Blog for Sunday, 19th August 2007
19/08/2007: TrivialEncoder/0.2
An update to my PHP encryption class. Despite the name, it’s becoming a pretty sophisticated encyption machine. New encryption algorithms added:
- Vigenerè cypher
- One-Time Pad
- Bruce Schneier’s Superencyption
- Various other methods using the MCrypt library
The TrivialEncoderManager class has been obsoleted by TE_Machine, an abstract class with several different child classes for encoding, decoding and analysis. TE_Machine has a greatly improved parser for methods, which has made it a lot easier for me to add additional functionality such as the ability to analyse an encryption technique to see how strong it would be, and to check whether the output would be ASCII-safe. TrivialEncoderManager is still present, but is deprecated and will be removed next release.
19/08/2007: Sequential Video Thumbnails on Linux
So, I was looking for a way to create sequential video thumbnails (like this one) from a video file on Linux. I found that my options were severely limited. On Windows there are a plethora of tools capable of this fairly simple task, including Media Player Classic, but on Linux all I could find was QFrameCatcher. The QFrameCatcher website was inaccessible yesterday; today I managed to download the source code, but couldn’t get it to build.
Anyway, I decided it probably wouldn’t be very difficult to build my own so…
dhyana.pl
dhyana.pl is a small Perl script that co-ordinates mplayer and ImageMagick to create a lovely montage of thumbnails. (Dyhana — roughly pronounced as “jahna” — is the Sanskrit word for a deep meditation.)