OS X ships with a tool called keychain. It is a central database where tools can store sensitive information like logins. Luckily, it is accessible from shell scripts with the command line utility security.

Let’s say you want to securely access an FTP server’s username and password. First of all, add a new Internet password to your keychain. To do so, just fire it up, select New password and enter the credentials. Remember to add the prefix http:// or ftp:// to your service name to create an Internet password.

Now you read the username like this from the command line

security find-internet-password -s ftp.home.com | grep "acct" | cut -d '"' -f 4

The service is what you entered in keychain, but without the prefix. And finally your password

security 2>&1 >/dev/null find-internet-password -gs ftp.home.com | cut -d '"' -f 2

There are two major problems with HTML input:

• DTD resolution
• Missing closing tags

We are going to build a simple Groovy script that prints the list of questions on StackOverflow’s start page. The straight forward solution looks something like that

def slurper = new XmlSlurper()
def htmlParser = slurper.parse("http://stackoverflow.com/")

htmlParser.'**'.findAll{ it.@class == 'question-hyperlink'}.each {
	println	it
}

We parse http://stackoverflow.com with XMLSlurper, loop over all tags with the class attribute ‘question-hyperlink’ and print it. But when running the script we get the following exception:

Caught: java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd at html_parser.run(html_parser.groovy:7)

def slurper = new XmlSlurper()
slurper.setFeature("http://apache.org/xml/features/nonvalidating/load-external-dtd", false)
def htmlParser = slurper.parse("http://stackoverflow.com/")

htmlParser.'**'.findAll{ it.@class == 'question-hyperlink'}.each {
	println	it
}

@Grab(group='org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup',
      module='tagsoup', version='1.2' )
def tagsoupParser = new org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Parser()
def slurper = new XmlSlurper(tagsoupParser)
def htmlParser = slurper.parse("http://stackoverflow.com/")

htmlParser.'**'.findAll{ it.@class == 'question-hyperlink'}.each {
	println	it
}

Meanwhile, AVM has changed the login procedure and the original script no longer works. With the help of this example, it’s finally doing its job again.

Special thanks go to Christopher Füseschi (ICQ 40520202) for pointing me to this issue and also for doing final tests.

You can download the updated script here.

Launchbar is a very convenient application launcher for Mac OS X. Among other great features like instant send, it can execute a script when invoking a phone number from your address book. I own a Fritz!Box 7170, which is one of the most famous combination of WLAN router and telephone system in Germany. By sending special HTTP POST-requests to the Fritz!Box, you can dial phone numbers from your computer. I wrote a small Applescript which glues both features together.

The installation is pretty simple. First of all, open the script in Apple’s script editor and adjust the parameters. The password and the phone port are very likely to change. Save it to Library/Application Support/Launchbar/Actions under your Home folder. The script assumes that you are using Launchbar 5, which currently is in public Beta. Now open Launchbares preferences, choose Actions and select the script for phone numbers.

That’s all. Now fire up Launchbar, navigate to an entry from your address book, select a number and hit enter. The script immediately tries to call the number and prints a message in large print on the screen. After the specified delay (25 seconds by default), the script gives up reaching the number.

The script is based on a shell script by Christian Felder posted here and an expample script for dialing with Skype from Launchbar found in its help.

You can download the script here here.

An RSS feed from the technical point of view is nothing more than a specially formatted XML document. It contains a general feed description as well as a headline, a link to the source and the content or an excerpt for every item. In this arcticle, I will show you how to create your own feed using PHP.

First of all, we set up the header information to specify that it is an XML document.

<?
header("Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8");
print "<?xml version=\"1.0\" ?>\n";
?>

Then we add general feed information like the feed’s name, its description and the source URL.

<rss version="2.0">
<channel>

<title>Feed's title</title>
<description>My site's cool feed</description>
<link>http://www.my-site.com</link>

Now the real work begins. We need to get the necessary information for every item to be published. This could mean simply selecting information from a database, but also parsing XML or HTML files and gathering the information we need. It all depends on the datasource. When looping over every single item of our information, I assume we fill the variables $item, $content and $link, containing what the name suggests. We print the following block for every step of the loop.

<item>
  <title><?= $title ?></title>
  <description><?= $content ?></description>
  <link><?= $link ?></link>
</item>

Finally, we close the opened tags.

</channel>
</rss>

That’s pretty much all you need to set up your own feed. But there are some pitfalls I discovered when creating my first feed. Because we’re working with XML documents, we have to convert special characters like < and > to &lt; and &gt;. This can be archieved by using PHP’s  htmlspecialchars funtion. However, I had to use it twice for a proper display in Google Reader. I would have expected Google to escape the content properly, but looks like they just pass the output to the frontend.

Now I wish you a lot of fun creating your own feed. If you need some information on how to parse HTML files with PHP and create  an RSS feed from almost any website, just leave a comment and I will provide some examples.

1. Read the URL and title of the website currently shown in Safari
2. Create a short URL using is.gd
3. Open Twitter in Safari showing a message like “The site’s title (http://is.gd/abcd)”
4. Additionally the short URL is copied to the clipboard

Just copy the script to a directory where Quicksilver can find it and you’re done. Tweeting an interesing website is a breeze. You could even set up a Quicksilver trigger and assign a hotkey for even easier execution.

The script itself uses some snippets from external resources. This site is a great overview on how to shorten URLs with Applescript and how to use it with Quicksilver. A routine for finding and replacing text can be found here.

Download the script: Twitter URL

Dialog shown after execution of script

It does nothing more than telling Safari to execute the same Javascript as the bookmarklet would do. Calling it from within an Applescript has one huge advantage called Quicksilver. I set up a trigger to execute this script with the scope of Safari (scopes seem to be broken in Leopard) and assigned the hotkey CMD-D.

This trigger in combination with Quicksilver’s “Social bookmarks” plugin is a great way use delicious with Safari.

Download the script: delicious_add_from_safari

Greasemonkey is a Firefox-Addon providing the possibility to customize web-pages using Javascript and DOM. The script I wrote is based on the Amazon Linky script and performs the following tasks on every page at amazon (tested on amazon.de, but should work with other TLDs as well):

1. Parse the page and try to find the ISBN number
2. Abort processing if none was found. That’s the case if you are not looking at product details but e.g. search results or the product shown is not a book.
3. Search for the tag at the position where links should be added (under the “used & new” link)
4. Create the links to the search engines
5. Insert the new tags into the page

Most of the steps should be quite self-explanatory when looking at the script’s source code. The most difficult part is setting up the URLs to the search engines. I got them by visiting the book price comparison and performing a search for the ISBN number of an arbitrary book. Then on the result page, I had a closer look at the address bar. If you’re lucky then the ISBN number entered appears somewhere in the URL. Just try to search for another book by exchanging the ISBN in the URL with another one. If that works (and it does most of the time), you’re ready to go.

Edit the script’s source and use one of the already existing engines as template. Paste your URL as href-attribute in it and adjust it to read the ISBN number from the variable “isbn”.

amazon_buchpreis.user.js