https://gitorious.org/pycairo-ctypes/pycairo-ctypes

This is a really rough proof of concept that the pycairo API can be implemented with ctypes + metclasses.

So far only ImageSurface is supported on the SVG backend, along with Contexts.   The nice thing about this is that you can use a pycairo like API on pypy, where things should be faster (in theory).

There’s a test that can be run to show the outputs the same for pycairo and cairo ctypes.

To install you’ll need to do

pip install pycha

Heres the code for a simple view to output a chart directly to SVG:

# views.py

from StringIO import StringIO
from django.http import HttpResponse

import cairo

def colors(request):
    in_req = 1

    svg_buffer = StringIO()

    width, height = (500, 400)
    surface = cairo.SVGSurface(svg_buffer, width, height)

    dataSet = (
     ('dataSet 1', ((0, 1), (1, 3), (2, 2.5))),
     ('dataSet 2', ((0, 2), (1, 4), (2, 3))),
     ('dataSet 3', ((0, 5), (1, 1), (2, 0.5))),
    )

    options = {
       'legend': {'hide': True},
       'background': {'color': '#f0f0f0'},
    }

    #import pycha.bar
    #chart = pycha.bar.VerticalBarChart(surface, options)

    import pycha.line
    chart = pycha.line.LineChart(surface, options)
    chart.addDataset(dataSet)
    chart.render()

    del chart
    del surface

    response = ''
    response = HttpResponse(mimetype='image/svg+xml')
    svg_buffer.seek(0)
    response.write( svg_buffer.read() )
    return response

The basic idea is that – instead of the chart outputting to an svg file, the output goes to a buffer, this is triggered by calling the destructors of the chart and it’s cairo surface.  Once the data is in the buffer, it is rewound and played back to the Http Response.

Inline SVG

As is, this won’t work as inline svg, because outputting the XML preamble in the middle of the page will cause problems.  Below is an example that let’s you decide if you need the preamble (full SVG output), or not (SVG fragment for inclusion in a page or another SVG):

# Create your views here.

from StringIO import StringIO
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

import cairo

XML_PREAMBLE = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>'

def colors_chart(inline = False):
    """
    Generate colours chart

    Set inline to True to disable the XML preamble
    """
    in_req = 1

    svg_buffer = StringIO()

    width, height = (500, 400)
    surface = cairo.SVGSurface(svg_buffer, width, height)

    dataSet = (
     ('dataSet 1', ((0, 1), (1, 3), (2, 2.5))),
     ('dataSet 2', ((0, 2), (1, 4), (2, 3))),
     ('dataSet 3', ((0, 5), (1, 1), (2, 0.5))),
    )

    options = {
       'legend': {'hide': True},
       'background': {'color': '#f0f0f0'},
    }

    import pycha.bar
    chart = pycha.bar.VerticalBarChart(surface, options)

    #import pycha.line
    #chart = pycha.line.LineChart(surface, options)
    chart.addDataset(dataSet)
    chart.render()

    del chart
    del surface

    response = ''

    if inline:
        svg_buffer.seek(len(XML_PREAMBLE))
    else:
        svg_buffer.seek(0)
    return svg_buffer.read()

def colors_svg(request):
    """ render a pure SVG chart """
    response = HttpResponse(mimetype='image/svg+xml')
    response.write(colors_chart(inline = False))
    return response

def index(request):
    """ render a chart into the template """
    chart_svg = colors_chart(inline = True)

    return render_to_response(
        'shapes_index.html',
        { "chart" : chart_svg },
        mimetype='application/xhtml+xml')

An example project with the above code is available here:
pycha_django

[EDIT 25/2/2011] Fixed PyCha URL

Oops, I’ve been using TCC/LE by JPSoft as my shell… the following doesn’t work in the normal command prompt

[/EDIT]

I just had a look at SET and it lets you set user/system variables:

Display, create, modify, or delete environment variables.

SET [/A /D /E /P /R file... /S /U /V /X] [name[=][value ]]
        file:  One or more files containing variable definitions
        /A(rithmetic)           /S(ystem variables)
        /D(efault variables)    /U(ser variables)
        /E(nv vars)             /V(olatile variables)
        /R(ead from file)       /X override VariableExclude
        /P(ause)

So to set save a variables MYAPP_HOME as the current directory, just do

SET /U MYAPP_HOME=%CD

Wish I’d have looked that up a few years ago, it’ll save a few seconds next time I need to setup some dev sdk

While it works OK, I feel like I’m missing a higher level audio library (especially having seen Minim, for C++ and Java).

To run it in shoebot:

sbot -w audiobot.bot

audiobot.bot

# Major library imports
import atexit
import pyaudio
from numpy import zeros, short, fromstring, array
from numpy.fft import fft

NUM_SAMPLES = 512
SAMPLING_RATE = 11025

def setup():
    size(350, 260)
    speed(SAMPLING_RATE / NUM_SAMPLES)

_stream = None

def read_fft():
    global _stream
    pa = None

    def cleanup_audio():
        if _stream:
            _stream.stop_stream()
            _stream.close()
        pa.terminate()

    if _stream is None:
        pa = pyaudio.PyAudio()
        _stream = pa.open(format=pyaudio.paInt16, channels=1,
                           rate=SAMPLING_RATE,
                           input=True, frames_per_buffer=NUM_SAMPLES)
        atexit.register(cleanup_audio)

    audio_data  = fromstring(_stream.read(NUM_SAMPLES), dtype=short)
    normalized_data = audio_data / 32768.0

    return fft(normalized_data)[1:1+NUM_SAMPLES/2]

def flatten_fft(scale = 1.0):
    """
    Produces a nicer graph, I'm not sure if this is correct
    """
    for i, v in enumerate(read_fft()):
        yield scale * (i * v) / NUM_SAMPLES

def triple(audio):
    '''return bass/mid/treble'''
    c = audio.copy()
    c.resize(3, 255 / 3)
    return c

def draw():
    '''Draw 3 different colour graphs'''
    global NUM_SAMPLES
    audio = array(list(flatten_fft(scale = 80)))
    freqs = len(audio)
    bass, mid, treble = triple(audio)

    colours = (0.5, 1.0, 0.5), (1, 1, 0), (1, 0.2, 0.5)

    fill(0, 0, 1)
    rect(0, 0, WIDTH, 400)
    translate(50, 200)

    for spectrum, col in zip((bass, mid, treble), colours):
        fill(col)
        for i, s in enumerate(spectrum):
            rect(i, 0, 1, -abs(s))
        else:
            translate(i, 0)

    audio = array(list(flatten_fft(scale = 80)))

When cairo 1.10 comes out we’ll get a RecordingSurface so you can record commands and play them back to another surface, but how to do something similar now ?

Skip to the end if you just want the code, explanation of how I got there ahead:

My first advice was to try using PDFSurface, and set the file object to None.

# Record a red rectangle onto a surface.
#
# Create another surface and draw a background on it
# Draw the first surface onto this surface
#
from cairo import PDFSurface, ImageSurface, FORMAT_ARGB32, Context

recording = PDFSurface(None, 200, 200)
target = ImageSurface(FORMAT_ARGB32, 200, 200)

# Record a red rectangle
cr = Context(recording)
cr.set_source_rgb(1.0, 0.0, 1.0)
cr.rectangle(20, 20, 10, 10)

cr.fill_preserve()
cr.set_source_rgb(0.0, 0.0, 1.0)
cr.stroke()

target_context = Context(target)

# Draw background
target_context.set_source_rgb(1.0, 1.0, 0)
target_context.paint()

# Replay recording to target
target_context.set_source_surface(recording)
target_context.paint()

target.write_to_png('output.png')

That seems to work, except when I tried in Windows, when it complained that the file object was wrong.

OK, we can work round that:

def RecordingSurface(w, h):
    if os.name == 'nt':
        fobj = 'nul'
    else:
        fobj = None
    return PDFSurface(fobj, w, h)

This seems to be working, but my animation seemed slow… time for some benchmarking; I rendered 1000 frames and got a rough wall clock time:
1m48.

Hmm… perhaps SVGSurface will be quicker:
1m28

This is much better, 20 seconds difference just by changing what kind of surface is returned!

Animation not smooth though

The animation still seemed jerky it occured to me that when the surfaces are disposed they will attempt to out their content to the file object !

Luckily, get_similar_surface() comes to the rescue; it returns a surface not associated with a file object. Using this the original surface can be kept around forever, and never output.

Wallclock time:
50 seconds!

And here it is:

_svg_surface = None
def RecordingSurface(*size):
    '''
    We don't have RecordingSurfaces until cairo 1.10, so this kludge is used

    SVGSurfaces are created, but to stop them ever attempting to output, they
    are kept in a dict.

    When a surface is needed, create_similar is called to get a Surface from
    the SVGSurface of the same size
    '''
    global _svg_surface
    if os.name == 'nt':
        fobj = 'nul'
    else:
        fobj = None
    if _svg_surface is None:
        _svg_surface = SVGSurface(fobj, 0, 0)
    return _svg_surface.create_similar(cairo.CONTENT_COLOR_ALPHA, *size)

This is really useful, you can record commands and play them back to other surfaces.

This is a simple drawing model, implemented in cairo, hopefully somebody will find it useful.

Queue

class DrawQueue:
    '''
    A list of draw commands, stored as callables that, are
    passed a set of parameters to draw on from the canvas
    implementation.
    '''
    def __init__(self, render_callables = None):
        self.render_callables = render_callables or deque()

    def append(self, render_callable):
        '''
        Add a render callable to the queue
        '''
        self.render_callables.append(render_callable)

    def render(self, cairo_ctx):
        '''
        Call all the render callables with cairo_ctx
        '''
        for render_callable in self.render_callables:
            render_callable(cairo_ctx)

The queue just accepts callables (any old function), and calls them when you call render, passing them a cairo context you pass in.

To get useful functions you can call closure functions like these:

def paint_closure():
    def paint(ctx):
        ctx.paint()
    return paint

def fill_closure():
    def fill(ctx):
        ctx.fill()
    return fill

def set_source_rgb_closure(r, g, b):
    def set_source_rgb(ctx):
        ctx.set_source_rgb(r, g, b)
    return set_source_rgb

def moveto_closure(x, y):
    def moveto(ctx):
        ctx.move_to(x, y)
    return moveto

def rectangle_closure(x, y, w, h):
    def rectangle(ctx):
        ctx.rectangle(x, y, w, h)
    return rectangle

Adding commands to the queue is simple:

dq = DrawQueue()
dq.append(set_source_rgb_closure(1, 1, 1))
dq.append(paint_closure())
dq.append(moveto_closure(10, 0))
dq.append(rectangle_closure(0, 0, 20, 20))
dq.append(set_source_rgb_closure(0, 0, 0))
dq.append(fill_closure())

This is the same drawing model I’m using in my branch of shoebot, I’m hoping to expand it to be multithreaded; while a foreground thread adds commands a background thread is executing them.

Here it is all put together in a simple example to draw a black rectangle

from collections import deque
import cairo

class DrawQueue:
    '''
    A list of draw commands, stored as callables that, are
    passed a set of parameters to draw on from the canvas
    implementation.
    '''
    def __init__(self, render_callables = None):
        self.render_callables = render_callables or deque()

    def append(self, render_callable):
        '''
        Add a render callable to the queue
        '''
        self.render_callables.append(render_callable)

    def render(self, cairo_ctx):
        '''
        Call all the render callables with cairo_ctx
        '''
        for render_callable in self.render_callables:
            render_callable(cairo_ctx)

#### drawing closures
def paint_closure():
    def paint(ctx):
        ctx.paint()
    return paint

def fill_closure():
    def fill(ctx):
        ctx.fill()
    return fill

def set_source_rgb_closure(r, g, b):
    def set_source_rgb(ctx):
        ctx.set_source_rgb(r, g, b)
    return set_source_rgb

def moveto_closure(x, y):
    def moveto(ctx):
        ctx.move_to(x, y)
    return moveto

def rectangle_closure(x, y, w, h):
    def rectangle(ctx):
        ctx.rectangle(x, y, w, h)
    return rectangle

#### /drawing closures

dq = DrawQueue()

# Add some commands to the drawing queue
dq.append(set_source_rgb_closure(1, 1, 1))
dq.append(paint_closure())
dq.append(moveto_closure(10, 0))
dq.append(rectangle_closure(0, 0, 20, 20))
dq.append(set_source_rgb_closure(0, 0, 0))
dq.append(fill_closure())

# Create a surface and context
surface = cairo.ImageSurface(cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, 200, 200)
ctx = cairo.Context(surface)

# run defered rendering
dq.render(ctx)

surface.write_to_png('output.png')

Update: 26/April/2010

Problems I was having with incomplete images have been fixed in the current version of the web library, available in shoebots mecurial repository.

Using Processing from Jython is a promising idea, so I took the base from this post on backspaces.net where they explained how to use Jython and built on it a little.

This is great as Shoebot/Nodebox have great libraries for data manipulation, while processing is more focused on graphics.

The result is the attached Netbeans project which demonstrates using the nodebox web library and  drawing with processing.

Slowcessing

The glue code is in slowcessing.py

Theres a special version of PApplet (PJApplet), and ‘pj_frame’ which can put this in a JFrame.

The other method is ‘shoebot_imports’ adds the shoebot imports to the library path

In case anybody doesn’t want to download the whole project, heres the code:

imagestrip.py

from slowcessing import PJApplet, pj_frame, shoebot_imports
from processing.opengl import *

shoebot_imports()
import web
import thread

class ImageQueue(list):
    """
    Download images in the background and add them to a list
    """
    def __init__(self, search, size):
        list.__init__(self)
        self._search = search
        self._image_size = size
        thread.start_new_thread(self._get_images, ())

    def _image_downloaded(self, path):
        p = PJApplet()
        self.append(p.loadImage(path))

    def _get_images(self):
        for image in self._search:
            image.download(self._image_size, asynchronous=False)
            self._image_downloaded(image.path)

class WebTest (PJApplet):
  def setup(self):
    self.size(400, 400, self.P3D)
    self.images = ImageQueue(web.morguefile.search("sweets", max=1), size='small')

  def draw(self):
    self.background(0);
    y = (self.height * 0.2) - self.mouseY * (len(self.images) * 0.58)
    for image in self.images:
        self.image(image, 20, y)
        y += image.height

if __name__ == '__main__':
    pj_frame(WebTest)

slowcessing.py

from javax.swing import JFrame

from processing.core import PApplet

class PJApplet(PApplet):
  # rqd due to PApplet's using frameRate and frameRate(n) etc.
  def getField(self, name):
      return PApplet.getDeclaredField(name).get(self)

def pj_frame(pj_applet, **kwargs):
    from time import sleep

    frame = JFrame(kwargs.get('title', 'Slowcessing'))
    frame.defaultCloseOperation = kwargs.get('defaultCloseOperation', JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE)
    frame.resizable = kwargs.get('resizable', False)

    panel = pj_applet()
    frame.add(panel)
    panel.init()

    while panel.defaultSize and not panel.finished:
        sleep(0.5)

    frame.pack()
    frame.visible = 1

    return frame

def shoebot_imports():
    """
    Allow import of the shoebot libraries
    """
    ##APP = 'shoebot'
    import sys
    DIR = sys.prefix + '/share/shoebot/locale'
    ##locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
    ##gettext.bindtextdomain(APP, DIR)
    ###gettext.bindtextdomain(APP)
    ##gettext.textdomain(APP)
    ##_ = gettext.gettext

    LIB_DIR = sys.prefix + '/share/shoebot/lib'
    sys.path.append(LIB_DIR)

Problems

There are some things I couldn’t work :

The callback to say that images have been downloaded happens before the whole file is available, for this reason there are grey parts on the images on the first run.

Nodebox web…

While I did manage to fix things to get this working in Jython and get Morguefile working, I had a lot of trouble understanding what was going on here.

Cheers to Tom De Smedt for fixing these the areas of nodebox-web that I couldn’t

Processing…

Some parts of PApplet to do with image loading seem to be static, which may also explain problems I was getting with reentrancy.

Download

If you want to have a go, you’ll need to:

Install Netbeans 6.8

Install Jython (2.5 or higher) by installing the Netbeans python module

Add python to the path (if using Netbeans it’s copy is where Netbeans is installed).

Get nodebox-web by downloading shoebot and install it with:

jython setup.py install

In Netbeans, add all the jars in the processing\lib folder to the Jython classpath, and opengl\library\opengl.jar

Download the PythonOnProcessing (tested on Netbeans 6.8)

I’m going to show here that it can also be used to generate web content, using Django.

I’m going to port two examples from the Michael Urmans Cairo Tutorial for PyGTK Programmers.

To understand the cairo and it’s drawing model I’d recommend his his Cairo Tutorial for Python Programmers.

Note: In this example I’ll be generating SVGs…  as I.E. (as of 2010) does not support them, you might want to generate PNG or PDF – if you need to do this with cairo, look for one of the many cairo tutorials on the web.

The example django project can be downloaded at the end of the article.

Prerequisites

You’ll need django and pycairo installed… and a little bit of Django knowledge.

In Windows you can do use easy_install to get the python dependencies:

easy_install pycairo
easy_install django

In linux you’ll need to use your favourite package manager.

Onto the code…

Hosting Framework

The pygtk example starts by building a simple hosting framework

#! /usr/bin/env python
import pygtk
pygtk.require('2.0')
import gtk, gobject, cairo

# Create a GTK+ widget on which we will draw using Cairo
class Screen(gtk.DrawingArea):

    # Draw in response to an expose-event
    __gsignals__ = { "expose-event": "override" }

    # Handle the expose-event by drawing
    def do_expose_event(self, event):

        # Create the cairo context
        cr = self.window.cairo_create()

        # Restrict Cairo to the exposed area; avoid extra work
        cr.rectangle(event.area.x, event.area.y,
                event.area.width, event.area.height)
        cr.clip()

        self.draw(cr, *self.window.get_size())

    def draw(self, cr, width, height):
        # Fill the background with gray
        cr.set_source_rgb(0.5, 0.5, 0.5)
        cr.rectangle(0, 0, width, height)
        cr.fill()

# GTK mumbo-jumbo to show the widget in a window and quit when it's closed
def run(Widget):
    window = gtk.Window()
    window.connect("delete-event", gtk.main_quit)
    widget = Widget()
    widget.show()
    window.add(widget)
    window.present()
    gtk.main()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    run(Screen)

This needs to be made ready for the web and the Gtkisms removed:

cairodraw.py

from cairo import Context, SVGSurface

# Create a GTK+ widget on which we will draw using Cairo
class CairoWidget:

    def __init__(self, Surface = None):
        if Surface == None:
            Surface = SVGSurface

        self.Surface = Surface

    def draw(self, cr, width, height):
        # Fill the background with gray
        cr.set_source_rgb(0.5, 0.5, 0.5)
        cr.rectangle(0, 0, width, height)
        cr.fill()

def draw_widget(dest, Widget, Surface = SVGSurface, width = 100, height = 100):
    """
    Convenience function to output CairoWidget to a buffer
    """
    widget = Widget(Surface)
    surface = widget.Surface(dest, width, height)
    widget.draw(Context(surface), width, height)
    surface.finish()

Changes:

• Screen class is now CairoWidget as Screen made less sense in this context.
• run() is replaced with draw_widget() and it has some new parameters to help it be rendered with django.
• The new file is ‘cairodraw.py’, not ‘framework.py’

Initial view…

Heres the initial views.py

# Create your views here.

from django.http import HttpResponse
from cairo import SVGSurface

import cairodraw

from math import pi

class Shapes(cairodraw.CairoWidget):
    def draw(self, cr, width, height):
        cr.set_source_rgb(0.5, 0.5, 0.5)
        cr.rectangle(0, 0, width, height)
        cr.fill()

        # draw a rectangle
        cr.set_source_rgb(1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
        cr.rectangle(10, 10, width - 20, height - 20)
        cr.fill()

        # draw lines
        cr.set_source_rgb(0.0, 0.0, 0.8)
        cr.move_to(width / 3.0, height / 3.0)
        cr.rel_line_to(0, height / 6.0)
        cr.move_to(2 * width / 3.0, height / 3.0)
        cr.rel_line_to(0, height / 6.0)
        cr.stroke()

        # and a circle
        cr.set_source_rgb(1.0, 0.0, 0.0)
        radius = min(width, height)
        cr.arc(width / 2.0, height / 2.0, radius / 2.0 - 20, 0, 2 * pi)
        cr.stroke()
        cr.arc(width / 2.0, height / 2.0, radius / 3.0 - 10, pi / 3, 2 * pi / 3)
        cr.stroke()

class Transform(cairodraw.CairoWidget):
    def draw(self, cr, width, height):
        cr.set_source_rgb(0.5, 0.5, 0.5)
        cr.rectangle(0, 0, width, height)
        cr.fill()

        # draw a rectangle
        cr.set_source_rgb(1.0, 1.0, 1.0)
        cr.rectangle(10, 10, width - 20, height - 20)
        cr.fill()

        # set up a transform so that (0,0) to (1,1)
        # maps to (20, 20) to (width - 40, height - 40)
        cr.translate(20, 20)
        cr.scale((width - 40) / 1.0, (height - 40) / 1.0)

        # draw lines
        cr.set_line_width(0.01)
        cr.set_source_rgb(0.0, 0.0, 0.8)
        cr.move_to(1 / 3.0, 1 / 3.0)
        cr.rel_line_to(0, 1 / 6.0)
        cr.move_to(2 / 3.0, 1 / 3.0)
        cr.rel_line_to(0, 1 / 6.0)
        cr.stroke()

        # and a circle
        cr.set_source_rgb(1.0, 0.0, 0.0)
        radius = 1
        cr.arc(0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0, 2 * pi)
        cr.stroke()
        cr.arc(0.5, 0.5, 0.33, pi / 3, 2 * pi / 3)
        cr.stroke()

def shapes(request):
    response = HttpResponse(mimetype='image/svg+xml')
    cairodraw.draw_widget(response, Shapes)
    return response

def transform(request):
    response = HttpResponse(mimetype='image/svg+xml')
    cairodraw.draw_widget(response, Transform)
    return response

The main difference is that Shape and Transform are the same, except they extend cairodraw.CairoWidget.

urls.py

This is pretty straightforward.

(r'^shapes/shapes/$', 'shapes.views.shapes'),

(r'^shapes/transform/$', 'shapes.views.transform'),

Taking stock…

This is a good stage to try things out, heres the django project so far: django_cairo_1a.

Enter the svgsite directory and run

python manage.py runserver

If all is well it should output something like this:

Validating models...
0 errors found

Django version 1.1.1, using settings 'svgsite.settings'
Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CTRL-BREAK.

If you visit the two URLs in most browsers except I.E. the output will look like this:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/shapes/transform/

http://127.0.0.1:8000/shapes/shapes/

Inline SVG and templates…

The previous examples output straight SVG, however it would be much better to be able to incorperate SVG into templates and use it with HTML.

Luckily modern browsers support this, and with a couple of changes we can make templates that will output mixed documents like this.

Example template:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 <head>
 <title>SVG embedded inline in XHTML</title>
 </head>
 <body>
 <h1>Transform</h1>
 <div style="width:50%, height:40px">{{transform|safe}}</div>
 <div><a href="transform">Full screen svg</a></div>
 <h1>Shapes</h1>
 <div style="width:50%">{{shapes|safe}}</div>
 <div><a href="shapes">Full screen svg</a></div>
 </body>
</html>

The variables ‘shapes’ and ‘transform’ will be the svg, the key is the ‘|safe’, which means the XML won’t be processed by django.

Changes to views to support inline

To use templates the SVG data is needed as a string to pass to the template.

Heres an index view demonstrating this:

def index(request):
    buff = StringIO()
    cairodraw.draw_widget(buff, Shapes)
    shapes = buff.getvalue()[38:]

    buff = StringIO()
    cairodraw.draw_widget(buff, Transform)
    transform = buff.getvalue()[38:]

    return render_to_response(
    'shapes_index.html',
    {"transform": transform, "shapes": shapes},
    mimetype='application/xhtml+xml')

The main differences are that -
cairodraw.draw_widget() is called with a temporary buffer, we use templates.

Evil hack alert:

OK, I did something naughty… notice the [38:] ? Unfortunately django doesn’t like having in the middle of the output. I couldn’t find a way to turn this off so we chop it off the beginning of the string.

Apart from the evil hack this works well and you get output like this:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/shapes/

Final Version

Cool, every thing seems to be working !

The final version to try django_cairo_1b.

Next time….

I’ll be looking at using a Cairo based library,  PyCha library with django to output smooth looking charts in SVG.

Heres a summary of some of the things you can do.

Clipboard integration

Go to a directory in the clipboard.

If you have the address bar enabled in explorer:

Copy the location, go to the prompt and enter ‘pcd’ to go to that folder

Go to the location of a setting in netbeans or eclipse:

Copy the location , go to the prompt and enter ‘pcd’ to go to the folder (or folder containing the file).

Get the current directory without dragging:

Enter ‘ccd’

Directory bookmarks

dirsave and dirload let you save named bookmarks.

Using hotkeys

If you use the alternate shell 4nt (or the free TCC/LE) you can use the supplied configuration and aliases to access the bookmark functionality from the keyboard:

In the 4nt or tcc/le prompt enter “option”, under the “TCStart/TCExit” path, change the location to the location where batch-flow is installed + “\conf”, for instance on my computer batch-flow is installed to c:\usr\batch-flow, so I set it to

c:\usr\batch-flow\conf

Now in new TCC/LE prompts F5-F10 are reserved for directories: Ctrl+Fkey to save, and Alt+Fkey to load.  Alt-F12 lists these shortcuts.

Note:  Alt-F12 only lists shortcuts on FKeys, to list these and other shortcuts enter dirload /l

batch-flow comes with other handy hotkeys, use ‘alias’ in TCC/LE to see what they are.

Path manipulation

addpath

It’s annoying after installing a program to have to add it to the path, so there is an ‘addpath’ command to do this.

regpath

This is a more general utility for viewing the registry path, you can list it, validate it, check for the location of files within it.

Also useful is ‘regpath /L’ which sets the local prompts path to the one in the registry.

Further help

Most of the commands have help builtin, which you can access by using the /? option.

There is one caveat:

• It only works if the filesystem is ext2 (ext3 works, and ext4 probably works).

Install VMWare DiskMount Utility

Accept the EULA, download and install the VMWare DiskMount utility.

For convenience add the utilities folder to the path:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware DiskMount Utility

Do this through the Windows Gui, or even use my addpath utility.

At this point you can mount Windows VMWare images.

The usage is:  vmware-mount drive-letter vmdk-image.

Heres how I mount my Ubuntu image to the j: drive

[C:\vmware\Ubuntu]vmware-mount j: ubuntu.vmdk

[C:\vmware\Ubuntu]

No output here indicates success.

At this point everything seems fine, but a crucial piece of the puzzle is still missing; try and view the files and you still can’t:

The next step is to make Windows understand the ext2 filesystem, using a special driver.

Install ext2ifs

Grab ext2ifs from www.fs-driver.org and install.

If the following steps don’t work then you may need to reboot.

Thats it!

You should be now able to access files inside your VMWare image (assuming it’s ext2 and not reiserfs), remount the image and have a go:

In my case I did:

[C:\vmware\Ubuntu]vmware-mount j: ubuntu.vmdk

[C:\vmware\Ubuntu] dir j:

Heres the output – hooray, I can copy my work out of the image !

This is very useful, especially if you do dist-upgrade in ubuntu and can’t access the network.

Bonus tip:

Newer versions of VMWare player let you install VMWare tools from inside the GUI, this is another way to fix the kind of catestrophic problems you can cause yourself by accidentally upgrading the kernel in an image.