I need to generate calibration files* for the Gartrip program. Does anyone known where I can find the file format it uses or, better yet, code for generating them?
I'm not to picky on the language.
If no one point me at anything better, I'm working on getting some examples to reverse engineer. Shouldn't be to bad as I have reason to expect them to be text.
Edit:
What I need is to be able to generate is the files need to tell gartrip: "for file xyz.jpg, point A is at location B, point C is at location D"
*calibration files tell gartrip how to use image files as background so that tracks and whatnot can be overladed on it
I've made search for Gartrip related entries in your blog but were in vain.
One possibility is to reverse engineer the calibration file's format and write an utility based on knowldedge extracted.
Gartrip seems to be a proprietary software so as a registered user are you entitled to do so?
The only thing I am sure of is that it's author doesn't disclose any file format.
Related
As part of my Master's thesis, I'm trying to run some statistics on which factors affect whether crowdfunding campaigns get funded or not. I've been trying to get data from the largest platform Kickstarter.com. Unfortunately, they have removed all the non-successful campaigns from their website (unless you have the direct link).
Luckily, I'm not the only one looking for this data.
Webrobots.io have a scraper robot which crawls all Kickstarter projects and collects data in JSON format (http://webrobots.io/kickstarter-datasets/).
The latest dataset can be found on:
http://webrobots.io/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Kickstarter_2015-10-22.json_.zip
However, my programming skills are limited, and I don't know how to convert it into an excel file where I can manipulate the data and run my analysis. I found a few online converters, but the file is far too big for it (approx 300 mb).
Can someone please help me get the file converted?
It will earn you an acknowledgement in my Master's thesis when it gets published :)
Thanks in advance!!!
I guess the answer for this varies massively on a few things.
What subject is the masters covering? (mainly to appease many people who will probably assume you're hoping for people to do your homework for you! This might explain why the thread has been down-voted already)
You mention your programming skills are limited... What programming skills do you have? What language would you be using to achieve this goal? Bear in mind that even with a fully coded solution, if it's not in the language you know, you might not be able to compile it!
What kind of information do you want from the JSON file?
With regards to question 3, I've looked in the JSON file and it contains hierarchical data which is pretty difficult to replicate in a flat file i.e. an Excel or CSV file (I should know, we had to do this a lot in a previous job of mine).
But, I would look at the following plan of action to achieve what you're after:
Use a JSON parser to serialize the data into a class structure (Visual Studio can create the classes for you... See this S/O thread - How to show the "paste Json class" in visual studio 2012 when clicking on Paste Special?)
Once you've got the objects in memory, you can then step through them one by one and pick out the data you want and append them to a comma-separated string (in C# I'd use the StringBuilder) and write the rows of data out to a file on disk.
Once this is complete, you'll have the data you want.
Depending on what data you want from the JSON file, step 2 could be the most difficult part as you'd need to step into the different levels of the data hierarchy.
Hope this points you in the right direction?
You may want to look at this Blog.
http://jdunkerley.co.uk/2015/09/04/downloading-and-parsing-met-office-historic-station-data-with-alteryx/
He uses a process with Alteryx that may line up with what you are trying to do. I am looking to do something similar, but haven't tried it yet. I'll update this answer if I get it to work.
I'm looking to identify some possible software options that will allow for custom rules to manipulate bulk data files (.csv) For example, proper capitalization (allowing for states to remain capital and unique surnames), identifying the word count of specific words in a field, and some other custom rules. Any guidance would be appreciated.
You could use Talend Open Studio for this task. It is an Opensource ETL tool for data manipulation and integration. You can for example ImportCSV >> DATABASE >> perform transformations >> ExportCSV. The possibilities are endless.
You can find it here: http://www.talend.com/products-data-integration/talend-open-studio.php
It also sounds like you might be looking to create a profile of the data. For this you can use Talend Open Profiler, they recently added support for flat files such as your .csv. It is simple to use and you should be up and running in 30 mins.
You can find the download here: http://www.talend.com/products-data-quality/talend-open-profiler.php
You can find some tutorials here:http://www.talendforge.org/tutorials/menu.php
On the tutorials choose the Data Quality tab, and scroll down until 'Talend Open Profiler'
It is my first step in assessing data quality on a new dataset.
A quick google "data scrubbing utilities" turned up this:
http://data-scrubbing.qarchive.org/
They look to be very close to what you're looking for.
It'll really depend on how complex the rules get. Much more complex than simple stuff, and you'd probably be ahead by just coding something up (or having it coded).
I’m trying to reverse engineer an old medical imaging format called Stentor for interoperability. It was designed by a company of the same name who was subsequently bought by Phillips. But Phillips has forgotten how to read Stentor files. I have a windows program which exports JPEG from Stentor files but it’s closed source. I’d like to automate this process in order to tackle hundreds of files in this format.
The program is late-1990s Win32 or MFC executeable. It runs next to an ActiveX (.ocx) file which I’ve been able to interop with, but that file doesn’t contain the export method. I'm looking for suggestions on how to dissemble the binary in order to unearth the algorithm used to convert Stentor to JPEG. I looked through the Stentor files in hex editor and didn’t find any evidence of JPEG (although hints on finding that would be appreciated too), so I think that the program has a couple of tricks up its sleeve.
Thanks in advance.
Kyle
Few programmers implement complex routines such as image recoding themselves. Instead they tend to license libraries that do that. A very smart way to start would be searching for text strings and see if you can discover the libraries they use. This will subsequently give you a lot of insight into how the data is encoded.
Another good strategy would be to build a program that simply runs the GUI of your export program by sending mouse and keyboard events directly to it. Let this run a few days to complete your export. Reverse engineering the file format is going to be slow and expensive so for a 1 time gig it's probably not worthwhile.
Any ideas ?
I think the original source was a goldmine database, looking around it appears that the file was likely built using an application called ACT which I gather is a huge product I don't really want to be deploying for a one off file total size less than 5 meg.
So ...
Anyone know of a simple tool that I can run this file through to convert it to a standard CSV or something?
It does appear to be (when looking at it in notepad and excel) in some sort of csv type format but it's like the data is encrypted somehow.
Ok this is weird,
I got a little confused because the data looked a complete mess, in actual fact the mess was the data, that's what it was meant to look like.
Simply put, i opened the file in notepad, seemed to have a sort of pattern so i droppped it on excel.
Apparently excel has no issues reading these files ... strange huh !!!
I am unaware of any third party tooling for opening these files specifically, although there is an SDK available for C# which could resolve your problem with a little elbow grease.
The SDK can be aquired for free Here
Also there is a developer forum which could provide some valuable resources including training material with sample code Here
Resources will be provided with the SDK
Also, out of interest since ACT is a Sage product have you any Sage software floating about which you could attempt to access the data with? Most offices have!
Failing all of the above there is a trial available for ACT! Here!
Good luck with your problem!
This is so vague it's ridiculous but who knows...
We have got this client who will not budge - they are supplying PDF files auto generated by their own software. These files don't import into our (printing) lab management software - made by kodak.
So I emailed Kodak the error log and relevant files and got this back..
DP2 supports the importing of PDF's from – Adobe Illustrator and Quark Express
Some of the capabilities when importing PDF's as ORDER ITEMS is that the images can be modified,
color corrected, or replaced. To accomplish this, the PDF is disassembled. PDF's from Illustrator and Quark,
contain additional information that tells us where everythings goes and how, thus enought information for
us to reassemble the PDF. While other applications do generate PDF's they don't contain this additional
information.
After speaking with a 3rd party 'expert' we need to consider another 3rd party 'rip' software that's fairly expensive. So before I go ahead I thought I'd ask if any one has experience with this stuff?
Cheers
Thats a tough one, PDFs can be created in so many different ways, it hard to tell exactly what any given PDF may be composed of, personally I'd try some different PDF editors first to see if you can exact the data you need before going the expensive route.
Eg Foxit PDF offer an editor (I think its free, or cheap in any case)
Darknight