BiaMovE (pronounced by-a-movie) is an advanced mencoder GUI I've written in Python and Tkinter. Features include:

• Configuration for popularly used audio and video codecs (e.g. LAVC, x364, xvid, mp3lame, twolame etc.)
• Save/load profiles. You can create a specific profile for encoding different types of videos.
• A dialog box for common video filters - crop, scale, expand etc.
• Other advanced mencoder options not found in other video encoding GUIs.

What BiaMovE doesn't do:

• Detect mencoder/codecs installed on your system. You need mencoder installed with specific codecs you need for it to work.
• Advanced error checking. Be aware that Mencoder is a complex video encoding software and supports hundreds of options. Using certain combination of options/codecs might produce invalid, incompatible video formats. BiaMovE just passes your choices to the Mencoder command line and doesn't do much more than that.

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As mentioned in my previous post, I'm still working on the Mencoder GUI, but it's now beginning to take shape. I've almost completed it (except for saving and loading profiles and the actual encoding part). All the codec specific/video filter configuration dialog boxes are complete as of now.

Here's a screenshot of the main window. More coming up later.

I've written a new blog tool in PHP called LiteDoodle. It's a simple, configuration driven image blogging system, ideal for small webcomics. Doesn't use MySQL or any databases.

Before you test it out, make sure you read the install-readme.html file. It has some useful information. It's a very rough-and-ready tool, so you won't find much polish in the code, but it does the job and is not very complicated.

Download: LiteDoodle.zip (25 kB)

I've known about Gambas for a while now, but I neglected mentioning it on this blog. Recently this project made it back to the Debian repositories and I was really pleased to see how well it has matured into a full-fledged Visual Basic-like development environment for Linux.

Now, I know that a lot of developers scoff at Basic in general and Visual Basic in particular. But to be honest, it was my first real GUI programming experience on Windows and I was immediately hooked by its simplicity and power until I got into Visual C++ and such. Similarly Linux programming needn't be all about complex shell scripting and C programming. There are *plenty* of options for newbie programmers who just want to get an application developed as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Gambas is not a VB-clone but those who've used VB for any length of time will immediately feel at home with it. Though it has a long way to go, I was able to write a fairly decent GUI application within an hour (and that was slow by my standards). The best thing about it is that it has support for both QT (with or without KDE support) and GTK interfaces, so all you need to do is choose the library you want to use for your final executable and you're set. Besides it has a number of components which tap into the full power of libraries like libXML, ODBC, MySQL, PostgreSQL, OpenGL and so on.

So if you're looking for a simple RAD tool for Linux without having to learn a complex scripting or programming language, give Gambas a try.

Do you have a bunch of images/photos in folders in your hard drive that you just want to quickly turn into an album of navigable web pages? And you don't want the hassle of installing a heavyweight PHP/MySQL driven gallery software on your web host simply to put these pictures online or waste time in individually uploading each image to a hosted service like Flickr or Photobucket? If so, this post is for you.

There are a large number of (extremely simple) command line tools in *nix that will do the job of processing folders of images, producing thumbnails and organizing them in a simple, easily navigable website. The output of these gallery generators can be customized using HTML templates, so if you're not satisfied with the default, basic layout of your gallery, you can easily modify the result. The best part is that such albums are completely platform independent and can be hosted on any web server, being nothing more than static HTML files with images in JPG/PNG/GIF format.

I found plenty of them in Debian's repository and I'll share a few of them here.

• BINS - Seems an interesting option for those interested in multiple albums within a single website.
• galrey - I couldn't find a website for this tool, but the package is available in the Debian repositories.
• Photon - Another simple Python script which produces a static album with thumbnails.
• iGal - Another configurable image gallery generator written in Perl.
• kallery - for those who hate the CLI and prefer a "Wizard" style interface to accomplish tasks, this one is a good choice. This is similar to the above command line tools and produces a static HTML album.

There are plenty of simple command line utilities in Linux/*nix like these for other tasks as well. Feel free to explore!