OCD and filenames, as pertaining to TV series

I like all my file names to be similar, and this applies to both mp3 and series. For mp3 I use the wonderful foobar2k to tag and rename files, but for series I ended up coding my own formatter. All this assumes a linux system (as is my home server, flatline)
First of all, to extract the video files from the rars:

find -name "*rar" -type f -exec rar e {} \;

This extracts all rars from under the current directory (and subdirectory) into the working directory.
If the files already come uncompressed, but are in subdirectories:

find -name "*mkv" -type f -exec mv {} . \;

Replace mkv with avi if that's what you've got.
Now, sometimes the files come in different formats. Some have [season][episode], others [season]x[episode], and I'd like for them all to be in the same [title]S[season]E[episode] format.
For that all you need is the following python script:


It can take 2 arguments: the directory where the file names are, and a title that overrides the one found in the file names. Hope this is helpful for someone else :)

More Buxfer goodies (this time, a backup script)

I just realized that I'm putting a fair amount of effort (and information) on Buxfer. Been tracking rather faithfully my expenses for a month, and I'm rather happy with the service.

But what if it someday fails, or disappears? What about the data? It seems to have a data export facility implemented, but it's for Pro accounts only. Okay, it seems like either I misread the membership plans, or they changed them. Either way, the data export is good for when you want to take a look at the statements in excel, but as far as a backup goes, it's no good for me.

A backup must be something I don't have to think about for it to work. It should do its job in the background as much as possible, and only warn me if something goes wrong. Thankfully Buxfer's API has enough functionality to cover this.

This is a small script that fetches all transactions from your Buxfer accounts (or one particular account) to disk. It has some smarts implemented to "continue" a previous backup, so you can setup a scheduled task periodically to fetch the transactions, and it should just fetch the new ones after the first run.

So far it stores the info as pure json, which was the easiest way to implement it. Should I require in the future to actually act on this, I can parse the json again and convert it to csv, or any other format I need.

The source is here, and a skeleton configuration file is here.

To use it you'll need Python (I tested it with 2.5, but I think it should work with 2.4) and simplejson.

Configuration should be self-explanatory, it needs you to fill out your username, password, and filename for backup.

To run it, you can pass the path to the configuration file (this way you can have several different configurations, one for each account, or for different users).

I guess this is it. Any questions, feedback or general chat, just leave a comment.

That's all, folks!

Python, windows, sockets and Ctrl-c

One of the minor annoyances of python on windows has to do with the sockets' blocking behavior.

Python's libs have several implementations of simple server loops, where the server listens for connections or specific requests and passes it on to a handler function on your code. To do so, the server blocks on an accept or read. Which, on Windows, means you can't ctrl-c out of a server process to test a code change.

To get around this little quirk I found a small workaround. We need two tools:

• Powershell to launch the python script
  

• PsKill to kill the python process

Stick an infinite loop outside the python script (like this "while (1) { server.py }"). Now, open another command prompt (I use Console for managing those) and, when you want to reload the server, just run "pskill python". Sadly this kills all python sessions currently running, which may not be what you want. But for now it works well enough.