Emails are still one of the most important means of electronic communication. Apart of everyday usage with some convenient client ( like superb Thunderbird), from time to time one might need to get messages content out of the mailbox and perform some bulk action(s) with it – an example could be to download all image attachments from your mailbox into some folder – this can be done easily manually for few emails, but what if there is 10 thousands of emails? Your mailbox is usually hosted on some server and you can access it via IMAP protocol. There are many possible ways how to achieve this, however most of them require to download or synchronize full mailbox locally and then extract required parts from messages and process them. This could be very inefficient indeed. Recently I have a need for automated task like one above – search messages in particular IMAP mailbox, identify attachments of certain type and name and download then and run a command with them, after command is finished successfully delete email (or move it to other folder). Looking around I did not found anything suitable, which would meet my requirements (Linux, command line, simple yet powerful). So having some experiences with IMAP and python, I decided to write such tool myself. It’s called imap_detach, and you can check details on it’s page. Here I’d like to present couple of use cases for this tool in hope they might be useful for people with similar email processing needs.
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Testing Terminal Apps
Sometimes you need to test a terminal application, which reads user inputs from terminal and prints results to terminal. These tasks are very common in introductory programming courses. Simple testing tool can help here, and students can learn good practices – automatic testing – from the very beginning. I’ve been looking around and does not find anything, simple enough, that ie can be used by beginner and provide basic actions – for testing output of program and supplying inpu to itt. So I created such tool – simpletest. Continue reading Testing Terminal Apps
Do We Trust Cloud Storage For Privacy?
With more generic offerings from cloud storage providers – up to 50GB free, cloud storage is tempting alternative to store some of our data. I have some data, which I really do not want to loose. I already have them stored on several devices, however additional copy in cloud could help. But how much I can trust cloud providers to keep my data private, even from their own employees. Not that I have something super secret, but somehow I do not like idea, that some bored sysadmin, will be browsing my family photos. Or provider use my photos for some machine learning algorithms.
Main providers like Dropbox, Google do use some encryption, however they control encryption keys, so they can theoretically access your data any time and in worst case provide them to third parties – like government agencies. From what I have been looking around only few providers like Mega or SpiderOak offer privacy by design – which means all encryption is done on client and they should not have any access to your keys (zero knowledge). However how much we can trust that their implementation is flawless or that there are not intentional back-doors left? There has been some concerns about Mega security couple years ago, but no major issues appeared since then.
So rather then trusting those guys fully, why not to take additional step and also encrypt our data, before sending them to cloud? Additional encryption will not cost us much CPU time on current hardware (from tests – 11% of one core of old AMD CPU) and will not slow down transfers, because they are rather limited by Internet connection bandwidth. And on Linux we have quite few quality encryption tools like gpg or openssl, which can be relatively easily integrated into our backup/restore chains. In the rest of this article I’ll describe my PoC shell script, that backs up/ restores whole directory to MEGA, while providing additional encryption / decryption on client side. Continue reading Do We Trust Cloud Storage For Privacy?
Writing Simple Parser in Python
From time to time one might need to write simple language parser to implement some domain specific language for his application. As always python ecosystem offers various solutions – overview of python parser generators is available here. In this article I’d like to describe my experiences with parsimonious package. For recent project of mine ( imap_detach – a tool to automatically download attachment from IMAP mailbox) I needed simple expressions to specify what emails and what exact parts should be downloaded. Continue reading Writing Simple Parser in Python
Opus Audio Codec for Audio Books And More
Opus is a relatively new lossy audio codec from Xiph Foundation, successor to Vorbis and Speex codecs. It provides very good quality for low bandwidth (<=32kbps) streams with speech, but also provides high quality for broader bandwidth (>64kbps) and more demanding data like music etc. So it can be one-off solution for any digital audio encoding. According to some tests presented on it’s site, it’s comparable with HE AAC for higher bandwidth, higher quality data, while it additionally provides better results for lower bandwidth, speech data this is something xHE ACC is addressing too, however I have not seen available codec yet.). And what is most appealing on Opus is that it’s free, without patents and it’s open source. (While majority of common audio codecs e.g MP3, AAC are restricted by patents and are subject to paying loyalties , I think Fraunhofer holds basic patents, but situations is quite complex and differs per country).
Based on positives reviews, I though that Opus could be ideal codec for audio books, where it can provide good quality at low bit rates. At least for me, I really do not need top quality for audio books (say mp3 320kbps), while the book takes gigabytes of space, but on the other hand, I do appreciate good quality and with low quality audios I have problems to understand them and I cannot really enjoy the book.
So how can Opus help and is it ready for everyday use? Continue reading Opus Audio Codec for Audio Books And More
Media Server For Music And Audio-Books
Having updated my mobile recently (but still staying on Android) to 4G device, I thought that it would be about time to make my audio collection available outside of home network. At home I use samba share, which is quite fine for most of uses, however enabling access from internet required bit more effort. In following article I’d like to describe options, I’ve been looking at, and the final solution. Continue reading Media Server For Music And Audio-Books
Simple Web Applications Deployment via Git
Git is not only great version control tool, but can be easily used for web application deployment to testing or production environmenst. For more complex projects some continuous integration (CI), tools/services can be more appropriate (like Jenkins), but for smaller project we can do just fine with Git , SSH and simple script installed as git hook. Below is the scenario I’m using for one Python Flask web application. Continue reading Simple Web Applications Deployment via Git
Terminal Interfaces in Python
Although there is a fair choice of GUI libraries for Python (good overview of Python GUI libraries is here), sometimes we need just a little bit more enhanced terminal interface, like in my recent project – XMPP test client – where requirements were quite simple – just to split terminal screen into two areas – main screen where messages are displayed (possibly asynchronously) and bottom line, where commands/messages can be entered:
OpenShift Experiencies
PaaS is happily buzzing in the Cloud and it seems to be hottest topic in the infrastructure services today, so I decided to test Openshift – PaaS offering from Red Hat. Couple of reasons make this platform interesting – firstly it’s open source solution, so we can use it to build your own private solution, secondly on public service we get 3 gears ( linux containers with predefined configuration) for free forever, so it’s easy to experiment with this platform. As a sample project we will create very simple Python Flask web application with MongoDb. Continue reading OpenShift Experiencies
Beautiful Code History Visualization with Gource
Gource tool offers very nice and appealing visualization of SW project history. Gource works with all major version control systems – git, svn, etc. can be easily installed from Ubuntu repos and is fairly easy to use. Continue reading Beautiful Code History Visualization with Gource