All of the code is based off of the previous application, so there's no shockers to getting it setup on your own mac- just change the name in your head from 'search' to 'image' and you should be just fine.

The one thing that has changed is the search string being used. While the search engine was only searching for the contents of all files, we are search all files for a particular type.

In Mac OS X 10.5, groups of file types are placed into groups. As it happens, the _kMDItemGroupId of “all images” happens to be 13. So, in the search, we're just running something like:

mdfind _kMDItemGroupId = 13

from the command line and parsing the results which come back from the search.

Unfortunately, I have no clue what the GroupId is in 10.4, so this script will probably only work reliably in 10.5. Besides, don't you think it's time to upgrade?

Anyway, download is located over here. To use, check out the documents on the search app. They're very close together when it comes to code reuse.

Also, forgive me for calling it an 'image gallery'. It just pretty much outputs images and that's it. However, there's a lot of code out there that can show you how to turn an array of images into an actual gallery, so I didn't include all those bits in there. That, is an exercise left up to the Dear Reader to perform.

Enjoy!

tom

So, basically, you have an inbuilt system on Mac OS X which will allow you to search text files, html files, images, Word documents, PDF's, the list goes on and on. The really interesting bit (to me, at least) is that there's nothing to configure or tweak. If you are running a Mac, then everything copied over to the file system is automatically indexed, and made quickly available for searching- even from a web browser.

Setup

All that I am using here is Apache, PHP 5.2, and the command line Spotlight search application “mdfind”. All of these technologies are already built into OSX 10.5 and ready for use. All I ended up doing was creating a web interface to them.

Since Spotlight has its own database (sqlite), there is no need to anyfor any database connection. Also, since all of the importing is handled in the background, there's nothing to write or tweak. It just works. However, if you are wanting a little more control on how Spotlight searches your data, I'd recommend checking out the relevant Apple documentation or this helpful page with more information on Spotlight from the command line.

Web-ifying Search

Well, enough of the gushing about the searching capabilities, how can we turn this puppy into a document search repository?

basically, the PHP script will run a command line query and then output the results back to the screen. The configuration file (conf.php) will let you set the relevant paths so that all the correct links go to the right places.

The only caveat is that if you search for something silly (like the word “the” as the only search term), the script will take a long time for it to return any relevant results back to you. There should be a way to tie in an array of “stop words” to reject those searches, but adding that functionality in is left up to the discretion of the reader.

Install

Anyway, download a copy of it over over here and extract it.

Copy the search/ directory to the default web directory on the mac (normally, its /Library/WebServer/Documents/) so that the full path looks like:

/Library/WebServer/Documents/search

Drop some documents into the /Library/WebServer/Documents/search/documents/ directory. These can be .PDF files, Word documents, etc. Whatever you want to peek at.

Open your web browser and browse to http://localhost/search/index.php and make a search.

That really should be it. If you run into any issues, let me know.

Caveats

I seem to remember a while back having issues with search to function correctly under 10.4. This ended up being permissions issues in the httpd.conf file. 10.4's Apache run as the 'nobody' user. Switching to the 'www' user fixed the issue. If that does not do it for you, try running Apache as a standard user and see if you run into any issues with it.

Enjoy!

tom

Nevertheless, here's a bit of an app that I managed to stop messing with and actually prep for release.

Late summer / early fall always gets me interested in the weather a lot more than other times of the year. I poke around at noaa.gov for weather reports, temperatures, humidity, and all that crap. This year I looked into just pulling the raw information down from noaa, parsing it how I like it, and then working on my local copy of the data.

Weather Script is the results of my curiosity into creating weather charts for my own use (You can see some example charts over at http://idlethreat.com/weather, if you're curious about what it looks like).

Currently, I capture all the big stuff (temp, humidity, wind, etc.) from noaa's .xml feed on an hourly basis. That is fed into a MySQL database and can be queried from there to create a wide range of really nice charts and the like using libchart- which is included in the package.

So, if you happen to have a unix box with PHP and wanted to mess around with weather for a bit, this is probably the place for you.

It's all licensed under a liberal license, so feel free to hack on it and make it yours.

Enjoy.

tom

Now looking back on it, it probably needs a revamp. and filling out of the particular bits. There's still a deep need to finish up the bottom bit and make it more presentable.

This evening I spent quite a bit of time coming up with a web-based OpenVPN certificate generator. while successful in writing up an application to do the job, there's still quite a number of dependencies that I need to flesh out and document before I can put everything together and present it.

In any case. Enjoy the other stuff. more later as it comes in.

tom

This application will send a “beacon” message every two seconds from one server to another via UDP syslog. To make it go, you will need to run it with an argument- the argument is the IP address you wish to send message to.

Click read more for examples!

“python bacon.py 111.111.111.111″ will being sending messages off to IP 111.111.111.111.

You can adjust the port it sends messages to, just check the “port” variable and change as needed.

You can download the script here.

Enjoy!

tom

So, click on Read More for more information on how I did it.

The example will grab whatever text that is in the Pasteboard (analogous to the Clipboard in Windows), transform it to Base64 encoding (which is pretty much the gold standard for encoding text across the internet) and then ship the text off to a server for processing.

Once there, I wrote up a small PHP page which will decode the text, and then write the results to a file on the local server for viewing. Of course, after decoding you can put the text in a database, write it to files, whatever you need it to do. This is just an exercise in getting it from point A to point B without mangling it too bad.

I've left a lot of print statements in here and there so you can see the information transform as it occurs. Note that it only works on OS X at the moment.

Enjoy!

tom

Client Side

import subprocess, base64, urllib

p = subprocess.Popen(“pbpaste”, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
mytext = p.stdout.read()
encoded = base64.b64encode(mytext)
decoded = base64.b64decode(encoded)

print “mytext is:”,mytext , “n”
print “encoded is:”,encoded , “n”
print “decoded is:”,decoded , “n”

print “sending the data up to web server n”

myurl = 'http://example.com/test/decode.php?thought=' + encoded

urllib.urlopen(myurl)

Server Side

<?
$thought = $_GET['thought'];

$stringData = base64_decode($thought);

$myFile = “testFile.txt”;
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die(“can't open file”);
fwrite($fh, $stringData);
fclose($fh);

?>

This is an old-ish app that I've been sitting on over the past few months and thought I should release it before it joins my BPOUS (Big Pile Of Unpublished Stuff) on a random hard drive somewhere.

Echo.py is a one trick pony. It tails a (configurable) log file on the system and sends the logs off to a syslog server for further processing. It's configurable for either UDP or TCP syslogging and is highly configurable, depending on your environment and needs. It's been tested on OS X 10.5 and Ubuntu 7.10 with Python 2.5.*

Since this application is written in Python, it can run on Windows, Linux, etc. Pretty much any OS with a Python interpreter can run this script. This script can be compiled as a “frozen binary” and run on systems without a Python interpreter installed on it. I will leave that exercise up to you, Dear Reader, on how to accomplish this.

The only real caveat to using the script is that if the application which creates the log file dies and the log is overwritten whenever it comes back up, echo.py will not catch that change and hang up, not sending out logs until it's restarted. Since the standard UN*X 'tail -f' exhibits the same issue, this should be considered normal.

Click Read More for more information.

How To Use

After downloading and unzipping the archive, run echo.py from the command line without any arguments. It will create a new configuration file (named echo.cfg) in the local directory. Edit the configuration file as you like it and save your changes. Re-run echo.py and it will use the new configuration. The configuration file is well documented and is in a standard .INI format that works well on either UN*X or Windows systems.

Download

That should be it. My contact information is in the script itself, let me know if you have any questions or issues with it. Like all the applications and scripts, there's a license:

# File Scanner. Copyright (C) 2008 by idlethreat (tgiles at gmail dot com). All rights reserved.
# This program is released under Creative Commons by-nc-sa. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
# Read the license. Know your rights.

Enjoy!

echo.py.zip

I'm a Mac guy who, due to the nature of my work, has to spend a whole lot of time on Windows systems at work. Of all the Mac hotkeys that I miss terribly, + W (close window) is probably going to be at the top of my list. So, with a little hacking around last night I've successfully crafted up a hotkey (I use + W due to its location on the keyboard) which closes the foremost open window.

Window Closer

HotKey, #w, WindowCloser
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

WindowCloser:
WinGet, active_id, ID, A
WinClose ahk_id %active_id%

The only real caveat to it is that Windows task management sees open windows as instances of applications. Close a window and you (may) close the application altogether. The Mac sees all open windows as children of the application. Close all the open windows, and the application is still running (and still requires a + q to quit it). However, it pretty much works as advertised pretty much everywhere. I will warn you that applications like Firefox will just close altogether when this hotkey is used. So, keep using your + w in Windows to those those tabs individually.

And Others…

While working on that script, I managed to fire off a couple of more scripts that will make things handy for me that I thought I'd share. This one will open up a new Explorer window in whatever folder you wish it to (I defaulted to the C: drive, but that can be changed). This is another Mac hot key that I have always liked. This hotkey is kicked off by using the + n keys.

HotKey, #n, NewExplorerWindow
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

NewExplorerWindow:
Run C:

; This one will open up an explorer window on your personal desktop
;Run C:Documents and Settings%username%Desktop

And finally, this one creates a new email whenever you hit the + e keys. I send a whole bunch of emails off every day and know it will be terribly useful here in the very near future.

HotKey, #e, EmailMaker
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

EmailMaker:
Run mailto:

How to Implement?

Grab and install a copy of AHK on your windows systems and either copy-paste in my examples that I have above into new .ahk files, or just [Download Here].

Once you have them on your system and unzipped, edit the files to your liking and run them as is. If you want them to be runnable executables (I.E. .exe files), right-click on them and select “compile script” from the list.

I just remembered only after writing this was the rather huge project that I once wrote up in AHK at work. This was a few years ago and I was working in the NOC at a web hosting company (that I'm still at, by the way). One issue we alway seemed to run into was running down websites on IIS servers so we could troubleshoot them.

I wrote an AHK script that would pull all the active sites from IIS and copy them over to a Linux server. the Linux box would parse the list (as a .CSV) and inject them into a MySQL database. I wrote a PHP front end to the entire mess and you could perform boolean searches on site names and which server they were parked at.

It was a hackish affair, abd prone to failure, but at the time there was nothing quite like it for a number of years until that functionality was added into our current ERP system. I think I still have the source code for Badger somewhere around here.

Would be interesting to see those scripts again.

Ok, well, enjoy these for now.

Cheers,

tom