Linux Journal’s [Mike Diehl] pointed out an interesting tool for manipulating data: Sprog. Sprog lets you assemble machines to complete specific data processing tasks. You snap together gears that read input data, process the data in different ways, and then output the results. The input could be a file, URL, database query results, or even MIDI notes. For processing you could be matching patterns, selecting csv columns, converting to uppercase, or executing arbitrary Perl code amongst many other options. Finally the output could be shown in a text window, inserted into a database, written to a file, or sent to your spreadsheet application. Sprog’s site has a section for user uploaded gears and a recipe section for examples like this crossword puzzle solver. Everything Sprog does could be done with scripting, but this is a simple graphical tool that could help you solve a problem without having to know the gory machinery behind it.
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Read Every Bit On A DVD
If you are curious about reading all the bits on a DVD, [tmbinc] has devised a hardware hack that uses a Pioneer DVD drive with leads soldered onto it and a Cypress FX2 microcontroller board to grab the flow of bits and push them over USB2.0. My favorite part of this tutorial is when you slow the spinning DVD down very slightly with your finger with a scope hooked up over what you believe to be the raw data stream from the disk. If the data rate slows when you physically slow down the disk, you probably are grabbing data from the correct pin. [tmbinc] even put together a software tool to process the resulting raw DVD data.
