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Okay, I'm no programmer. I'm not even close. But I am a wannabe. And I've even had some success...a long time ago. I wrote a fun, little pong program for my TI-82 when I was in 8th grade that spread around the school. I have to say, I was pretty proud of that program.

Still, I'm no programmer. Nonetheless, I do have a few odd programs and scripts that I've written to do something specifically useful for me. A real programmer would probably cringe at my code, but that's not the point. In the spirit of OSS, I'm going to go ahead and post some of my more useful programs here. They probably won't be of any use to you, but if they are, feel free to use them.

PodCopy

This is a little python program that takes podcasts that I've downloaded through Banshee and puts them on my iAudio7 mp3 player. It keeps track (in a separate log file) of which files it's already transferred, so you can delete them off of your mp3 player, and it won't transfer the deleted file again. Originally it was a command-line program, but I decided to try to write a GUI for it in GTK and was only marginally successful. The good news is that this program should work with any combination of platforms, providing you have pygtk and gtk and an mp3 player that shows up as a removable disk.

iPod Video Convert

This is a simple shell script that passes a command over to ffmpeg to convert any video that ffmpeg can handle into a format appropriate for viewing on an iPod. Yes, I used to have an iPod. Now, I'm very happy with my iAudio7. :) But, in all truth, I used the video feature much more on the iPod than I thought I would...and largely thanks to this script. To use it, you have to have a working copy of ffmpeg with AAC audio support (stupid Apple!). Then, just copy the appropriate line (either 4:3 or 16:9) depending on the aspect ratio of the video you want to convert, and fill in the filenames (with relevant path). Then...wait.

Backing Up Drupal to a Local Server

I'm posting this here more for myself, but feel free to use these instructions (at your own risk). Basically, these are the steps I went through to copy my old Drupal install to a local server so that I could have a backup of it when I took it off my webserver.

Change MySQL Collation to utf8_general_ci Script for Drupal

For some reason, on many hosting servers, the default character encoding and collation for mysql is latin-1_swedish_ci. This is usually fine unless you want to use the extended character sets for other languages, like Chinese or Japanese. You can use this script by editing the db info, uploading it to your server, and running via a web browser. The script has been specialized for Drupal, but can be altered for other needs.