A little set of tools

This is a little set of tools that I like to use now and then. I name them by their Ubuntu/Debian package names although I think one can find them easily for any package system out there. apg - The "automated password generator". It generates automated pronounceable passwords. It takes a lot of options as to how the passwords should look and what they must contain etc. It is a handy tool for generating passwords which are hard to guess but still easy to memorize. mp3gain - Mastered music today has different loudness levels. You will search for your volume button all the time because some tracks are much louder than others. This tool can analyze mp3 files and hint about the loudness level so programs can adjust accordingly. Or it can adjust the volume of the mp3 file in a lossless way (using a nice property of the MDCT in mp3s). password-gorilla - A Password safe application written on top of "pwsafe" in TCL. Main advantage of using this is that there are Windows and OSX programs able to read the format as well. stow - Manager for the hell that is /usr/local. You create /usr/local/stow and proceed to compile programs with "--prefix=/usr/local" but run "make install prefix=/usr/local/stow/foo-1.2.3". Now you can cd into /usr/local/stow and call the "stow" command on "foo-1.2.3". This creates a symlink farm in /usr/local. Want to get rid of the program? "stow -D" it followed by deletion. This is nice for handling seamless upgrades/downgrades of non-packaged software as wel. vorbisgain - Like mp3gain, just for vorbis files. graphviz - Hate drawing diagrams? Now you can program diagrams instead! Graphviz takes a description of a graph (not a plot!) and proceeds to build the graph for you. It uses some really good layout algorithms so you often get extremely neat graphs if you know a bit about the tool. Most kinds of graphs can be drawn easily. There are also tools for doing post-processing of drawn graphs if you want to do things a bit different than what the tool thought - but you rarely need that. It got a Cairo rendering backend and can output to PDF, PS, PNG, SVG, etc. The real power of graphviz is when your graph changes a lot. You just add vertices and edges and the system figures out layout itself. It is way easier than editing the graph in tool most of the time.