The Setup

First, you need to find the menu. Open Settings, go to General, then Keyboard and scroll to the bottom. You’ll notice a default one, which I deleted. Click the Add New Shortcut… button at the bottom. You’re presented with two options: Phrase and Shortcut. Phrase is the full, final text you want to be displayed. Shortcut is the short phrase that you want converted.

Below is what I use. I prepend an “s” for “Stephen”:

• Phrase: my email address, Shortcut: se-
• Phrase: my phone number, Shortcut: sp-
• Phrase: my home address, Shortcut: sa-

Now, when you’re in Safari and you need to submit your phone number or email address, you just type se- and the autocorrect field comes up with the full email address.

A Bonus

As a bonus, if you leave the Shortcut field blank, the word in Phrase will be considered spelled correctly. This eliminates the “ducking” problem, if you know what I mean.

The Down Side

There are a couple down sides to Apple’s implementation.

1. Your shortcuts are not portable. If you have an iPhone and an iPad, you have to put the shortcuts into each device separately. Maybe this will be fixed with iCloud at some point.
2. You can’t put line breaks in to your Phrase. This means that my address is all on one line.

I had a need at work to send email out of our Rails application which met the following criteria:

• It has both a plain text and HTML part.
• It may have embedded images in the HTML part.
• It may have attachments.

Below is the code, which you can put in your app/models directory.

class EmbeddedMailer < ActionMailer::Base

  def embedded_mail(to, from, subject, html_message, text_message, files = {}, embeds = {})
    mail(:to => to, :from => from, :subject => subject) do |format|
      format.text { render :text => text_message }
      format.html { render :text => html_message }
    end

    # Embeds
    embeds.each do |key, embed|
      attachments.inline[key] = {
        :content => File.read(embed[:path]),
        :content_id => "<#{key}>"
      }
    end

    # Attachments
    files.each do |key, embed|
      attachments[key] = File.read(embed[:path])
    end
  end

end

A Quick Explanation

Rails 3 has made this a lot easier. The only real hack is handling dynamic inline Content-ID’s. ActionMailer will dynamically generate a Content-ID for each inline attachment. We override that with the :content_id => "<#{key}>" line. The brackets are required.

The format of the files and embeds hashes is as follows. The key is the file name of the attached file. The value is another hash with content_type set to the content type of the attachment and path is the full path to the file. For example:

{ 'image.png' =>
    'content_type' => 'image/png',
    'path' => '/tmp/image.png'
}

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'dbus'

# Get the proper DBus session address
pid = nil
programs = %w( gnome-session )
programs.each do |program|
  pid = `pidof -s #{program}`
  break unless pid.nil?
end

# Fail if we can't find the pid
exit if pid.nil?

# Get the address
info = IO.readlines("/proc/#{pid.strip}/environ").first.split("\0")
info.reject! { |x| !x.include? 'DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS' }
address = info.first.split('=', 2)[1]

# Set the address
ENV['DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS'] = address

# Get the objects
bus = DBus::SessionBus.instance
service = bus.service('org.freedesktop.Telepathy.AccountManager')
service.introspect

account_manager = service.object('/org/freedesktop/Telepathy/AccountManager');
account_manager.introspect

iface = account_manager['com.nokia.AccountManager.Interface.Query']

accounts = iface.FindAccounts []
accounts.first.each do |account|
  account_object = service.object(account);
  account_object.introspect

  account_iface = account_object['org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties']
  account_iface.Set 'org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Account', 'RequestedPresence', ['(uss)', [1,'offline','']]
end

You’ll need the ruby-dbus gem to use this. I just placed it in a file and call it from a cron job. The script finds all of your accounts via D-Bus and and then sends them a new presence.

Update 2011-01-31: Added code to find the correct DBus Session Address, since the cron job does not have it.

Of course, this problem is silly to brute force, but by watching the visualization and working on a pad of paper, I came up with a much faster solution to solving the problem.

The code is available on github. It’s Ruby and Tk. Some Ruby installs don’t compile with Tk, so if the script doesn’t load the tk requirement, Google around for the solution.

Also note, this is a quick hack. It leaks memory, it’s buggy, it might eat your processor and will run for a very long time.

• It has both a plain text and HTML part.
• It may have embedded images in the HTML part.
• It may have attachments.

Below is the code, which you can put in your app/models directory.

class EmbeddedMailer < ActionMailer::Base

  def embedded_mail(to, from, subject, html_message, text_message, files = {}, embeds = {})
    # Hack TMail to allow embeds
    TMail::HeaderField::FNAME_TO_CLASS.delete 'content-id'

    recipients   to
    from         from
    subject      subject

    content_type 'multipart/mixed'

    # The Message
    part :content_type => 'multipart/alternative' do |m|

      # Plain Text Message
      m.part :content_type => 'text/plain' do |p|
        p.transfer_encoding = 'base64'
        p.body = text_message
      end

      # HTML Message
      m.part :content_type => 'multipart/related' do |x|
        x.part :content_type => 'text/html' do |p|
          p.body = html_message
        end

        # Embedded
        embeds.each do |key, embed|
          x.part :content_type => embed[:content_type] do |p|
            p.headers = { 'Content-ID' => "<#{key}>" }
            p.transfer_encoding = 'base64'
            p.body = File.read embed[:path]
          end
        end
      end
    end

    # Attachments
    files.each do |key, embed|
      attachment :content_type => embed[:content_type] do |a|
        a.filename = key
        a.body = File.read embed[:path]
      end
    end
  end

end

A Quick Explanation

You have to hack TMail, the built in email parser for ActionMailer, so that it doesn’t try to validate the Content-ID header.

To meet all of the criteria above, you have to create a MIME-type hierarchy as follows:

• multipart/mixed – a mix of a message and attachments
  • multipart/alternative – to mark that the text and html parts are equivalent to each other
  • text/plain – the plain text section
  • multipart/related – the HTML section with embedded images
    • text/html – the HTML section
    • Embedded images go here
  • attachment/content-type – attachments are at the bottom

The format of the files and embeds hashes is as follows. The key is the file name of the attached file. The value is another hash with content_type set to the content type of the attachment and path is the full path to the file. For example:

{ 'image.png' =>
    'content_type' => 'image/png',
    'path' => '/tmp/image.png'
}

Update 2010-11-30: Fixed the layout to add multipart/mixed for attachments.
Update 2011-04-07: I have created a solution for Rails 3, which is much more simplistic.

Note: This is a PowerShell script, so you will need PowerShell to run it.

$source = $args[0];
$dest   = $args[1];

$files = Get-ChildItem "$source" -recurse
foreach($file in $files) {
    if ($file.psiscontainer) {
        $common_directory = $file.FullName.Replace($source, "")
        $new_directory = $dest + $common_directory
        Write-Host "Creating directory $new_directory"
        New-Item $new_directory -type directory
    } else {
        $source_file = $file.FullName
        $common_path = $source_file.Replace($source, "")
        $new_file = $dest + $common_path
        Write-Host "Copying $source_file to $new_file"
        Copy-Item $source_file $new_file -ErrorAction Stop
    }

}

This is also very quick and dirty. It is meant to get you started as quickly as possible. This means any longevity or security concerns are ignored. You have been warned.

The original idea came from here.

Setting Up An OS

The proxy is based off of a default install of Debian Lenny from the netinstall iso. It can be found here.

For the OS install, you can accept the defaults for almost every option. There are two cases to watch out for. First, you will be prompted to confirm all of your partitioning options before proceeding. The default option is to cancel. The second case is the additional software options. I unchecked the “Desktop Environment” option, since this is going to be server.

Once the OS is installed, log in as root and run the following commands to prepare our environment:

apt-get install squid3 apache2 imagemagick
chmod -R 777 /var/www

Configuring the Proxy

Open the /etc/squid3/squid.conf file in your favorite editor. Near the top of the file is a configuration option for http_port. Change it to look like the following:

http_port 3128 transparent

Next, find the line that begins with INSERT YOUR OWN RULE(S), which should be around line number 2138. Below that line, add the following to allow your private network access to your proxy. Make sure to change the it for your network.

acl lan src 192.168.1.0/24
http_access allow lan

Lastly, go to the bottom of the file and add the following line. This is the magic which will flip the images for you.

redirect_program /usr/local/bin/flip.pl

Save the file and exit your editor.

The Flip Script

Edit the file /usr/local/bin/flip.pl and add the following to it:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$|=1;
$count = 0;
$pid = $$;
while (<>) {
  chomp $_;
  if ($_ =~ /(.*)(\.jpg|\.png|\.gif)/i) {
    $url = $1 . $2;
    system("/usr/bin/wget", "-q", "-O","/var/www/$pid-$count$2", "$url");
    system("/usr/bin/mogrify", "-flip","/var/www/$pid-$count$2");
    system("/bin/chmod", "777", "/var/www/$pid-$count$2");
    print "http://127.0.0.1/$pid-$count$2\\n";
  } else {
    print "$_\\n";
  }
  $count++;
}

The script is fairly simple. Squid passes URL’s to the script. If the URL ends in image type, it is pulled down to root of our web server. Mogrify then modifies the image in place. Lastly, it tells Squid to pull the image from our webserver instead of the internet. If the URL isn’t an image, we just dump the origin URL back out.

Once the file is in place, make sure to make it executable.

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/flip.pl

You should have enough to test. Restart Squid with the following:

invoke-rc.d squid3 restart

You can now set up any browser to use the server as a proxy on port 3128. If you visit a page you have been to before, make sure you refresh a couple of times. Your browser might have cached the images locally, which means they won’t go through our proxy.

Making A Transparent Gateway

The last part of the process is to make the server a gateway which will transparently redirect web requests through the proxy. Create the file /etc/network/if-up.d/00-firewall and add the following to it:

#!/bin/sh

PATH=/usr/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin

#
# delete all existing rules.
#
iptables -F
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -X

# Always accept loopback traffic
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT

# Allow established connections
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED,NEW -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth0 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

# Allow outgoing connections
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT

# Masquerade
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3128

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Now make the the script executable and restart the networking.

chmod +x /etc/network/if-up.d/00-firewall
invoke-rc.d networking restart

At this point, you should be able to set any computer’s default gateway to the IP address of your server. You don’t need to set a proxy address for your browser. Everything is now routed and all HTTP requests are redirected through the proxy.

If you want to check it out, go to JSBin to see my example.

You can also download the file if you want to play with it on your computer.