Software Projects

List of Contents

CatBack

Status: Candidate for release
Version: 1.0 CR1
Official Web Page: http://www.distantvisions.net/catback/

Back up your files, yo. Back up all of your important files to another internal, external, or network hard drive. Shares the same file copy engine as CopyCat.

CopyCat

Status: Under Development (nearly complete though kinda on hold)
Version: 1.0 alpha
Official Web Page:: http://www.distantvisions.net/copycat/

Once again I've encountered a situation where a large number of files needed to be copied and some of them were inaccessible causing the usual operating system file browser to give up half way through the copy. Remove or fix the offending file, try to copy again, and it fails on the next file that has the same problem. Repeat ad nauseum. This, and the desire to start building a lightweight easy-to-use backup application, has led to the development of CopyCat. CopyCat is a file browser that will keep track of all the files it doesn't know what to do with during a copy and let the user decide as his or her own leisure. At it's heart is a file copying engine that also powers CatBack. Now has drag/drop support, but it's still a bit experimental.

CatScan

Status: Under Development
Version: 0.9
Official Web Page: None

A utility for searching for files. Similar in function to the Windows XP search function of Windows Explorer, but customized to meet my own personal preferences. Much functionality left to implement; at present, it can only return a list of the largest files and directories within a selected directory set.

NAS Reconfigure Utility

Status: Complete
Version: 1.1
Official Web Page: None

My line of NAS loses it's configuration and reverts to default configuration each time it loses power. This is most annoying. While it allows you to save a copy of your configuration, meaning you only have to upload the saved config when this happens, it is still a pain; first you have to find the NAS on the network, then log into it, then remember where you saved the last configuration file to, then upload it. The NAS Reconfigure Utility provides the ability to reconfigure the NAS through a click of a button. You can also schedule it to run periodically in a fully automated fashion if one click is simply too much effort.

MyMo (replaces Movie Rankings Updater)

Status: In Testing
Version: 1.0 beta
Official Web Page: http://www.distantvisions.net/mymo/

Movie Rankings Updater is a niche program written to help keep My Movie Rankings in synch with my movie rankings at the IMDB.

I decided to host a personal movie rankings page because people must have an account on the IMDB themselves in order to access my movie rankings page on the IMDB. I also wanted to include additional information on some titles. However, due to the large number of titles, manually editing a personal page would be very tedious.

The Movie Rankings Updater largely solves this problem by parsing the IMDB movie rankings page and merging it with my personal movie rankings pages.

Dynamic IP Assistant

Status: Complete
Version: 1.1
Official Web Page: None

Dynamic IP Assistant is an application for automatically creating and uploading a web page with local dynamic IP information to a static web site. This program is useful when running a server at home where the IP address is dynamic. In order for clients to connect to the server, they will have to use the dynamic IP address. By scheduling this program to run periodically, a web page containing the dynamic IP address can be uploaded to a static location whenever the IP address changes.

I occasionally host services from my home computer that are accessed from My Server Page; this page is created and uploaded using Dynamic IP Assistant.

Conflict

Status: On Hold (not enough time)
Version: 0.7
Official Web Page: http://www.distantvisions.net/conflict/

Conflict is a turn-based military conquest board game with turn-based battle sequences. It is based off of a Nintendo game. For more information, see the official web page.

Site Profiler

Status: On Hold (not enough time)
Version: n/a
Official Web Page: None

Site Profiler is designed as a web site organizational aid. It will compile statistics on a web site, including broken links, broken images, storage space used, alphabetization inconsistencies, etc. This information can be used to improve the site, by fixing the broken parts and removing old files no longer in use. Site Profiler will also be able to build a site map web page for the web site (a page listing and linking to all other pages on the web site).

Initially it will only process my personal web folder on my local machine, but it may be expanded to also process the actual web site as well, and possibly synchronize files between the web site and the personal web folder on the local machine.

MP Front Door

Status: Complete
Version: 1.0
Official Web Page: None

MP Front Door is a simple graphical user interface for the MPlayer media player. MPlayer is a great open source program for playing DivX and other video formats that other commercial media players do not handle (or do not handle well). However, MPlayer does not come with a GUI. Several open source GUIs exist, but I was not happy with them (largely due to difficulty in getting them to work). I therefore wrote my own simple GUI for it. It was written some time ago, so it's not the greatest.

Grab a copy here:MP Front Door

Unfortunately, my GUI is not very easy to install (maybe I'll work on this sometime). First, you need to have MPlayer on your computer. You also need to have a Java Virtual Machine installed. Put the MPFrontDoor.jar file into a separate directory somewhere and set up a shortcut that runs "???/bin/javaw -jar MPFrontDoor.jar" where "???" is the install path of your Java Virtual Machine. Set the start/run directory to the directory where you placed MPFrontDoor.jar. On first run of MP Front Door, you will need to go to the settings and tell it what the full path of the media player executable file is.

Other media players (or even software that isn't a media player at all) could potentially be run with MP Front Door, but it was designed only with MPlayer in mind.


Last Updated 7/13/2009 by Scott Arnold
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