After 6 years of wonderful services I decided to change my superb Nokia 7373 by a Nexus 4 (thanks to the last price down). Welcome to the 21th century with a big smartphone running Android. One problem : how to transfer my contacts from Nokia to Android ? After reading some articles on the net I didn't find any simple solution. So I developped a perl script that will convert contacts extracted from Nokia Suite to vCad format (.vcf). The procedure is bellow :

• Extract your contacts with Nokia Suite into a CSV file
• Run this script (you can see help with -h switch)
• Copy vcf files to your phone (you can copy them in DCIM directory if you have a Nexus 4, it works)
• Go to "contact" application and import all vcf files

Now you can use your mobile phone as before. Personally I deactivated contact synchronisation because I do not want to give phone numbers of my friends to Google (even if I suppose it already has). *Beware* this script has been developped for French people : default call prefix is +33 (you can change it) and a cell phone numbers starts with 6 in France (you can change it). If you're in another country you may have to tweak it. Currently it can extract first name, last name, phone numbers and email. Have fun !

If I often compile under emacs, I use a lot the terminal. Most of people ignore how it's fast and practical to work, not for every tasks but it's perfect for programing. I already talks about Autojump2, today I will present colout. It's true that the terminal miss some colors. For better displays I personaly use black over white, but when you compile some projects, it's hard to see if errors happens.

I tweak colout (written by nojhan) to fit my needs. It's a simple Python software that will color terminal output if it found specific words. The list of words is fix and embedded into the script (unlike the original one that takes them in parameter). My script is available here.

You only need to add colout file into a bin directory (referenced in your $PATH) and edit your .bashrc with (don't forget to make it executable) :

function make() { /usr/bin/make "$@" 2>&1 | colout ;}

So, when you type "make", it will transparently use colout. The only bad thing is that you loss make's returns value.

Example with :

int main()
{
    int a, b;

    b = a+1;
    c = a;

    return 0;
}

It's better, isn't it ?

Some weeks ago I bought a "Ready for PIC" board from MikroElektronika. These board comes with a PIC18F25K22 flashed with a bootloader that receives a program from UART and load it in memory without flashing. The prototype area is very nice for peoples that do not want to weld, it also contains a FTDI chip and can be powered by USB. Plus MikroElektronika supply a GUI software to interact with the bootloader. These GUI is available for Windows and Linux, that's great ! Contrary to microchip, MikroElektronika wants to sell their expensive C/BASIC/Pascal compiler and provide cool boards at a good price. The only thing I regret is that you cannot reset the PIC with the FTDI, you need to press the reset button before and after code is downloaded (so boring...).

Maybe the GUI is useful for electronics peoples, but I found it (on Linux) heavy and sometimes buggy. Moreover you cannot access to serial output just after code is downloaded. So, I wrote a simple console Python program that will download an HEX file with command line and optionally displays the output of UART. This allows to do quicker and simpler tests. You can find the file here, it's licensed under GPL v3.

This is a fast software DES implementation for 64 bits machines thats supports intel SSE instructions (SSE, SSE2, SSE3 and SSSE3). The x86_64 architecture lacks support for bit manipulation and the ones introduced by AMD are not used here. The main SSE instruction used is "pmovmskb" that will extract the most significant bit of each byte inside an XMM register. That allows to do linear permutations with few instructions, but for random permutations a simple mask-shift is used. The next generation of processors with AVX2 should includes some bit manipulation instructions that will even more speed up DES computation.

Currently, my implementation is about 10 times faster than the one in OpenSSL 1.0.1c, assembly optimized but 32 bits centered. The package includes a basic implementation in full C (des.c) for algorithm comprehension and the fast implementation in fast_des.c. fast_des.c is linked with the libcrypto.a of OpenSSL (configured with linux-x86_64) to do benchmarks. The benchmark is to do 1 000 000 full DES computation. I obtained these values :

fast_des.c
Init value 123456789abcdef
Fast des
Time 0 29333426 85e813540f0ab405
Des
Time 0 362639005 85e813540f0ab405

des.c :
Init value 123456789abcdef
Time 0 236431885 85e813540f0ab405

My configuration is compounded by an intel core i5 m450 @ 2.4Ghz, 4Gb of RAM, Linux 64, gcc 4.7.1. One funny thing is that if I compile fast_des.c with -O3 flag, performances dramatically falls just under OpenSSL implementation. On an core 2 duo E7500 @ 2.93GHz :

Init value 123456789abcdef
Fast des
Time 0 110037322 85e813540f0ab405
Des
Time 0 352010444 85e813540f0ab405

Source file can be found here.

Working with OpenOffice/LibreOffice Spreadsheets with Python One improvement of OpenOffice was to introduce Python scripting beside VBA one. You can do internal or external scripting. External scripting is done via Python UNO interface, it's like CORBA objects (...). But resources on web are poor and sparse. Only two websites have a clear and complete information :
https://www.wzdftpd.net/downloads/oowall/pyUnoServerV2.py
http://stuvel.eu/ooo-python

This is a mini HOWTO you can use in your external scripts First you have to start server side OOo/LO :

libreoffice "--accept=socket,host=localhost,port=2002;urp;" --invisible

If you don't want to see OOo/LO interface, add --headless. WARNING: You need to close ALL OOo/LO instances before starting server !

Next, load a document :

def connect(port, filename):
    # get the uno component context from the PyUNO runtime
    localContext = uno.getComponentContext()

    # create the UnoUrlResolver
    resolver = localContext.ServiceManager.createInstanceWithContext(
        "com.sun.star.bridge.UnoUrlResolver", localContext)

    # connect to the running office
    ctx = resolver.resolve("uno:socket,host=localhost,port=" + str(port) + ";urp;StarOffice.ComponentContext")
    smgr = ctx.ServiceManager

    # get the central desktop object
    DESKTOP =smgr.createInstanceWithContext("com.sun.star.frame.Desktop", ctx)

    url = unohelper.systemPathToFileUrl(
        os.path.abspath(filename))

    doc = DESKTOP.loadComponentFromURL(url, '_blank', 0, ()) 

    return doc

You can get sheets inside document by creating an enumeration :

doc = connect(port, filename)
sheets = doc.getSheets()
sheet_enum = sheets.createEnumeration()

while sheet_enum.hasMoreElements():
    sheet = sheet_enum.nextElement()
    print sheet.getName()

Retrieve cells :

cell = sheet.getCellByPosition(col, row)

You can use following methods on cell objects : XCell

To retrieve cell type (CellContentType) :

cell.getType()

For me object (or enumeration) comparison fails, so I use string comparison :

if cell.getType().value != 'EMPTY':

cell.getValue() will return cell float value (0.0 if cell is empty or text). Most of the case you need to cast it into int value : int(cell.getValue()) or do all your code with float values !!

Be careful, sometimes cells values are formated with text but contains float/integer !! value = value_cell.getString() will return "0x45"

Now you have all basics to do a spreadsheet parser ! If you don't know how to handle an object, juste print it and look at its supportedInterfaces dictionary, OOo API doc will tells how to handle them.