Converting ppt to pdf (and many others) from Java

JODConverter is a nice project that deploys OpenOffice to obtain services. It allows converting files from Office to OpenOffice, to pdf, to flash etc.
It can be embedded in a Webservice, in a Website, or driven from a Java program. The JODConverter site offers the possibility to perform online conversion.

Since NeoOffice is a branch of OpenOffice, it works also with it.

Here is a simple example (taken from the JODConverter website and completed by adding the right imports etc. - sorry the indentation is killed from Blogger's editor).

To use it (on a Mac) you need:
- to install NeoOffice
- to download the JODConverter jars
- to start NeoOffice as a service (in a shell, execute:
/Applications/NeoOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice.bin -headless -accept="socket,port=8100;urp;")
- compile and run the following java program (make sure that you include the jars in the library!)

package jod;
import java.io.File;
import com.artofsolving.jodconverter.openoffice.connection.OpenOfficeConnection;
import com.artofsolving.jodconverter.openoffice.connection.SocketOpenOfficeConnection;
import com.artofsolving.jodconverter.DocumentConverter;
import com.artofsolving.jodconverter.openoffice.converter.OpenOfficeDocumentConverter;
import java.net.ConnectException;
import java.util.logging.Level;
import java.util.logging.Logger;

public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
new Main();
}
Main(){
//put here the name of your source file
File inputFile = new File("/Users/ronchet/Desktop/3.5.ppt");
//put here the name of your destination file
File outputFile = new File("/Users/ronchet/Desktop/3.5.pdf");
//Note that for determining which conversion must be applied, JODConverter will use the files'extensions

// connect to an OpenOffice.org instance running on port 8100
OpenOfficeConnection connection = new SocketOpenOfficeConnection(8100);
try {
connection.connect();
} catch (ConnectException ex) {
Logger.getLogger(Main.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
}
// convert
DocumentConverter converter = new OpenOfficeDocumentConverter(connection);
converter.convert(inputFile, outputFile);
// close the connection
connection.disconnect();
}
}

Just a note: an alternative way to convert slides is to use (within ppt) a VBA script to export the slides into a bunch of jpgs. Here is a such script, and here another version of the same.
Also, for exporting all text, here is another VBA script.

Office on Mac - without M$

OpenOffice has been for long time a free alternative to MS Office.
On the Mac it needs to install X11 - which can be a bit annoying. There is though an interesting alternative: NeoOffice. It is an OpenOffice independent branch dedicated to the Mac and based on Aqua. It also opens the new MS formats (e.g. ppx) - OpenOffice does not yet! It also has an interface to Databases (can access a database through JDBC).

NoMu is a nice add on that installs a menu in the finder for launching NeoOffice in a different mode (e.g. as presentation or spreadsheet tool).

Alternatively, you can launch it from the shell as
/Applications/NeoOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice.bin file.doc
/Applications/NeoOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice.bin -impress file.ppt
/Applications/NeoOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice.bin -calc file.xls

NeoOffice is scriptable (in several languages: Basic, Java, Javascript, Python). I found it difficult to find documentation - it took me a lot of frustrating googling hours - until I realized that OpenOffice and StarOffice documentation apply also to NeoOffice - maybe with some differences.
Here are some resources:

• Basic programming language documentation (StarOffice)
• OpenOffice wiki
• OpenOffice forum with a section on Macros and APIs
  

Comparing directories in MacOsX

I needed to check if a directory and its backup were equal.
I found two nice ways of doing this:
- diff -rq dir1 dir2
and the very powerful FileMerge (one of the Apple Developer Tools) thac can be lauched frm the shell with "opendiff".

Extracting an audio track from a video on a Mac

I was looking for a free software for extracting an audio track from a movie.

I found one that does much more: it's called MPEG Streamclip, and it is produced by an italian company called Squared5.

It is a powerful video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many movie files, not only MPEGs; it can convert MPEG files between muxed/demuxed formats for authoring; it can encode movies to many formats, including iPod; it can cut, trim and join movies.

MPEG Streamclip can also download videos from YouTube and Google by entering the page URL.

ffmpeg on Mac OsX

ffmpegX is a nice solution - but if you need to use ffmpeg from a script or from the shell, then yo must install ffmpeg and probably also lame. See Stephen Jungles blog.

Recover lost administrator password on Mac OsX

Easier than I expected...
Use the installation disk, and reboot the machine pressing the the C key whet the machine starts.
Proceed to a new OS installation, but not all the way! just go ahead until you have a menu bar on the top. In the menu bar choose "Utilities" and "Reset password".

Adding a user to a group on a mac

Mac OsX does not use the usual Unix user and group administration tools. It has it's own application - called netinfo (see man netinfo) and a gui for that, called Netinfo Manager and located in /Applications/Utilities. You need to have administrator privileges to use it for modification.

When you open Netinfo Manager, you can browse a set of items, among which users and groups. When you select a user or a group, you'll see a set of properties and values. Each grup is identified by a gid number, and each user by a uid number - and a gid that refers to its default group.
If you want a user to belong also to other groups (say e.g. to group www), you need to add the name (not the gid) of the user to group www's "users" propertiy. If the "users" property (in groups -> www) does not exist - by default it's not there - , you need to create it by using the "new" icon top left.

If instead you want to do it from command line, take a look here. An example is
dseditgroup -o edit -a username -t user groupname
(you may have to sudo this!)

MySQL, Apache2, PHP5 and Tomcat (with mod_jk) on Mac OsX

For MySQL, Apache and Php5 there are a couple of web pages describing how to do it, and some package does automagically everything (e.g. MAMP). However, in such way you are bound to certain versions - sometimes old.
A better option is to be able to do it yourself, so that you can upgrade when you want and choose the version you want. Avery good description of how to do that is given in Richard Valk's blog.
Here are the links:

• Installing MySQL (after that you might also want to install the MySQL GUI Tools for administration and interaction with the DB).
  
• Compiling and installing Apache 2
• Compiling and installing PHP 5

What is really good in these pages is that Richard describes the way to install these softwares in a way that is somehow independent on the actual version.
For instance, by carefully following step by step the instructions, I was able to successfully install the current versions: httpd 2.2.6, mysql 5.0.45, php 5.2.4 even though his instructions refer to earlier versions.
At the end of the process described in these pages you'll have Apache and MySql starting automatically at boot time.

Delicate points in the process are:
- make sure that you choose the script for the right architecture (ppc or intel)
- make sure that you carefully read and follow the section about the MySQL libraries.

One point not mentioned in Richard's php page is the fact that probably you also want to add index.php as a file automatically used when you access a directory (as index.html is). To do it you have to edit Apache2/conf/httpd.config, and modify the DirectoryIndex statement as follows:

<ifmodule>
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
</ifmodule>

To check that it works, create the file index.php in your deployment directory (default is the Apache's htdocs) with the following content

<html><body><h1>It works!</h1>

<h2><?php
echo("php also works!");
phpinfo();
?></h2>

</body></html>

and then point at http://localhost/index.php.

Another point is that when you invoke apachectl (to start and stop Apache) probably it still resolves to the preinstalled Apache (try to issue the which apachectl command in a shell, you will probably find out that this points to /usr/sbin/apachectl). This can generate problems. I solved this by renaming /usr/sbin/apachectl to /usr/sbin/apachectl_orig (just to be able to restore the original setting if needed!), and creating a link from /usr/sbin/apachectl to /Library/Apache2/bin/apachectl:
ln -s /Library/Apache2/bin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl

---

Let's now move on to Tomcat: its installation is very simple, and is well described on the apache wiki: essentially you download, unpack, and set the JAVA_HOME environment variable. I easily installed 5.5.25 ( I unpacked it in /Library/Tomcat - note that later there will be references to this directory - so if yours is different adapt the commands to your configuration).

At this point Tomcat responds on port 8080 while Apache responds on port 80. It would be better to have both of them responding on port 80. This can be done by registering Tomcat as an Apache service, so that Apache recognizes certain URLs and forwards them to Tomcat. Doing so (through the mod_jk module) is a bit more complex - because I was not able to find reliable instructions, and the official documentation page does not describe clearly all steps.
So here is how I did it:

1) define the TOMCAT_HOME environment variable pointing at the place where Tomcat was unpacked;

2) get the mac binary mod_jk.so (the actual name will be something like mod_jk-1.2.25-httpd-2.2.4.so) from the Tomcat site, rename it mod_jk.so and drop it into APACHE2_HOME/modules, where APACHE2_HOME stays for the place where Apache2 was installed.

3) edit conf/server.xml in your TOMCAT_HOME, find the line
</Engine>
and add right before that:
<Listener className="org.apache.jk.config.ApacheConfig" modJk="/Library/Apache2/modules/mod_jk.so" />
(assuming that /Library/Apache2 is your Apache2 home).

4) Create a new file containing the following lines:

# Setup for Mac OS X
# Define the homes
workers.tomcat_home=/Library/Tomcat
workers.java_home=/Library/Java/Home

# Define the file separator
ps=/

# Define the worker's names
worker.list=ajp13

# Definition for worker
#
worker.ajp13.port=8009
worker.ajp13.host=127.0.0.1
worker.ajp13.type=ajp13

and save it with the name workers.properties in the directory TOMCAT_HOME/conf/jk (if the directory does not exist, create it).

5) edit conf/httpd.config in Apache2, adding at the end of the file:
# Tomcat bridge auto configuration
Include /Library/Tomcat/conf/auto/mod_jk.conf
(assuming that your TOMCAT_HOME is /Library/Tomcat)

6) restart Tomcat (sudo $TOMCAT_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh an then sudo $TOMCAT_HOME/bin/startup.sh). At this point the file called /Library/Tomcat/conf/auto/mod_jk.conf is automatically created.

7) restart Apache (sudo $APACHE_HOME/bin/apachectl restart)

8) open a browser, and point it to http://127.0.0.1/servlets-examples/
You should see page coming from your TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/servlets-examples. You can try to execute the hello world, everything should be now fine.

The next problem is what happens if you want all this to work with your machine name instead of localhost.
In fact opening http://your_machine.your.domain/servlets-examples/ in your browser will give a "Not Found". To fix this, you'll have to change in conf/xml the following lines:

<Engine name="Standalone" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="jvm1">
...
<Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost">
...
<Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps"
unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"
xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">


In all three cases you need to change "localhost" with "your_machine.your.domain" where your_machine.your.domain is of course the name of your machine.
Restart Tomcat first and then restart Apache: point at http://your_machine.your.domain/servlets-examples/ in your browser and it should work. Note that now http://127.0.0.1/servlets-examples/ will give a Not Found!
If you want both localhost (127.0.01) and your_machine.your.domain, you'll have to go though the Virtual Hosts setting - but I'll not cover that here.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: when you deploy a new webapp, always first restart Tomcat and then restart Apache (so that the automatic configuration is first regenerated by Tomcat and then read by Apache).

The next step would be to have Tomcat starting automatically at boot time.
An example and some explanation can be found here.
In short, here is what is needed (assuming that you already have Apache starting at boot):
a) create a directory Tomcat in /System/Library/StartupItems/
b) create a file called Tomcat in that directory. This is its content (of course reference to the directory where Tomcat is installed should be modified according to you system):
#!/bin/sh

. /etc/rc.common

StartService ()
{
if [ "${TOMCAT}" = "-YES-" ]; then
ConsoleMessage "Starting Tomcat Servlet/JSP Server"
/Library/Tomcat/bin/startup.sh
fi
}

StopService ()
{
ConsoleMessage "Stopping Tomcat Servlet/JSP Server"
echo "Stopping Apache web server"
/Library/Tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
}

RestartService ()
{
ConsoleMessage "Restarting Tomcat Servlet/JSP Server"
echo "Restarting Apache web server"
/Library/Tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
/Library/Tomcat/bin/startup.sh
}

JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home; export JAVA_HOME
RunService "$1"

and make it executable
(sudo chmod a+x /System/Library/StartupItems/Tomcat/Tomcat)

c) Next create a file called StartupParameters.plist into the same Tomcat directory. The content should be:
{
Description = "Tomcat Servlet/JSP Server";
Provides = ("Tomcat");
Requires = ("Resolver");
OrderPreference = "None";
Messages =
{
start = "Starting Tomcat Servlet/JSP Server";
stop = "Stopping Tomcat Servlet/JSP Server";
};
}

d) The last step is to make sure that Apache will wait for Tomcat to start. We can do that by changing the
StartupParameters.plist in the /System/Library/StartupItems/Apache directory in the following way:

{
Description = "Apache web server";
Provides = ("Web Server");
Requires = ("Tomcat");
Uses = ("Disks", "NFS");
}

(essentially we added the line that declares that Apache "Requires Tomcat").

For further info on Tomcat and on how to deploy servlets and JSPs. see the article on Apple Developer's Connection.

Some Mac tricks

Changing the default app on a Mac

I needed to change the default app for a certain file type on Mac. Found a good guide here.

Changing the default mail reader/writer on a Mac

see here (Google notifier) and here (changing e-mail preferences on the Mac)

Lots of hint

in dave taylor's site.