Unfortunately, these databases are around a gigabyte in size for me (e.g. tracker, strigi). Context search is overkill for  me, because I name my files properly and put them in folders.

Introducing “Spuren”

So I developed a search engine a while ago that works on file names and paths: The keywords a file can be found is the filename and path split by ‘/’,'-’,'_’,’.’,'\’. With the feature of exclusive search terms (starting with ‘-’), and being able to open the found file or its parent folder, that is something you can work with.

Now this tool is available as a indexer and search tray icon program, for Unix only. It quickly produces a tiny database of your files, because it is based on unix tools (find+gzip). The search tool is written in Java.

Try out “spuren”, the content-free desktop search engine. Spuren is German for ‘tracks’. Download it at the bottom of this page.

Spuren provides a KISS combination of the ease of use of Beagle et. al. and the simplicity of find.

Install and Configure

• Download the tar and extract it somewhere, for example in ~/bin/
• Put the directories you want to have indexed in ~/.local/share/spuren/dirs (line by line)
• Put the directory names you want to have skipped in ~/.local/share/spuren/skipdirnames
• Put the file names you want to have skipped in ~/.local/share/spuren/skipfilenames
• Run spuren-mine. This produces ~/.local/share/spuren/db.gz, which contains all indexed file names.
• Run spuren-trayicon (and perhaps make yourself a icon on the desktop or put it into session start preferences).
• Click on the icon and search away

Tipps

• Separate keywords by spaces (search will be slightly faster if you enter the least generic term first)
• You can exclude by prefixing a ‘-’, for example ” houses -skyscrapers  “
• The default is to find files that have tags starting with the given keywords. You can prefix with a ‘*’ to find files that have tags containing the given keyword. For example: “houses *scrape”.
• You can jump down to the results by pressing the down key, and up gets you back. Escape closes the search window.
• A double-click launches the file, pressing shift at the same time will open the folder the file is in instead.
• You can rebuild the database by right-clicking the icon. It only takes a minute or two.
• The result folders are abbreviated to 3 chars to save space. You can find the full path and some other info at the bottom of the window

FAQ

• “Java is ugly”: You can switch to the GTK theme or Nimbus LAF. Enable it in the swing.properties file.

… leave feedback and comments …

Download

• Spuren, release 1.0: spuren-1.0.tar.bz2
• Source for Java program: spuren-1.0-source.tar.bz2

So, what I did was wrap maven in a script that colorizes the output. The result looks like this:

This is how to do it:
create the file ~/bin/mvn with the following content (mvn (0 KB))

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/mvn $* | sed -e 's/Tests run: \([^,]*\), Failures: \([^,]*\), Errors: \([^,]*\), Skipped: \([^,]*\)/Tests run: \1, Failures: \2, Errors: \3, Skipped: \4/g' \
-e 's/\(\[WARN\].*\)/\1/g' \
-e 's/\(\[INFO\].*\)/\1/g' \
-e 's/\(\[ERROR\].*\)/\1/g'

replace /usr/bin/mvn with wherever your mvn is (find out with which mvn).
Double-check that you get the encoding right, the weird sign should be hexadecimal 1b. Use a editor that supports encodings for copy+paste.
Give your ~/bin/mvn execute permissions (chmod +x ~/bin/mvn)

Try it out: call ~/bin/mvn in one of your maven projects

What is left to do is to register your new mvn-wrapper so it is called everytime.
Add the following line to your ~/.bashrc :

alias mvn=~/bin/mvn

Execute the command you just added in your running shells so you can use it there too.

You are done.

Changing the distributed mvn startup script

Even better, but a little more intrusive (you need root rights):
change the distributed mvn file. It is a bash script actually.
In gentoo:

 $ which mvn
/usr/bin/mvn
$ file /usr/bin/mvn
/usr/bin/mvn: symbolic link to `/usr/share/maven-bin-2.0/bin/mvn'
$ file /usr/share/maven-bin-2.0/bin/mvn
/usr/share/maven-bin-2.0/bin/mvn: Bourne shell script text executable
$ 

Change the last call in that file to:

exec "$JAVACMD" \
$MAVEN_OPTS \
-classpath "${M2_HOME}"/boot/classworlds-*.jar \
"-Dclassworlds.conf=${M2_HOME}/bin/m2.conf" \
"-Dmaven.home=${M2_HOME}"  \
${CLASSWORLDS_LAUNCHER} $QUOTED_ARGS |
sed -e 's/Tests run: \([^,]*\), Failures: \([^,]*\), Errors: \([^,]*\), Skipped: \([^,]*\)/Tests run: \1, Failures: \2, Errors: \3, Skipped: \4/g' \
-e 's/\(\[WARN\].*\)/\1/g' \
-e 's/\(\[INFO\].*\)/\1/g' \
-e 's/\(\[ERROR\].*\)/\1/g'

That way you have it there directly. Maybe the gentoo devs could add a color use-flag. That’d be fun…

.

Download:
=> 8KB pdfjoin-nosrc.tar.bz2

14712KB pdfjoin.tar.bz2 (with Ghostscript sources)

I programmed it in Python+Glade+GTK. It uses ghostscript as backend.
Unpack and run “python pdfjoin.py”.

I’ll make a Windows package sometime.

Feed into stdin, await from stdout.
For example: python dbdesc.py < DATASCHEME > dbdesc.html

It isn’t perfect nor meant to be, but gives a good starting point for a documentation.

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import re
a = ''
for i in sys.stdin.readlines():
a = a + " " + re.sub('--.*', '', i).strip()
a = a.strip().lower()
a = re.sub('\/\*[^*]*\*\/', '', a)
print """
<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="dbdesc.css" />
</head>
<body>
"""
for m in re.findall('create table ([^ (]*)[ (]*([^;]*)[ )]*;', a):
tablename = m[0]
content = m[1]
print "<h2>%s</h2>"  % tablename
print """<table class="dbdesc"><thead><tr>
<th class="name">Feldname</th>
<th class="type">Typ</th>
<th class="option">Option</th>
<th class="comment">Bemerkung</th>
</tr></thead>"""
atts = {}
for l in content.split(','):
l = l.strip()
if l == '':
continue
if l.startswith('constraint') or l.startswith('foreign key'):
continue
l = l.split(None, 2)
if len(l)<2:
continue
name = l[0]
if name == 'constraint' or name.__contains__('(') or name.__contains__(')'):
continue
type = l[1]
if len(l)<3:
l.append('')
op = ""
if 'not null' in l[2]:       op = op + '!'
if 'primary key' in l[2]:    op = op + '1+P'
elif 'unique' in l[2]:       op = op + '1'
print """ <tr>
<td class="name">%s</td>
<td class="type">%s</td>
<td class="option">%s</td>
<td class="comment"><!-- TODO: Bemerkungen --></td>
</tr>""" % (name, type, op)
print """ </table> """
print """</html> """

CSS file dbdesc.css

table.dbdesc{	width: 40em;	border: 1px solid #080;	border-width: 1px 0;}
table.dbdesc th{	border-bottom: 1px solid #080;}
table.dbdesc td{	border: none;}
table.dbdesc td, table.dbdesc th{	width: 15em;}
table.dbdesc th{	font-style: italic;	font-weight: normal; }
table.dbdesc td.option{	text-align: center;}
table.dbdesc td.type{	text-transform: uppercase;}

So let’s use this in the deskbar-applet. Some friendly neighbor already did this, I updated it to 2.20 new-style classes.

Screenshot:

Code: converter (py, 6 KB)
Don’t use this anymore. Try this updated version!

Download to your Desktop, then drag and drop it into the deskbar preferences window. Or copy it to ~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/modules-2.20-compatible.
Don’t forget to enable it in the preferences.

Yaha, you need to install the units program first!

This script creates a directory “backup”, and places there a archive of the files in the current directory (not recursive) with an increasing number.

e.g. you start it in a Folder “Bsp-3″, it will create “backup/Bsp3-1.tar.bz2″, next time “Bsp3-2.tar.bz2″, etc.
Also cleans up duplicates, so you cannot call it too often!

Small, clean, easy. I love it!

backup-point.sh

DIRNAME=$(basename $PWD)
EXT=tar.bz2
mkdir -p backup
cleanup_unneeded(){
cd backup
FILES=*.tar.bz2
UNIQ=$(md5sum $FILES|sort|uniq --check-chars=32 | cut -d ' ' -f 3-);
for i in $FILES
do
if ! echo "$UNIQ" | grep -wq "$i"
then
echo "deleting unnecessary $i."
rm "$i"
fi
done
cd ..
}
cleanup_unneeded
for((i=1;i<200;i++)); do
FILENAME="backup/$DIRNAME-$i.$EXT"
if ! test -f "$FILENAME"; then
find  -maxdepth 1 -type f|xargs tar -cjf "$FILENAME"
echo "backup-point $i made."
cleanup_unneeded
exit
fi
done
echo '200 points reached! Clean up a bit?'

But how to select a theme and a color theme? Which are there anyway?

The first script takes you through a tour how your presentation will look like for each theme.
The second does quite the same thing for the color schemes.

#!/bin/sh
name="switchtheme"
THEMEFILEDIR="/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/"
INFILE="presentation.tex"
TMPINFILE="$name.tex"
TMPOUTFILE="$name.pdf"
MAKECMD="pdflatex $TMPINFILE"
DISPLAYCMD="evince $TMPOUTFILE"
THEMELIST=$*
if [ "$THEMELIST" == "" ]; then
THEMELIST=$(ls $THEMEFILEDIR |
grep 'beamertheme[A-Z]' | sed 's/beamertheme\([A-Z].*\)\.sty/\1/')
fi
for theme in $THEMELIST; do
echo $theme
cat $INFILE | sed 's/\\usetheme{[^}]*}/\\usetheme{'$theme'}/g' |
sed 's/\\title{\([^}]*\)}/\\title{\1 - '$theme'}/g' |
cat > $TMPINFILE
$MAKECMD
$DISPLAYCMD
done
rm $TMPOUTFILE $TMPINFILE $name.{out,aux,log,nav,snm,toc}

#!/bin/sh
name="switchcolor"
THEMEFILEDIR="/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/"
INFILE="presentation.tex"
TMPINFILE="$name.tex"
TMPOUTFILE="$name.pdf"
MAKECMD="pdflatex $TMPINFILE"
DISPLAYCMD="evince $TMPOUTFILE"
THEMELIST=$*
if [ "$THEMELIST" == "" ]; then
THEMELIST=$(ls $THEMEFILEDIR |
grep 'beamercolortheme' | sed 's/beamercolortheme\(.*\)\.sty/\1/')
fi
for theme in $THEMELIST; do
echo $theme
cat $INFILE | sed 's/\\usecolortheme{[^}]*}/\\usecolortheme{'$theme'}/g' |
sed 's/\\title{\([^}]*\)}/\\title{\1 - '$theme'}/g' |
cat > $TMPINFILE
$MAKECMD
$DISPLAYCMD
done
rm $TMPOUTFILE $TMPINFILE $name.{out,aux,log,nav,snm,toc}

Start it where your tex file lives (plus change the INFILE variable). Your .tex file has to have \usetheme{something} as this will be replaced (not in your file, but a temporary).
You can also give it themes names as parameter, and it will show you only these.

Needs executable rights on the shellscript and a

The shell script next.sh:

DATE=$(date +%y%m%d)
SERVER=antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov
URL=http://${SERVER}/apod/ap${DATE}.html
NEWIMG=${DATE}.img
[ -e $NEWIMG ] && exit;
rm -rf *.jpg *.png *.gif
wget --recursive --level=1 $URL --accept jpg,png,gif --no-clobber --no-directories --tries=0
FIRST=$( ls -U *_f.* *_big.* *.jpg *.png *.gif 2>/dev/null|head -n 1 );
if [[ "$FIRST" != "" ]]; then
cp $FIRST $NEWIMG
unlink newest
ln -s $NEWIMG newest
fi

If you want a cronjob for that, use e.g.:

0,30 * * * * cd bgimg/astro/data; sh ../next.sh

Don’t forget to set the background image of your window manager to the link … obviously