bash

Backing up data from a dead Sony Ericsson T630

Alexander Griesser — 2007-02-01T17:12:21+01:00

Today, a workmate has smashed his Sony Ericsson T630 on the ground and the display broke. The mobile itself seemed to be alive, though. Now we had to find out, how to activate the infrared connection to transfer files from the phone to my computer. After some googline, we found out how to do that in "blind" mode:

Press:
menu button | 8 | 8 | 6 | 2

Afterwards the phone tries to send a file called "Whole phonebook.vcf" to the other side of the infrared connection. That worked well, _BUT_ this vcf file is of invalid syntax as it contains all contacts in one big vcf file and therefore we need to split it up. I wrote a small shell script to do that, so if anyone is interested:

#!/bin/bash
# This script contains some bashisms and therefore may need bash,
# especially the counter arithmetic is bashy
#
# Besides that, this script parses a single vcf file generated by many
# Sony Ericsson phones and produces single vcf files (one per contact)
# suitable for importing them into Outlook, etc.
#
# by Alexander Griesser  2007
die() { echo "$*"; exit 1; }
[ "$#" = "1" ] || die "usage: $(basename $0) phonebookfile.vcf"
[ -r "$1" ] || die "cannot read $1"
COUNTER=0
while read line; do
  echo "$line" >>$COUNTER.vcf
  if echo "$line" | grep -q "^END:VCARD"; then
    COUNTER=$((COUNTER + 1))
  fi
done < $1

Usage:

# chmod 755 splitupvcf.sh
# ./splitupvcf.sh "Whole phonebook.vcf"
#

Links:

Automatically getting a list of all telephone city codes for Austria/Germany

Alexander Griesser — 2006-03-27T13:14:48+01:00

Today I needed a list of all Citys, their ZIP-Codes and telephone city codes for Austria. Getting the ZIP-Codes wasn't that difficult, because the Austrian postal agency provides such a list for download on their website (see external links section below).

I searched quite some time on the web but didn't find anything similar for the telephone city codes, but I found a website that does have a quite recent listing of all austrian telephone city codes, so I started to write a script that downloads the information from this website.
This script should also work - after some minor modifications - to work with the german city codes part of this website, so if you are interested in it, write me an e-mail.

As this is only a q'n'd workaround I would be very grateful if anyone knows about a place where I can download a really recent list of austrian city codes.

Update:
One of the maintainers of this website asked me to put this script down to avoid unnecessary traffic to his site. As this script is nothing illegal and everyone with at least some knowledge in any scripting language is able to rebuild it, I'm putting it down to avoid bad blood.

Downloads:

The sorted outputfile for Austria so that you don't need to run this script yourself ;)

External Links:

Austrian ZIP-Code directory [http://www.post.at/content/online_service/download/online_service_download_plzverz.html]
German and international country and city codes [http://www.vorwahl-nummern.de]

restore-dpkg-status skript

Alexander Griesser — 2005-02-16T13:36:14+01:00

In cases, where your /var/lib/dpkg/status file is corrupt it's very difficult to restore it properly, so I wrote this little script to rebuild the status file.

Since the first version of this script never really worked, I wrote a new one today which works flawlessly (as far as I could test that on my systems). This script tries to rebuild the status-file by using the package-information (grep from /var/lib/dpkg/available) of all installed packages (ls in /var/lib/dpkg/info/).

Feature Requests, Comments or Bugreports via e-mail, please.

You can download this script here [BASH] and there's also a html-version of the syntax-highlighted code available here [EN].

Please read the comment-section on top of the script before first use!

Linux playing faxserver

Alexander Griesser — 2004-12-01T16:00:40+01:00

Today I struggled quite a few hours with getting g3tolj to print incoming faxes properly. 99% of all faxes were printed perfectly, but there's another 1% of faxes that occupied two printed pages instead of one. So, as you could guess, this post is for everyone, who has the same problem.

RES=$(basename $FAX | sed 's/.\(.\).*/\1/')

if [ "$RES" = "n" ]; then
  STRETCH="-aspect 2.0"
else
  STRETCH=""
fi

g3tolj $STRETCH $FAX | lp -d $PRINTER

While trying to understand the G3-Format by reading tons of regarding documents on the web, I stumbled across this information, that mgetty already sorts out such faxes for me by renaming them to fn instead of ff... Well, it works now and that's important.