My software
Software projects I worked on

I've recently taken the time to scan the remaining channel numbers for additional channels like Premiere and Comedy Central, to write autoconf and automake files for this grabber to ease installation, and to write a standard XMLTV grabber script. All in all, this grabber can now be used like a standard XMLTV grabber.

Download current version 1.2 of the tv_grab_de_tvmovie_clickfinder grabber

There have been sev­er­al bugs in the TV Movie grab­ber script, most promi­nent­ly bro­ken day­light sav­ing time sup­port. Thanks ev­ery­one for point­ing these out. I have im­proved the script in sev­er­al re­spects and pack­aged these changes for the ver­sion 1.1. Changes are:

• Fixed day­light sav­ing time
• Fixed XML dec­la­ra­tion for ISO-8859-1
• Fixed orig­i­nal ti­tle for movies (was in­cor­rect­ly parsed as sub-ti­tle)
• Fixed star-rat­ing (in­cor­rect­ly dis­played as rat­ing)
• Added out­put of FSK rat­ing
• Added ex­tend­ed cat­e­go­ry out­put
• Added coun­try pars­ing and canon­i­fi­ca­tion
• Re­duced chan­nel list in XML file to ac­tu­al­ly present chan­nels
• Added Mono/Stereo/Dol­by cat­e­go­riza­tion
• Added black/white pars­ing
• Cleanup in code.

Down­load cur­rent ver­sion 1.1 of script

P.S.: In the code pub­lished be­fore the 21st of April a ter­ri­bly stupid bug pre­vents prop­er date/time pars­ing. Fixed it.

Recently, the TV Movie paper has changed its publication format for electronic programme data to match its new ClickFinder software. Unfortunately, a Linux version of this software is still missing; to remedy this, I have written a converter for these data to XMLTV and a script automating the EPG data acquisition.

I donate this script to the public. However, since the TV Movie paper probably finances its Click-Finder program with advertisements[1], please make sure you visit their web page regularily or find some other while to make this service worth their while.

UPDATE: Version 1.2 of this script is available.

Writ­ing a LIRC con­fig­u­ra­tion file is the ma­jor part of any re­mote con­trol work with Lin­ux. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the low de­gree of script­ing avail­able in LIRC makes this a lot hard­er – there is no ab­strac­tion from the but­tons on the re­mote con­trol to a gen­er­al con­cept of the task one wants to achieve with the re­mote, which could then be in­ter­pret­ed by clients in their re­spec­tive ways.

To ad­dress that is­sue, I wrote mk­lir­crc. By an­no­tat­ing your lir­cd.conf with a few words, you can tell mk­lir­crc which high-lev­el task like "pause" or "raise vol­ume" you want to get done, and the script will write the LIRC con­trol file for you, in­clud­ing all ap­pli­ca­tions it knows about – cur­rent­ly mythtv, xine and mplay­er, but more are easy to add.

Down­load source tar­ball

I proud­ly present you De­bateTimer, a MIDP ap­pli­ca­tion for your Ja­va-ca­pa­ble mo­bile phone that sup­ports you in tim­ing a for­mal de­bate. After en­ter­ing a speech time, a timer is start­ed which will give a num­ber of sig­nals:

• Start of ques­tion­ing phase. Oc­curs not at all on speech­es of one minute or less, at 30 sec­onds on speech­es of two min­utes or less, and at 60 sec­onds on all oth­er speech­es.
• End of ques­tion­ing phase. Oc­curs not at all on speech­es of one minute or less, 30 sec­onds be­fore the end of speech sig­nal on speech­es of four min­utes or less, and 60 sec­onds be­fore the end of speech sig­nal on all oth­er speech­es.
• End of speech sig­nal. For clar­i­ty, this sig­nal is giv­en twice in short suc­ces­sion.
• Over­time beeps. 15 sec­onds af­ter the end of the speech, the soft­ware starts beep­ing re­peat­ed­ly.

For tim­ing com­pet­i­tive de­bates in Bri­tish Par­lia­ment Style or Open Par­lia­ment De­bate, the us­age is ex­treme­ly sim­ple: En­ter the length of speech and hit the Start but­ton. Every time your mo­bile beeps, ham­mer. Divert con­cen­tra­tion to the re­al tasks at hand.

JAD file for De­bateTimer

JAR file for De­bateTimer

Source code