Greg Reynolds - Programmer and Gamer

Just a quick test of the BlackBerry WordPress app. Looks quite easy to use! Composing this in the car near Carlisle (I am not driving of course)

A simple little script to echo stdin (or a file) to port 8080 on the host computer. Then simply browse to http://hostname:8080 and the contents will be there. Can be easier than trying to copy a lot of text in PuTTy. I saved it as to_nc.sh. Then you can do something like

cat filename | to_nc.sh

The script is really small, but does rely on netcat (nc) being installed.

if [[ "$1" != "" ]]
then
        { echo -ne "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n\r\n"; cat $1; } | nc -l -p 8080
else
        { echo -ne "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n\r\n";
        cat -
        } | nc -l -p 8080
fi;

I thought it would be a fun project to create a little Java program to make a nice wallpaper of the Astronomy Picture of the Day. You can get the executable JAR file here. It only works on Windows, and doesn’t need installing, just save the file and run it (assuming you have Java installed).

It’s not endorsed or affiliated with NASA in any way, it’s just for my own fun.

The default ImageIO save behaviour of images leaves something to be desired, so I put together a simple convenience method for saving them, based on the technique from Universal Web Services.

private void saveImageToJPGFile(Image img,
String fname) throws FileNotFoundException, IOException
{
    BufferedImage bufImage =
    new BufferedImage(img.getWidth(null), img.getHeight(null),BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
    Graphics2D bufImageGraphics = bufImage.createGraphics();
    bufImageGraphics.drawImage(img, 0, 0, null);
    Iterator iter = ImageIO.getImageWritersByFormatName("jpeg");
    ImageWriter writer = (ImageWriter)iter.next();
    // instantiate an ImageWriteParam object with default compression options

    ImageWriteParam iwp = writer.getDefaultWriteParam();
    iwp.setCompressionMode(ImageWriteParam.MODE_EXPLICIT);
    iwp.setCompressionQuality(1);   // an integer between 0 and 1
    // 1 specifies minimum compression and maximum quality

    File file = new File(fname);
    FileImageOutputStream output = new FileImageOutputStream(file);
    writer.setOutput(output);
    IIOImage image = new IIOImage(bufImage, null, null);
    writer.write(null, image, iwp);
    writer.dispose();
    output.close();
}

Via this post on lifehacker I found the brilliant memory aid Memoriser. It doesn’t come with any questions by default, so I made a list of capital cities in the correct format:

capitals.ini

The data is originally from About.com

I’ve just installed the WordPress app on my iPhone and I’m very impressed with how easy it is to use. I’ve even been inspired to take a photo of the garden work in progress.

This is the obligatory “First Post”. I’m still finding my feet with WordPress, and I hope I will think of some interesting content…