pyLiMaSound

Thursday, 21 August 2008

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. This small application is my first real need to use the python language, and that makes me excited. Furthermore Ubuntu and Debian, in the desktop varieties, appear to come standard with PyGTK (your mileage may vary).

My main issue was that I needed to remotely adjust my OS X workstation’s sound, and I figured a control would be easier than opening a shell and running a script. Basically this will give you a small gtk.VScale widget (a vertical slider widget used to select a value from a range) in a resizable window. When everything is all setup I also run it using AllTray so that it can be docked into the system tray.

When a value is selected using the widget it passes the value off to rsh, which in turn sends the command to a remote workstation (the command I have prefilled into the script works on OS X’s main volume):

rsh -l remote_username mac_workstation.fqdn "osascript -e 'set Volume 4.6'"

The following, in the intended deployment requires password-less key based ssh connections between the workstation intended to remotely adjust the sound (any platform that supports PyGTK) and the Macintosh workstation:

#!/usr/bin/env python
#pyLiMaSound.py

import os
import gtk
import pygtk

pygtk.require("2.0")

user="remote_username"
host="mac_workstation.fqdn"

def scale_set_default_values(scale):
    scale.set_update_policy(gtk.UPDATE_DELAYED)
    scale.set_digits(1)
    scale.set_value_pos(gtk.POS_BOTTOM)
    scale.set_draw_value(True)

class pyLiMaSound:
    def delete_event(self, widget, event, data=None):
        print "delete event occurred"
        return False

    def destroy(self, widget, data=None):
        print "destroy signal occurred"
        gtk.main_quit()

    def rsh_vol_cmd(self, data):
        payload = "rsh -l " + user + " " + host 
            + " "osascript -e 'set Volume " + 
            str(data.value) + "'""
	print payload
        os.system(payload);

    def __init__(self):
        self.window = gtk.Window(gtk.WINDOW_TOPLEVEL)
        self.window.set_default_size(50, 200)
        self.window.connect("delete_event", self.delete_event)
        self.window.connect("destroy", self.destroy)
        self.window.set_border_width(10)

        adj1 = gtk.Adjustment(0.0, 0.0, 10.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1)
	adj1.connect("value_changed", self.rsh_vol_cmd)

        self.vscale = gtk.VScale(adj1)
        scale_set_default_values(self.vscale)
        self.window.add(self.vscale)
        self.vscale.show()
        self.window.show()

    def main(self):
        gtk.main()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    control = pyLiMaSound()
    control.main()