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

import java.io.*;
import java.math.BigInteger;

public class BinaryPatcher {
	private String content;

	private final String filename;
	private final String searchPattern;
	private final String replacePattern;

	public BinaryPatcher(String filename, String searchPattern,
			String replacePattern) throws IOException {

		this.filename = filename;
		this.searchPattern = convertHexStringToBinaryString(searchPattern);
		this.replacePattern = convertHexStringToBinaryString(replacePattern);

		initializeContent();
	}

	public boolean isPatchable() {
		return getContent().contains(searchPattern);
	}

	public void patch() throws IOException {
		if (!isPatchable()) {
			throw new IOException("Search pattern not found");
		}

		String originalContent = getContent();
		String patchedContent = originalContent.replace(searchPattern,
				replacePattern);

		saveStringToFile(patchedContent, filename);
	}

	public void createBackup(String filename) throws IOException {
		saveStringToFile(getContent(), filename);
	}

	private static String convertHexStringToBinaryString(String theHexString) {
		byte[] byteSequence = new BigInteger(theHexString, 16).toByteArray();
		return new String(byteSequence);
	}

	private void initializeContent() throws IOException {
		byte[] buffer = new byte[(int) new File(filename).length()];
		FileInputStream in = new FileInputStream(filename);
		in.read(buffer);
		in.close();
		content = new String(buffer);
	}

	private void saveStringToFile(String content, String filename)
			throws IOException {
		FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(filename);
		out.write(content.getBytes());
		out.close();
	}

	private String getContent() {
		return content;
	}
}

The usage is pretty straight forward. Let’s have a look at an basic example:

class Tester {
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		try {
			String filename = "patchme";
			BinaryPatcher p = new BinaryPatcher(filename, "AB00FF14", "AB11FF14");

			if (p.isPatchable()) {
				p.createBackup(filename + ".org");
				p.patch();
			}
		} catch(IOException e) {
			System.out.println("ERROR: " + e.getMessage());
		}
	}
}

We try to patch the file patchme. The search and replace binary data is given by hex sequences, in this example AB00FF14 is replaced by AB11FF14. If the file is patchable, i.e. it contains the search pattern, a backup named patchme.org is created an finally, the original file is modified.

That’s all. Pretty simple but useful. You can download the BinaryPatcher class here.

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.

It offers an easy to use graphical user interface for Syntax Highlighter and Code Colorizer for WordPress. You can easily enter and modify source-code highlighted in your posts as well as specify options for every single snippet.

The plugin is also hosted at the WordPress plugin database. More information as well as the download can be found on the project specific site. If you discover a bug, then please report it in the comments.

I wish you a lot of fun with the plugin and hope you like it as much as I do. If you’ve got some feedback, please write it in the comments on this or the project page.

We will first create a new partition on the backup drive, then clone the install DVD to this partition and finally boot from the external hard disk.

Add new partition

First of all, we need a new partition on the backup drive to boot from. Thanks to the OS X disk utility, this is quite easy. I use an SATA drive with 1 TB capacity living in a Sharkoon Quickport Pro connected via USB. So fire up disk utility, select your backup drive and open the Partition tab.

As you can see, there is already plenty of space used on the drive, but that’s no problem at all, as disk utility can resize partitions. Just drag the lower right corner of the partition upwards until it frees the space you need. I set up a 10 GB partition. Finally apply the changes.

Clone Install DVD to new partition

Next we clone the install DVD (Snow Leopard in my case) to the new partition. Insert the DVD, select your new partition in disk utility and go to Restore. Drag the Mac OS X Install DVD to source and your new partition on the backup drive to target. Then click on restore and wait.

That’s all you need to do. Let’s try to boot.

Boot from the backup drive

Finally, reboot your Mac and hold down option key on startup. If everything went well, the new partition appears in the list of bootable devices. Select it and be amazed how fast you enter the OS X setup.

I (mis)used this plugin to setup short URLs to my profiles on social networks. I own the domain frommknecht.net, which happens to be my surname followed by the .net extension. So I thought it would be a great idea to forward frommknecht.net/fb to my Facebook profile, frommknecht.net/twitter to my Twitter page and so on. With Redirection, that’s very easy. Just go to the Redirection-settings, enter e.g. /twitter as “Source URL” and the link to your Twitter page as target. That’s all. After adding the redirection, your Twitter page will be available via http://<your-blog-url>/twitter.

This way, you could even use WordPress as your private short-URL service ala bit.ly.

You have other cool tipps for Redirection? Then please leave a comment.

SteerMouse

First I tried SteerMouse from Plentycom-Systems. It’s a solid and stable piece of Software with a fair price of $20. You can easily reassign mouse buttons, fine-tune tracking speed and much more. But there is a major drawback: the mouse sensibility can no longer be changed on the device. Because I like this feature very much, the search went on.

USB Overdrive

The second tool was USB Overdrive by Alessandro Levi Montalcini, also priced at $20. This tool is equally easy to use, offers reassignment of mouse buttons, but without disabling the sensibility adjustments. So that’s the way I go.

Summary

Both tools, SteerMouse and USB Overdrive let you reassign buttons on the Logitech G5. They work equally stable (that’s at least my impression) and cost exactly the same. While SteerMouse has the nicer interface and was updated more recently, USB Overdrive let’s you still change the sensibility on the mouse. So it really depends if you want to use the later feature or not. If so, you have to use USB Overdrive, choose SteerMouse otherwise.

Update: USB Overdrive also works in Snow Leopard, even without updating to version 3.0

But let’s first talk about the installation. That’s pretty easy. Just extract the downloaded archive, copy the script to an arbitrary location and then drag it to Finder’s toolbar. That’s all. Now let the fun begin.

Open in Textmate

Textmate is my favorite text editor. I use it a lot and so the Open in Textmate script comes in handy. It allows you to open the selected file directly in Textmate or if none is selected, open the whole directory for tabbed browsing.

Enhanced Open in Terminal Here

This script opens a Terminal window and changes to the directory shown in Finder. Very useful, but because it’s enhanced, it can do even more. Holding the Command-Key while clicking on the button opens a new tab instead of a new Terminal window. The Option-Key tries to recylcle an already running Terminal session and just changes to the directory. However, if this fails because the session is busy executing a program, a new window is created instead.

LSelect

Last but not least: LSelect. This script opens a dialog box where you can enter a globbing pattern like “*.jpg” and hitting enter selects all files with extension JPG. I think, you got the idea. It’s extremely useful for moving or deleting multiple files.

These were my top 3 Finder toolbar scripts making my daily work so much easier. If you happen to know scripts worth mentioning, then please leave a comment.

Adjusting a prefix

Let’s say you want to rename your ripped Futurama episodes. The current naming convention is “Futurama 02×12 Raging Bender.mp4″. So it’s Futurama followed by a space and the season-episode identifier (season 2, episode 12), then the episode’s name and finally the extension.

First of all, we strip off “Futurama” and the space, because all the files are stored in a directory named “Futurama”, so we don’t need that info in the file-name anymore.

for i in Futurama*; do mv "$i" "${i##Futurama }"; done

What we do here is to loop over all files in the current directory that start with “Futurama” and assign the file-name to the variable $i. We use $i as parameter to the mv command for actually renaming the file. The interesting part is its second parameter, ${i##Futurama }

Here we apply a modifier to the variable $i, which adjusts the returned value, but not the variable’s value itself. In this case, the modifier is ## which removes a certain prefix from the variable, “Futurama ” (including the space), leaving “02×12 Raging Bender.mp4″.

Make sure to surround both parameters by quotation marks, because the file names may contain spaces.

Modifying the suffix

Now that we have removed the leading “Futurama “, we want to adjust the mp4-extension. iTunes prefers m4v, so let’s change this.

for i in *.mp4; do mv "$i" "${i%mp4}m4v"; done

It’s very similar to what we did in the first part, except that we loop over all mp4-files and use a different variable modifier.

The % modifier removes the given text from the end of the variable’s value, so ${i%mp4} removes the mp4-extension, returning “02×12 Raging Bender.”. To add the new m4v-extension, we just include it after the braces.

That’s all, the files are renamed the way we wanted to. There are two tips when using this way to rename files. First of all, put the file-name in quotation marks, otherwise you will run into problems if files contain spaces, leading to undesired behaviour or errors in the best case, to loss of data in the worst case. And the second recommendation is to echo out the result first before actually using mv, just to make sure the modifier produces the expected result.

Do you have other tips for batch renaming files? Please explain them in the comments.