Recently I found myself in a position where I needed to have a bit more control over Lab computers – more specifically, normal screen sharing is a bit useless in a coding lab, and I found that students often wanted to use laptops instead of existing lab solutions.

LabHelper is a solution that runs through some central server. The client and server are pretty small. It’s a bit messy, but should be fairly extensible.

LabHelper on GitHub

I recently needed to move some Picasa 2 albums from an old computer to a new one given only the old files and album files. I’d about had it with albums, so I wrote a Python script to convert .pal (Picasa albums) into regular folders.

It chokes on unicode, but dumps errors to a file for you to resolve them – just run this in a directory with your .pil files and it will create subfolders for each album and copy the pictures into them, as well. Use at your own risk.

#!/usr/bin/python2
from xml.dom.minidom import parse
import os.path
import shutil

PICTURESPATH = "C:\\Users\\User\\Documents\\oldcomp\\My Pictures"
ERRORS = open('errors.txt','w')

def populateFolder(albumName):
    global PICTURESPATH
    global ERRORS
    doc = parse(albumName)
    title = [x for x in doc.getElementsByTagName("property") if x.getAttribute("name")=="name"]
    title = title[0].getAttribute("value")
    files = map(lambda x: x.childNodes[0].nodeValue, doc.getElementsByTagName("filename"))
    translated  = map(lambda x: os.path.expandvars(x).replace("$My Pictures",PICTURESPATH), files)
    try:
        os.mkdir(title)
    except:
        ERRORS.write("Cant make directory " + title)
    for f in translated:
        try:
            shutil.copy(f, title + "/")
        except:
            ERRORS.write("Error in album %s: %s\n" % (title, f))

def main():
    fileList = filter(lambda x: ".pal" in x, os.listdir("."))
    for cFile in fileList:
        populateFolder(cFile)
    

if __name__=="__main__":
    main()

Overview

multiftp is a multi-threaded (multiprocess) command-line FTP uploader that allows easy recursive uploading of directories. It provides an easy way to schedule fast FTP uploads via batch scripts.

Features

• Easily script multithreaded FTP uploads
• Works via multiprocessing to circumvent threading problems.
• Automatic recursive uploads
• Ideal for situations where you need to upload an entire folder in script (i.e. publishing a website via FTP).

Usage

Run mtftp.py -h for a help file.

Requirements

• Python 2.7.x+ (not currently Python 3 ready, but the changes are probably minimal)

License

The software is licensed under the MIT license, whose text can be viewed in the program source.

Download

Get the code here.