This is a post for the unlikely event that you find yourself owning an old ‘Jawbone Jambox Mini‘ **and** you want to change the voice pack back to original/default, after you spent a couple of years using the Japanese one – a voice pack you don’t really understand but thought it would be entertaining to listen to a new voice when you turn on the speaker.
To make it a little gloomier, their website was completely taken down and they never really open sourced the code for their hardware nor did they post to some third-party website the last state of all the software for their products.
Luckily, before Jawbone’s website was completely taken down, Robert decided to capture all the latest software and posted it elsewhere with instructions on how to update. You can find all the goodies here:
I use a macbook and I can confirm that if you try to use the Mac Jawbone Updater 2.2.5 to update/change the language pack of your Jawbone Mini Jambox, the upgrade will fail and you will end up with a bricked speaker. 😦
The good news is that this is recoverable. Here’s how to do it:
Unplug the Mini Jambox.
Power down the Mini Jambox.
Press and hold the Play/Pause button (circular button on top).
While still holding the button, plug the Mini Jambox to a power source.
Voilá, your Jambox should now be in recovery mode and you can flash it/upgrade it with a new language package.
In order to properly upgrade the language pack of your Jawbone Mini Jambox you should be running on Windows and use the Windows “Jawbone Updater.exe”. I did try initially doing this via VMWare Fusion, running a Windows 8.1 VM inside my Mac OS X. That does not work.
You need to run the Jawbone Updater software from a native Windows operating system (no VMs involved).
And that’s it, your Jawbone Mini Jambox is good to go for a little longer.
So this is a pet peeve that’s been biting me for a sometime.
Often when you take a picture with you phone or digital camera, the camera rotation sensor (gyroscope?) gets it wrong and ends  up taking a picture that is sideways (ie, rotated +/- 90 degrees).
Surely enough you can use your phone’s photo library app to rotate it and job done, sanity restored.
However, the really really annoying thing is when you camera gets the orientation of a video wrong. Rotating a video is just not a functionality that the photo library offers off the shelf. That’s because rotating a video involves actually re-enconding it from the scratch. Some nice video players (eg, VLC) allow you to rotate while playing the video, but this is fiddly and hard to remember to do every time you play the video.
So in any case, here are a few bash lines that I cobbled together to rotate a batch of videos trying to preserve as much of the metadata information as possible.
for i in $( find *.mov ); do
IN=$i OUT=${IN}.m4v && \
ffmpeg -i ${IN} -c:a copy -map_metadata 0:s:0 -vf "transpose=1" -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset medium ${OUT} && \
exiftool -tagsfromfile ${IN} -makernotes -make -model ${OUT} && \
exiftool ${OUT} && \
rm *_original
done
NOTE: To run these you will need to have ffmpeg and exiftool installed in your system.
Apache Hadoop is an open source project composed of several software solutions for distributed computing. One interesting component is Apache Hive that lets one leverage the MapReducing powers of Hadoop through the simple interface of HiveQL language. This language is basically a SQL lookalike that triggers MapReduces for operations that are highly distributable over huge datasets.
A common hurdle once a company decides to use Hadoop and Hive is: “How do we make Hadoop understand our data formats.”. This is where the Hadoop SerDe terminology kicks in. SerDe is nothing but a short form for Serialization/Deserialization. Hadoop makes available quite a few Java interfaces in its API to allow users to write their very own data format readers and writers.
Step by step, one can make Hadoop and Hive understand new data formats by:
1) Writing format readers and writers in Java that call Hadoop APIs.
2) Packaging all code in a java library – eg., MySerDe.jar.
3) Adding the jar to the Hadoop installation and configuration files.
4) Creating Hive tables and explicitly set the input format, the output format and the row format.
Before diving into the Hadoop API and Java code it’s important to explain what really needs to be implemented. For concisiveness of terms I shall refer to row as the individual unit of information that will be processed. In the case of good old days SQL databases this indeed maps to a table row. However our datasource can be something as simple as Apache logs. In that case, a row would be a single log line. Other storage types might take complex message formats like Protobuf Messages, Thrift Structs, etc… For any of these, think of the top-level struct as our row. What’s common between them all is that inside each row there will be sub-fields (columns), and those will have specific types like integer, string, double, map, …
So going back to our SerDe implemention, the first thing that will be required is the row deserializer/serializer (RowSerDe). This java class will be in charge of mapping our row structure into Hive’s row structure. Let’s say each of our rows corresponds to a java class (ExampleCustomRow) with the three fields:
int id;
string description;
byte[] payload;
The RowSerDe should be able to mirror this row class and their properties into Hive’s ObjectInspector interface. For each of our types it’ll find and return the equivalent type in the Hive API. Here’s the output of our RowSerDe for this example:
In the example above, the row structure is very flat but for examples where our class contains others classes and so forth, the RowSerDe needs to be able to recursively reflect the whole structure into Hive API objects.
Once we have a way of mapping our rows into hadoop rows, we need to provide a way for hadoop to read our files or databases that contain multiple rows and extract them one by one. This is done via de Input and Output format APIs. A simple format for storing multiple rows in a file would be separating them by newline characters (like comma separated files do). An Input reader in this case would need to know how to read a byte stream and single out byte arrays of individual lines that would later be fed into to our custom SerDe class.
As you can probably imagine by now, the Output writer needs to do exactly the opposite: it receives the bytes that corresponds to each line and it knows how to append them and separate them (by newline characters) in the output byte stream.
How an Hadoop MapReduce interacts with a custom SerDe for Hive.
Summarizing, in order to implement a complete SerDe one needs to implement:
1) The Hive Serde interface (contains both the Serializer and Deserializer interfaces).
2) Implement the InputFormat interface and the OutputFormat interface.
In the next post I’ll take a deep dive into the actual Hadoop/Hive APIs and Java code.
(Two years have gone by and I unfortunately never got round to writing anything else. Probably, anything I would write now would be outdated so I would encourage anyone who has questions to try to ping me directly or just ask directly the the hive community)
Here’s silly (and long) Python script I wrote a while back to count the number of lines in files recursively through a dir. (I guess I was fed up with ‘find ../ -iname “*cpp” | xargs wc -l” or just utterly bored or using Windows…)
#!/usr/bin/python
#
# Usage:
# ./count_lines.py [path_to_dir_or_file]
__author__ = "Rui Barbosa Martins (ruibmartins@gmail.com)"
import optparse
import os.path
import sys
def getNumberOfLines(filePath):
fp = file(filePath, "r");
numberOfLines = len(fp.readlines())
fp.close()
return numberOfLines
def visit((fileTypesIncluded, files), dirname, names):
for f in names:
filePath = os.path.join(dirname, f)
if (fileTypesIncluded == ["*"] or
filter(lambda fe: f.endswith(fe), fileTypesIncluded)) and
os.path.isfile(filePath):
files[filePath] = getNumberOfLines(filePath)
def main(startPath, fileTypesIncluded):
if not os.path.exists(startPath):
print "Error: Path [%s] does not exist." % (startPath)
sys.exit(-1)
elif os.path.isfile(startPath):
files = {startPath: getNumberOfLines(startPath)}
else:
fileTypes = "|".join(fileTypesIncluded)
absPath = os.path.abspath(startPath)
print "Searching for extensions '%s' in '%s'." % (fileTypes, absPath)
files = {}
os.path.walk(startPath, visit, (fileTypesIncluded, files))
keys = files.keys()
keys.sort()
total = 0
longestLength = 0
groups = {}
for key in keys:
if longestLength < len(key):
longestLength = len(key)
for key in keys:
spaces = " " * (longestLength - len(key))
print "%s%s %d" % (key, spaces , files[key])
total = total + files[key]
if len(keys) > 1:
print "Total lines of code: %d" % (total)
def parseArgs():
usage = "Usage: %prog [Options] FILE_OR_DIRECTORY"
parser = optparse.OptionParser(usage=usage)
parser.add_option("-f", "--file_extensions", dest="file_extensions",
help="File extensions to count in. (comma separated)",
metavar="FILE_TYPES",
default=[".*"])
(options, args) = parser.parse_args()
fe = options.file_extensions
if not args:
path = "."
elif len(args) == 1:
path = args[0]
else:
parser.print_help()
print "Error: Too many paths provided. Only one expected."
sys.exit(0)
if type(fe) == str:
fe = map(lambda s: s.strip(), fe.split(","))
if not fe or filter(lambda s: "*" in s, fe):
fe = ["*"]
return path, fe
if __name__ == "__main__":
main(*parseArgs())
Finally, after almost a year battling away with wxWidgets, GraphicsMagick, gcc, Visual Studio, CppUnitLite, … I finally get to release version 1.0.0 of SimplePhoto.
SimplePhoto is a batch processing application for images. For the time being it allows image format, image dimensions and groupings.
My main focus for this application was to make it’s memory footprint as little as possible. It’s been implemented in C++ and on Windows it takes around 5MB of memory when running. There are still loads of features to implement but I really wanted to get this out there ASAP. Next step is to open source it (probably hosting it at code.google.com).
After a lot of frustration I decided that the best way to have GraphicsMagick/ImageMagick finding the required magic.mgk file inside YourApp.app/Contents/Resources is to patch the image library code.
The change is quite trivial and I’ve pasted the diff below. This patch was applied to GraphicsMagick version 1.3.7. Basically it uses the path provided via magick::InitializeMagick(“executable/path”) to find Contents/Resources. Have fun!!!
Lately I’ve been battling away with the Mach-O binary file format. I am trying to create a Mac version of an application that depends on dylibs provided by wxWidgets and GraphicsMagick. I started this quest by finding out the hard way that mac binaries (libs and applications) store the path to their dylib dependencies in the binary itself. As you can imagine this is a big hassle for app deployment as you force every user wanting to install the app to have the same exact /usr/lib and /opt/local/lib as your machines does.
After a bit of scavenging in forums I found out that otool allows you to print the list of dependencies of a binary and that install_name_tool allows you to change them. Bearing this in mind I now wanted the simplest way I could get to change the list of dependencies both in my binary and inside all of its dependency dylibs. I ended up writing the python script below for this.
#!/usr/bin/python
#
# Uses otool and install_name_tool to change a given path in the list of
# dylib dependencies to another (hopefully relative) path to ease deployment.
# If this is applied to dylib files it will also change their ID.
#
# Author: Rui Barbosa Martins (ruibm@ruibm.com)
import os.path
import re
import subprocess
import sys
def RunCmd(cmd):
obj = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, bufsize=42000, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
out = ""
while (True) :
content = obj.stdout.read()
if content:
out += content
else:
break
ret_code = obj.wait()
if ret_code == 0:
return out
else:
return None
def GetDependencies(file):
cmd = "otool -L " + file
output = RunCmd(cmd)
if not output:
raise Exception("Problem running otool. [%s]" % (cmd))
output = output.split("n")
deps = list()
for line in output:
m = re.match("(.*)\(compatibility version.*", line);
if not m:
continue
dylib = m.group(1).strip()
deps.append(dylib)
return deps
def ChangeDependecies(file, dependencies, replaceFrom, replaceTo):
print "Changing dependencies in %s" % (file)
fname = os.path.basename(file)
for d in dependencies:
if not replaceFrom in d:
continue
new = d.replace(replaceFrom, replaceTo)
if fname == os.path.basename(d):
cmd = "install_name_tool -id %s %s" % (new, file)
print "ID: %s -> %s" % (d, new)
else:
cmd = "install_name_tool -change %s %s %s" % (d, new, file)
print "Change: %s -> %s" % (d, new)
RunCmd(cmd)
def main(argv) :
if len(argv) != 4:
print "Usage: %s [file] [replaceFrom] [replaceTo]" % (argv[0])
file = argv[1]
replaceFrom = argv[2]
replaceTo = argv[3]
deps = GetDependencies(file)
ChangeDependecies(file, deps, replaceFrom, replaceTo)
if __name__ == "__main__":
main(sys.argv)
Since I spent quite a few hours trying to get my first OpenGL ES triangle on the Android phone’s screen I thought I should share the code with everyone to ease a bit the pain. Hopefully this will help someone get going on Android.
Microsoft’s effort to force customers to pirate their software never ceases to astonish me. I have lately been trying Parallels versus VMWare Fusion on my Mac with my purchased version of Windows Vista Ultimate. I know some people will point out that I’d be better off by burning it down altogether but I have nothing against Windows users and I’d like to be able to compile my applications for their system.
That being said, it seems that using Parallels and VMware Fusion causes the platform detection system quite a headache. It has by now decided that I have Windows installed in several machines therefore I’m not entitled to use it anymore… I must say that at this point it’s a similar effort to go through Microsoft telephone service or just get a cracked key. Being in a good mood and all I decided I’d give Microsoft dudes a chance and made the phone call.
First thing I need to point out is that if you thought having to manually copy the serial key to the Windows installation dialog was hard enough, then you haven’t seen anything. Microsoft telephone activation service presents itself as a total of 48 digits you need to dial in to the phone just to get back another bundle of freshly baked 48 digits. If my math does not betray me this is a total of 96 digits that Microsoft expects you to copy flawlessly in order to prove yourself worthy of running a fully activated Windows Vista system. After spending 15min on the phone I believe that even my girlfriend started getting jealous of this woman voice that seemed to be bonding so well with me with so many numbers being dictated back and forth.
Eitherway, I’m quite glad to say that it all worked and I have now a VMware Fusion Windows Vista image that is actually activated. I’m now not so impressed with the 30GB it seems to already be taking even though I installed the smallest Windows footprint possible with Visual Studio. I guess I’ll leave this rant for another post. Taaa!
I found recently this amazing Mac application called Spark that allows you to define global shortcuts keys (hotkeys). Here are some utility scripts I conjured to make my life easier.
Copy the current Finder path to the clipboard.
tell application "Finder"
set theWindow to window 1
set thePath to (POSIX path of (target of theWindow as alias))
set the clipboard to thePath
end tell
Open an iTerm in the current Finder location.
tell application "Finder"
if ((count the window) < 1) then
return
end if
set theWindow to window 1
set thePath to (POSIX path of (target of theWindow as alias))
my openTerminal(thePath)
end tell
on openTerminal(path)
tell application "iTerm"
activate
if not (exists current terminal) then
launch session "Default Session"
end if
set mysession to current session of current terminal
select mysession
set cmd to "pushd " & path
write mysession text cmd
end tell
end openTerminal