Little programs and tools

Bulk Conversion of Images into an OpenOffice Presentation

I wrote a little perl script based on the OpenOffice::OODoc perl module to take a list of images and create an OpenOffice Presentation out of the images, one full size on each slide. This script was published as an article on Linux-Gazette. Unfortunately somewhere between the 1.x version of OpenOffice::OODoc and the newer 2.0.X version my script broke. There is an update also published on Linux-Gazette and you can grab two versions of the updated img2ooImpress.pl script here:

• The first version works just like the original -- it puts one image full size on each slide and adapts the aspect ratio as needed. This is intended to be used to convert slides which are created by e.g. the LaTeX beamer class into a OpenOffice or PowerPoint Presentation.
• The second version is simply taking the images and puts them one on each slide while preserving the aspect ratio. So this can be used to create an Impress or PowerPoint Presentation from digital photos. Please mind, that the script does absolutely nothing to beautify the slides right now -- they are simply dropped on white pages.

Both scripts have a list of prerequisites which are describes in detail in the Linux-Gazette article so please have a look there. There are also usage examples and details on the actual LaTeX/beamer to odp conversion. To get PowerPoint you'll need an OpenOffice to load the odp and then export it again as ppt. Of course you loose all navigation funktionality of the beamer pdf slides -- you just get the slides.

The scripts are published under GPL V3.

Update: Rafael Laboissiere sent me back an improved version of this script which does also the pdf-to-images conversion (with helper programs). You can find his version on the alioth website.

Script for recording internet radio

Since I like "Hörspiele" (radio shows?) and am often not at home to listen to them live I've started recording them from available internet streams. After a while it got annoying to have too many incomplete stories because the streaming broke down somewhere in the middle and I improved that script to find the streaming link by fetching the webpages and extracting the current link and made it restart the download if it stopped short of the programmed time. The script is written in perl and relies on wget and mplayer for the actual recording/download and on WWW::Mechanize for the webpage reading. The script only handles the link extraction, the restart if the stream breaks down and also stops the download at the end of the programmed time. Timed starting is done by the "at" daemon, so I would type into a shell (bash) something like:

      $ at 00:05 15.3.2008
      at> getradio.pl dlf 56
      at> [Ctrl-D]
    

To record the stereo (!) ogg stream of the weekly (every Sat 00:05) crime story from "Deutschlandfunk" on Sat 3/15/2008. "at" will start the script at 00:05 on 15.3.2008, the script fetches the webpages, extracts the streaming link and starts in this case wget to download the ogg-stream. If the wget process dies it will restart it with a little delay to avoid too quick restarts. If the endtime (56 minutes in above example) is reached the wget process is stopped (and no restarting). Right now the script takes two arguments:

  Usage:
    getradio.pl [br2|br4|wdr3|wdr5|dlr|einslive|figaro] duration
    

and can handle the following German radio stations: Bayrischer Rundfunk br2 and br4, Westdeutscher Rundfunk WDR3, WDR5 and einslive, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk Figaro and the two channels of Deutschlandradio -- Deutschlandfunk and Deutschlandradio Kultur. Extending the script to other stations based on the examples is pretty easy I think once you take a peek into the html-source of the webpages which lets you start the internet radio. If you happen to preprogram a lot of these for the next month you'll find the usual output of atq rather unhelpful. Another little script helps getting all relevant information from the programmed getradio jobs (start time, channel, duration, jobid for canceling, where the files will end up,..) and outputs them in chronological order and warns of duplicates:

start date and time chan      ID  dur  target dir 
2008-03-15 20:05:00 dlf  Sat 1004 115  /home/khh   
2008-03-15 22:00:00 ???? Sat 1013  ??  /home/khh  <-  not a proper entry (unknown channel, not getradio.pl,..)
2008-03-16 15:00:00 br2  Sun 1011  60  /home/khh
2008-03-19 20:30:00 br2  Wed 1012  60  /home/khh
    

I had to modify the script when switching to ubuntu, maybe the old version is helpful for somebody as well.

Licene for the scripts is GPL V3.

---

E-Mail: kh1@khherrmann.de

Last modified: Sat Mar 15 18:50:56 CET 2008