Utility-programs

In the past I have written these programs mostly for fun, but also because I wanted a small and tiny tool for one precise purpose at a time.

There are probably a dozen alternative ways to achieve the same with more elaborated software that you will easily find on the web or elsewhere. However, where I encountered these other programs, most were overloaded with functionality that I had either no use for or was too complicated to adapt to my own task at hand.

Installation instructions

All programs, presented on this page are written in C++ and use the Qt-libraries, meaning that they can run with any operating system that allows you to install these libraries and to compile the C++ code. I will now outline the procedure to build the software on your computer.

Preparation

The QMake utility is needed. It is part of the Qt Development Framework which you must install to compile any of the programs. For the later execution the shared Qt-libraries would be sufficiant, but you are not there yet. So make sure that a recent version of Qt is installed on your system (version 4.4 and newer is alright at the time of this writing).

Note: If you have already built other programs from source-code, you may be familiar with the so called autotools which serve the same purpose to create a Makefile from a provided project-configuration. QMake is just Trolltech/Nokia’s platform-independent way to do this.

Unzip the compressed program-archive. This will result in a new directory being created corresponding to the ZIP-archiv that you just expanded. Access this directory in the terminal-application that is available on your platform (a Shell in Unix-derivates, some DOS-like application in Microsoft-OSs).

The first step to create an executable program from the sources is to run the QMake-utility right there in the uncompressed project-directory. QMake will find the project-file [program].pro automatically and generate from its contents a Makefile that is already adapted to the platform that QMake is currently running on.

make the program

Provided that QMake did not report any errors, the Makefile is now created and if there are also a C++ compiler and the make-tool available, you can call make right away:

The C++-compiler will be called to build the program from the source-files in the folder src or the top-level directory.

The option clean to the make command can serve to clean the project-directory from all built files, possibly in preparation for a new build:

Installation of the binary in the file-system

This lies in your responsibility. The executable program-file may be moved to the place that is considered the right one on your operating system. Linux-users may like the use the paco package management utility for the installation, as it keeps a list of all the changes done and thus allows a clean de-installation, once it becomes necessary.

Upsslideshow

Yet another slide-show program. But this is mine. :-)

I wanted a program to swiftly browse through a number of photographs in order to choose one or more for a particular purpose. The first idea came with my decision to publish photos from my walking tours in the Provence on a web-page.

The interface is spartan. All user action is restricted to either the execution of a keyboard-shortcut or the selection from the context-menu. The two initial actions which you must know to use the program are:

• click the right mouse-button to access the context-menu, like in the screen-shot above.
• push the h key to see a list of keyboard-shortcuts.

Beartail

I do not like the name of the other program. But that amounts to only half the motivation for me to program a rolling log-file viewer.

At the time, I had to look for a program which could keep track with the current activity of a web-server and the applications deployed there. I did not want the helper-tool to be just as complicated as the system under test and in the end returned to the tail command as the most appropriate solution. However, others have created overloaded GUIs for the purpose and I did not want to cede the laurels to them.

Beartail does not offer many configuration-options, apart from the amount of data shown and the font-settings. These values can be persisted and will be restored in the next Beartail-session. The program lets you do the following:

• Manually bookmark and highlight single lines by a mouse-click.
• Jump to a bookmarked line above or below the current cursor-position.
• Clear all bookmarks.
• Clear a file, i.e. erase its contents.
• Start and stop the continuous refresh of the display. The current sate is always indicated by an LED in the lower right corner and the tool-tip of this led.
• Variate the maximum number of lines which are at display.
• Show line-numbers or not.
• Find occurences of an expression in the visible part of the file-contents.
• Choose a file from the list of recently opened files.

XPMWriter

An image-to-XPM conversion tool.

When I need icons or other small graphics in my C++ programs, the XPM-format is the easiest to embed, because these images consist of a simple two-dimensional byte-array, like in the following example of a small icon which contains only two colors.

/* XPM */ static char *dummy[]={ "24 24 2 1", "# c #3a27bf", ". c #ffffff", "........................", "........................", "........................", ".........#####..........", ".........######.........", ".........#######........", ".........########.......", ".........########.......", ".........#########......", "...################.....", "...#################....", "...#################....", "...#################....", "...################.....", ".........#########......", ".........########.......", ".........########.......", ".........#######........", ".........######.........", ".........#####..........", "........................", "........................", "........................", "........................"};

will look like this:

XPMWriter is a console program, however written by use of the Qt-framework which supports a number of graphic-formats and conversions between them. The ImageMagick tools could be used to perform arbitrary conversions and an incredible amount of other work on graphic-files, while my XPMWriter does only convert images of one of the supported formats into XPM, nothing else.

The advantage of XPMWriter is in my opinion that, calling the program, you do not need to add any arguments apart from the name of the source-image.

Execute XPMWriter without arguments at a command-prompt to see the usage-information together with the list of supported image-formats:

To convert the above arrow-icon from PNG to XPM, I executed the following command:
user@machine:~/html/utilities/images/$ xpmwriter xpm_example.png
This results in the new file xpm_example.xpm being written alongside the original PNG-version. The contents of the new file is shown above.
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