The Perceptus Back Story

Here’s my reasonably quick and free way to compare the files in a folder.  I’ve assumed a bit of computer knowledge, mostly, because I don’t have time to fill in the many little details.

Get a copy of WinMerge from Sourceforge – it’s a tool often used by programmers to see differences in text files.

Open a command window

- e.g. start –> run –> “cmd”

Create a text file with the names, sizes, and date stamps from folder “A”

- e.g. dir c:\the_documents\*.* > this_computer.txt

Do the same for folder “B”

- e.g. dir \\that_computer\c$\the_documents\*.* > that_computer.txt

Open both files in WinMerge.

- the differences in the two “dir” outputs will be higlighted for you.

Now if you’re still not sure if the files are the same or now, e.g. if the files are the same size but have different date stamps, then search for a utility called “md5sums”.  This will create md5 hashes of all files in a folder.

e.g. c:\tools\md5sums -n “\\distribution\c$\program files\cybex\*.*” > distrib2.txt

That’s it.  It’s been a couple weeks since the last blog post. We’ve been busy at Perceptus.  Our next project is going live soon – retailers with multiple locations in BC and Alberta, watch this space.  Our next product is geared for you!

Sometimes the things that should be stupidly easy… aren’t. Converting a bunch of audio files at once, is one of those things.

My previous method of converting FLAC files (those are lossless, i.e. exactly like the CD, sound files that some people use to rip tracks from CD’s) to MP3′s (those famous files that work on your cellphone, mp3 player, dvd player, and just about everywhere else) involved Winamp, a plug-in, and a lot of file renaming.  It wasn’t a system I could recommend to others.

Today, I found the need to make a few MP3′s.  So, I searched for a “better way”.  Here’s my FLAC to MP3 recipe:

• Install foobar2000.  It’s a free media player from foobar2000.org.  It appears to be safe to use, but YMMV.
• To create MP3′s you will need to find a (Windows) binary copy of LAME, the open source MP3 encoder.  Google for it.
• Load your files in foobar2000.
• You might want to set your default file naming and file quality preferences. Or do that after the next step.
• Right-click to bring up a context menu that brings up a “convert” option – how thoughtful.
• Answer a couple easy questions about finding lame.exe and the destination folder.
• And let it go.

So far so good.  This setup should be good for converting WAV and many other audio files too.

I found a new use for our Web Tools by Perceptus website.  I was sending a bulk email to friends, family, clients, and co-workers about my team’s upcoming race in the Red Bull Soapbox Derby in Vancouver.

But the list of email addresses I selected in Outlook, my PIM, would not copy and paste into a new email in Thunderbird, my email client.*  Outlook separates recipients with semi-colons, Thunderbird… doesn’t.  It’s not immediately obvious to me what Thunderbird will accept as a separator in a single “to” line. It took several Google searches (or was it trial and error?) to figure out that Thunderbird will accept line breaks, i.e. “enter”.

Now all I needed to do was find quick way to convert the list which looks like this “<Leonard> me@perceptus.ca; <Me too> me2@perceptus.ca” from Outlook.  In this case, the extra name information that comes up in angled braces was just in the way.

Fortunately, The Email Grep Text Wizard! from our tools site, tools.perceptus.ca, handled the job well.  Just paste the list from Outlook and let our website return a clean simple list of email addresses.  One email per line.

* My PDA syncs to Outlook so it has to be the personal info manager, but I prefer the email features of Thunderbird.  Yes, it’s cumbersome, and no, I’m not entirely happy with the setup, but I haven’t found anything better, yet.

So, I spent some time trying to find a free English-Chinese dictionary for Windows Mobile.  How naive was I to think that it would be easy?

In the end, I jerry-rigged one using the free CEDICT database and an ebook reader.  My compiled file and rough instructions are hosted on a page of this blog:

http://blog.perceptus.ca/windows-mobile-cedict/

It’s an ugly jerry-rigged  thing.  But it’ll have to do for now, for me at least.

P.S. Comments have just been enabled on pages on the Perceptus Back Story blog.  Please comment if the dictionary ebook is useful to you… or if you have a source for a better Mandarin Pinyin offline dictionary for WM PDAs.

Domain Name front-running is in the news on Slashdot again. This is the sneaky concept where bad domain name resellers and domain parking sites snoop on end-users as they look for the right domain name for their legitimate website.

E.g. if years ago I happened to use a bad DNS registrar to test if print-bingo.com was taken, and I didn’t register it right away, the shady DNS registrar would register it for themselves and then try to resell it to me at a premium – what’s worse is that currently they don’t even pay a dime as long as they cancel the registration within 4 days (or something).

So, we at Perceptus Solutions Inc., wrote a tool to try and avoid part of the risk, the “WHOIS” search.  Our web based tool is not bullet-proof. You can get false negatives. Plus, in theory, the DNS lookup can be snooped as well.

Nevertheless, for over a year, our Dig some domain names tool has been hosted on our random dumping ground called tools.perceptus.ca. We didn’t have a blog back then, so there was no where good to mention it. Today we have this blog, so we’re posting it now.

Our tool avoids the WHOIS lookup.  I also suspect the DNS server used on our VPS is less likely to be snooped since it’s not primarily used by Joe-Six-Pack — If I was buying domain lookup data, I’d prefer the higher volume, more “real” data that big ISPs like Comcast, Verizon, or Rogers would have to offer.

So, there you go.  It’s free to use, and we don’t expect enough traffic for it to be worth snooping ourselves.  But you’ll have to take our word on that.