Free hobbies software for linux

KXplayer is a very simple media player, based on xine. Its my hobby-project - just a way to get a better knowledge of KDEs internals.

Besides I wanted to learn programming C++ and since I believe the best way to learn programing is to write a program, I just made my mind to write a multimedia player.

Since it is a player, this word had to be in present in the title. The K and X appered there because of KDE (interface) and XINE (backend).

I took the decision to write a player because I needed one. I needed a good media player for KDE (something like XMMS with KDE inderface), which would be working as reliably as possible.

At present my PC is a 750MHz Duron with 128MB RAM and its almost imposible to work in OpenOffice.org and listen to MP3/OGG at the same time. Running XMMS and OpenOffice 1.x together on my Mandrake results in sound fragmentation.

For some time Ive been using boombox (you can find it in kde-apps). It is based on xine and I found it working better than xmms - almost no fragmentation. Unfortunately boomboxs interface is a bit strange (IMHO) and its not saving the equalizer settings (very annoying).

Harvs Hamshack Hack is a remaster of the KNOPPIX distro for Amateur Radio Operators (Hams).

This project is directed primarily at Amateur Radio enthusiasts (Hams) who have no prior experience with LINUX. Hopefully, experienced LINUX users (perhaps, even a "guru" or two) will give it a spin and offer corrections and suggestions for improvement ... in fact, they are obligated to do so!

The CD contains a complete LINUX-Knoppix operating system and enough software to accomplish the usual tasks we all perform daily from our homes ... web browsing, email, letter writing, etc.

In addition, there is a huge library of programs for our Amateur Radio hobby.

The Hamshack Hack is a "Live CD". As a "Live CD" system, no installation to your machines hard drive is necessary. The whole package will run off the CD by building a "ram disk" in your machines memory. As soon as you re-boot your machine, the LINUX system vaporizes and youll be back with whatever system is installed on your hard drive.

To obtain your very own copy of the "the Hack", you must download the "hamshack.iso" image file and then, using your favorite CD burner (I use K3B on Linux, or Nero on Windows), burn the image to a CD. Pick the "Burn CD Image" option, else youll end up with just another copy of the .iso file. Then, when the smoke clears, youll boot your machine with this new CD.

Large projects usually already have some type of mechanism for build numbering, because keeping track of which build is the latest can be very important information. However, even small hobby projects can benefit from a self-maintaining build numbering system.
BuildNumber project is a utility to add auto-incrementing build numbers to C and C++ projects. BuildNumber will create and maintain a single header file called buildnumber.h for your project which you can #include to access the current build number. BuildNumber is written in pure C for maximum portability, but the binary can also be used with C++ projects, and the source should compile with almost any C/C++ compiler.
The entire contents of a sample buildnumber.h are displayed below:
/* Generated by BuildNumber version 0.8 */
#ifndef BUILD_NUMBER_H_
#define BUILD_NUMBER_H_
#define BUILDNUMBER 53
#define BUILDNUMBER_STR "53"
#endif /* BUILD_NUMBER_H_ */
Every time you rebuild your project, BuildNumber will automatically update this file for you: set it up once, and it just works. You can compile individual files (to confirm syntax, etc) without incrementing the build number, because it only updates when you actually build or make your project.
Main features:
- Written in pure C for maximum portability
- Simple concept, simple solution, simple code
- Works seemlessly in C and C++ projects
- Sets up in minutes, then its entirely automated
- Works with virtually every C/C++ compiler on virtually every system
- BSD License for maximum freedom, even in commercial projects

Acme::OneHundredNotOut is a raise of the bat, a tip of the hat.

I have just released my 100th module to CPAN, the first time that anyone has reached that target. As some of you may know, I am getting ready to go back to college and reinvent myself from being a programmer into being a missionary. I dont forsee that many more Perl modules coming out of this.

Of course, this doesnt mean that Im going to abjure usage of Perl forever; any time theres a computer and something I need automated, out will come the Swiss Army Chainsaw and the job will get done. In fact, we recently needed to manipulate some text from a mission handbook to translate it into Japanese, and Perl was there handling and collating all that.

But 100 modules is a convenient place to stop and take stock, and I hope that those of you who have benefitted from my modules, programs or writing about Perl will forgive me a certain spot of self-indulgence as I look back over my CPAN career, especially since I feel that the diversity of modules that Ive produced is a good indication of the diversity of what can be done with Perl.

Lets begin, then, with some humble beginnings, and then catch up on recent history.
The Embarrassing Past

Contrary to popular belief, I was not always a CPAN author. I started writing modules in 1998, immediately after reading the first edition of the Perl Cookbook - yes, you can blame Nat and Tom for all this. The first module that I released was Tie::DiscoveryHash, since Id just learnt about tied hashes. As with many of my modules, it was an integral part of another software project which I actually never finished, and now cant find.

The first module that I ever wrote (but, by a curious quirk of fate, precisely the fiftieth module I released) was called String::Tokeniser, which is still a reasonably handy way of getting an iterator over tokenising a string. (Someone recently released String::Tokenizer, which makes me laugh.) This too was for an abortive project, webperl, an application of Don Knuths WEB system of structured documentation to Perl. However, given the code quality of these two modules, its perhaps just as well that the projects never saw the light of day.

There are a few other modules Id rather like to forget, too. Devel::Pointer was a sick joke that went badly wrong - it allowed people to use pointers in Perl. Some people failed to notice that referring to memory locations directly in an extremely high-level language was a dangerous and silly thing to do, and actually used the damned thing, and I started getting requests for support for it. Then at some point in 2001, when I should really have known better, I developed an interest in Microsofts .NET and the C# language, which I still think is pretty neat; but I decided it might be a good idea to translate the Mono projects tokenizer and parser into Perl, ending up with C::Sharp. I never got around to doing the parser part, or indeed anything else with it, and so it died a lonely death in a dark corner of CPAN. GTK::HandyClist was my foray into programming graphical applications, which started and ended there.

Bundle::SDK::SIMON was actually the slides from a talk on my top ten favourite CPAN modules - except that this changes so quickly over time, it doesnt really make much sense any more.

Finally, Array::FileReader was an attempt to optimize a file access process. Unfortunately, my "optimization" ended up introducing more overheads than the naive solution. It all goes to show. Since then, Mark-Jason Dominus, another huge influence in the development of my CPAN career, has written Tie::File, which not only has a better name but is actually efficient too.

The Internals Phase

1999-2000 were disastrous years for me personally but magnificent years Perl-sonally. Stuck in a boring job and a tiny flat in the middle of Tokyo, I had plenty of time to get stuck into more Perl development. I felt that getting involved with perl5-porters would be a good way of gettting to know more about Perl, and so I needed a hobby horse - an issue of Perls development that I cared about. Since I was in Japan and working a lot with non-Latin text, Unicode support seemed a good thing to work on, and so Unicode::Decompose appeared, while I fixed up a substantial part of the post-5.6 core Unicode support.

Id recommend this way to anyone who wants to get more involved in the Perl community, although I was very lucky in terms of who else happened to be around at the time: Gurusamy Sarathy was extremely gracious in helping me turn my fledgling C code into something fit for the Perl core, and he also helped me understand the perl5-porters etiquette (yes, there was some at the time) and what makes a good patch, while Jarkko Hietaniemi was always good for suggestions of interesting things for keen people to work on. Seriously, get involved. If I can do it, anyone can.
Anyway, this fixation with understanding the Perl 5 internals, and especially the Perl 5 compiler, (due to yet another of my Perl influences, the great Malcolm Beattie) led to quite a torrent of modules, from ByteCache, an implementation of just-in-time compilation for Perl modules, through B::Flags and B::Tree to help visualising the Perl op tree, to uninit, B::Generate, optimizer and B::Utils for modifying it.

Perl About The House

Now we abandon chronological order somewhat and take a look at the various areas in which Ive used Perl. One of these areas has been the automation of everyday life: checking my bank balance with Finance::Bank::LloydsTSB (the first Perl module to interface to personal internet banking, no less) and my phone bill with a release of Tony Bowdens Data::BT::PhoneBill.

Finance::Bank::LloydsTSB was meant to go with Finance::QIF, my Quicken file parser, to produce another now-abandoned idea, a Perl finances manager. It seemed that Im only capable of producing modules, not full standalone applications - or at least, it seemed that way until I produced Bryar, my blogging software, based on the concepts from Rael Dornfests blosxom and beginning my adventures with Andy Wardleys Template Toolkit. Bryar also tuned me in to the Model-View-Controller framework idea, of which more later.

Another project I briefly played with was a personal robot, using the Sphinx/Festival speech handling and recognition modules from Cepstral and Kevin Lenzo. I didnt have X10, so I couldnt shout "lights" into the air in a wonderfully scifi way, but I could shout "mail" and have a summary of my inbox read to me, "news" to get the latest BBC news headlines, and "time" to hear the time. Of course, getting computers to tell the time nicely takes a little bit of work. I dont like "Its eleven oh-three pee em", since thats not what someone would say if you asked them the time. I wanted my robot to say "Its just after eleven", and thats what Time::Human does. Shame about the localisation.

PGID3 is an ID3v1 and v2 tag editor for manipulating the information on files such as MP3s. PGID3 Tag Editor project is written in PHP and uses PHP-GTK, so it can take advantage of the GTK+ Toolkit for rendering a GUI.

The program itself is broken into three parts, a PHP Function Library called Pid Three (Pid3), a PHP CLI interface (PCLID3), and the GTK+ GUI itself. All three parts come together ready to go, so do not go freaking about uber amounts of dependencies to fill. All together they create the PGID3 Tag Editor.

"But Bob," you might say, "PHP is for the web!" Sure it is, but you should then check out the link below for the PHP Command Line Interface. That document describes using PHP to develop shell and desktop applications. Why PHP? Because I like to abuse it, that is a little hobby of mine.

Simply, PGID3 is an ID3 tag editor for MP3 files. The ID3 tags are what tell your media player the information about the tune such as title, album, etc. You can get by with slack tags if you just use a player like XMMS or Winamp, but if you have a portable like an iPod or some kind of database for the files, then correct and neat tags are a must. PGID3 can handle both the v1 and v2 of ID3 tags.

As for the program itself, it is the combonation of three seperate pieces that together work to create a user friendly envrionment to manipulate your ID3 tags. The base of it all is the Pid Three Function library, which is a fully custom set of functions for the reading and writing of ID3 tags. Since these are seperate from the application itself, the actual dirty work of messing with the data can be easily updated as well as easily included into other projects.

The second part of PGID3 is the Command Line Interface that I have lovingly called PCLID3. Using this you can manipulate your tags from the command line without using any type of graphical front end. By not having this built into the GUI, the opportunity is left open to build alternate GUIs, or even just not use any at all.

The third and final piece is the PHP-GTK GUI. This is the actual PGID3 component, though all of the parts together form a complete package under the PGID3 name. I designed this GUI to be light, compact, and solve as many problems in one spot as possible. As a bonus feature, PGID3 has built in intergration with QueryXMMS which is a command line utility for Linux that can ask XMMS what is currently playing so PGID3 can open it. This speeds up editing of playlists considerably.

Enough acronymns, what about features? Well, it is an ID3 editor so the features I would expect to find in one is what it has. It has the ability to read, write, and strip ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags from files. You can open a file from anywhere in the filesystem with a dialog, or using the above mentioned QueryXMMS integration you can zap right to whatever XMMS is playing.

If you leave the comment field blank when you write a tag, it fills it in automaticly with "Tagged by PGID3" which might be an easily disabled in future releases - depends if I get any feedback on that. It also automaticly removes excess whitespace on the end of tags which if I recall correctly happens because Winamp pads with spaces instead of nuls. Anyway it cleans that for you. Stripping a tag automaticly unchecks the related checkbox for writing it back, and the boxes are dynamicly checked as you load a file depending if it already has a v1 or v2 tag.

There are also a few keyboard shortcuts. F1 toggles the Write ID3v1 checkbox, and F2 toggles the Write ID3v2 one. F9 opens the currently playing file in XMMS, and naturally Enter writes tags.

WWW::Scraper::Google scrapes www.Google.com.

Caveat Kleptor

Please note that using the Google Scraper module (may) be a violation of Googles "Terms of Service", of which your humble author has been repeatedly reminded. The TOS is not as easy to locate as some of these correspondents have suggested (without a smile), but you can find the TOS at http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html

Briefly, the relevant part is the "No Automated Querying" section. Its a kind of "do as I say, not as I do" dictum. Your author has tried to divine exactly what it means. On the surface its pretty clear, but if you follow the thread you will realize that it doesnt lead to a place any of us want to be. However, Google Incs desire is clear enough. They do not want to be *abused* for the exclusive benefit of someone else.

Scraper is not a tool well suited for this kind of abuse. It is designed to be generally configurable and, as such, it is not particularly efficient. It obeys the "robot.txt" rules published by the web-server. It would require some effort on a users part to cirumvent this feature. The Google.pm does not do a "meta-search" on Google. Even if your humble author removed Google.pm from the Scraper suite, it would be trivially easy for someone to build a Google module for Scraper (their format is very simple compared to others).

I believe that Google Inc. understands a little interloping (in moderation) is beneficial to all. I should note that Google Inc. has not notified your author of any concern on their part. This has been done by third parties who, for whatever reasons of their own, feel it necessary to interject themselves in others disputes, even when no such dispute exists.

Keep in mind that this is Googles livelihood. Should your use of Scraper be your hobby, or even part of your livelihood, remember it never helps to hit someone where they live. They will defend themselves to the death (even if that death is yours).
Scraper is a handy little tool for getting to stuff you cant get to otherwise. Lets keep it that way!

Intruder Alert is an arcade maze game.

Intruder Alert is a free top-down 2D maze arcade game written in FreePascal using the SDL library for multimedia output.

Its a hobby project and was inspired by 80s classics like wolfenstein 2d and alien breed.

The Eagle EDA software is composed of tightly integrated modules for PCB design, including Schematic Capture, Board Layout, and Autorouter.
Eagle has a free full-function (only board size limited) non-commercial license available for hobby and educational use as well. Windows, DOS, and of course, Linux versions are available.
Enhancements:
- The latest version 4.16 fixes some problems.