gumbercules.net

Lately I’ve been working on a new project to sync music with my Sansa e260. Unsatisfied with manually moving files on and off of the tiny flash drive, I began work on an application to manage playlists and sync them for me. I’ve gotten it to the point where it scans my music collection, allows me to create playlists, and syncs those playlists with any directory I specify. In the future, I plan on implementing removable device recognition and cover attachment and resizing. It also currently only functions as a command-line client, but there are plans to develop a GUI frontend for it once the base library is stable enough.

Anyway, the project page is available behind the link on the right (or right here).

Have you ever had to move a lot of files from a sane filesystem to one that behaves more like FAT? Do these files have “strange” characters in their names, such as ‘:’, ‘?’, or ‘*’? This simple utility can rename these files so that the FAT-invalid characters are replaced with ‘_’. Works great for “fixing” the filenames on your music collection before transferring it to your portable audio player. You can download it here.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
 
require 'find'
 
bad_str = ":<>\\|*?\""
bad_files = Array.new
 
Find.find(ARGV[0]) do |file|
	bad_files.push file
end
 
# reverse array so bad directories come after the files
bad_files.reverse!
 
bad_files.each do |file|
	basename = File.basename(file)
	if basename.count(bad_str) > 0
		dirname = File.dirname(file)
		new_file = File.join(dirname, basename.tr(bad_str, '_'))
		puts [file, ' -> ', new_file].join
		File.rename( file, new_file )
	end
end

Mokash is now an official OpenMoko.org project. I’ve just finished copying the current svn repository over to the openmoko.org repository, and that will be the new official repository. The old repository on my home server will occasionally be updated to match the openmoko.org one, but it probably won’t be very often, so don’t come here looking for it. I still need to move the current tickets and such over to the OMO tracker, but that’s not a high priority. Thanks to this, this project will have higher availability (no more monthly reboots or crashes!) and the opportunity to be seen by a larger amount of OpenMoko users.

I’m proud to announce that I’ve reached what I consider to be version 0.1 for mokash. It probably still has some bugs in it, and definitely needs to be tested on a Neo1973, but I’m confident that it can work as a day-to-day check register. A few of the features I’ve implemented include locale-based currency display and entry, searching based on tags or parties, and automatic transaction purging.

Please download it and give me feedback, especially if you own a Neo1973. I’ll not be able to purchase one as soon as I’d hoped, so every bit of feedback is helpful. And if you encounter any bugs, or would like a feature implemented, please file a new ticket in Trac.