note: If fdisk reported your SSD and SD as different than sda and sdb respectively, you must change that in the dd commands, if unsure ask in the support forums)
When it finishes the task is complete, reboot and select to boot from the card reader
Re-image the SSD of your 3epc with your restore DVD or USB.

Google Translate in Python

admin — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 23:53:51 +0000

I was looking around for an example of how to access Google’s Translation services from Python, and all the examples I found seemed too bloated to me, so I decided to write my own, and managed it in just a few lines of code. Perhaps the Ajax API didn’t exist when others wrote theirs, but it’s certainly much easier now.

So here it is, gtrans.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python

# author: sublime@3euser.com

# usage: gtrans

import sys

import urllib

url = ‘http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&q=’+urllib.quote(‘ ‘.join(sys.argv[3:]))+’&langpair=’+sys.argv[1]+’%7C’+sys.argv[2]

# Google returns the result string in exactly the same format as a python dictionary, just need to escape ‘null’ values.

transtext = eval(urllib.urlopen(url).read().replace(‘null,’, ‘”",’))

if transtext['responseData']:

print “\n”, transtext['responseData']['translatedText'], “\n”

url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&q='+urllib.quote(' '.join(sys.argv[3:]))+'&langpair='+sys.argv[1]+'%7C'+sys.argv[2]

transtext = eval(urllib.urlopen(url).read().replace('null,', '"",'))

if transtext['responseData']:
print "\n", transtext['responseData']['translatedText'], "\n"

Google Wave

admin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:28:37 +0000

I just received my Google Wave Developer Sandbox account today, and so I’ve spent a good part of the evening playing around with it, finding my bearings in the interface, and working out how it all works. So far it looks like a very nicely integrated communication system, with a lot of API access to ensure it develops rapidly. There’s quite a few bots already running, for code syntax highlighting, for blogging, for starting discussion groups and a whole swath of other things.

Here is a screenshot of a wave:

Wave hints & tips

This wave is a collection of hints and tips on how to get started using Wave, and is a really handy FAQ to get things rolling once you’ve got your account setup.

And here is a shot of the entire interface for Wave, with a wave open that demos some of the stuff that can be embedded into a wave, in this case Google Maps.

Google Wave interface

As far as browser support goes, I’ve mostly been using it in Chromium (3.0.196.0), where it seems to work best (Surprise Surprise). It didn’t even recognise Firefox 3.5 as being a browser capable of handling Wave for some reason, but 3.0.11 was fine. The experience is a little laggy, but that could just be because it’s only a preview implementation, and therefore is probably not well distributed (like most other Google services usually are).

Ultralight text viewer

admin — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:47:08 +0000

textview is my first application written in Genie, a python-like language which is converted into C and then compiled as a normal C program. The language is cross-platform also, and I have compiled textview on Windows just to prove it!

Although I think there’s more than enough text editors available for Linux, I was unable to find a really lightweight text viewer that could also perform basic editing functions. Previously I used leafpad or gedit for this purpose, but even that is overkill, since most of the time I just view Readme files etc. which don’t need syntax highlighting, vast arrays of menu options or dialogs popping up asking me if I want to save etc.

Be warned that textview does not have any undo or backup features, and probably never will. It’s primarily for use as a viewer, not an editor. To enter edit mode, press escape, to return to view-only mode press escape again. To save any changes, press “w” in view-only mode.

Downloads

textview_0.1.deb (deb package)

textview-windows.zip (compiled for Windows)

You will also need to download GTK for windows to run this.

textview.gs (source code)