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Revisiting the randomized signature AppleScript, now with API goodness
When I shared an AppleScript last week which created randomized signatures using TextExpander, I promised to revisit it when the iheartquotes.com API started working again. It's working right now, but it seems to go up and down; check this link before you try the script and make sure you get a quote, not an error message. As before, when used with a TextExpander snippet set to the AppleScript type, this script will provide a random quote, this time pulling it from the Internet rather than our own list. The script is essentially the same, so I'm only going to explain the part which changed; visit the previous article for a rundown on the rest: set _date to do shell script ¬ "date +'Sent on %A, %b %d at %l:%M %p'|tr -s ' '" set _quote to "" try set _quote to do shell script "curl -s \\ 'http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random?source=macintosh&max_lines=4'" set {astid, AppleScript's text item delimiters} ¬ to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, return} set _quote to paragraphs 1 through -3 of _quote as string set AppleScript's text item delimiters to astid end try set _out to " -Brett " & _date & " ________________________________ Brett Terpstra | myemailaddress@mywebsite.com The Unofficial Apple Weblog | http://www.tuaw.com " & _quote return _out The curl call Here's the part which makes this more interesting than it was before: set _quote to do shell script "curl -s \\ 'http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random?source=macintosh&max_lines=4'" First off, that really should be all one line, but is split here for formatting purposes. You can remove the double backslash (\\) and merge the lines together if you like. What this does is use AppleScript's ability to run shell scripts (Unix commands) to make a curl call to retrieve a response from the iheartquotes API. Note the "try" statement surrounding that section; it will just return our regular signature without the quote if anything goes wrong. If it gets a response, it stores it in a variable (_quote) and then trims off the last line, like this: set {astid, AppleScript's text item delimiters} ¬ to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, return} set _quote to paragraphs 1 through -3 of _quote as string set AppleScript's text item delimiters to astid The first two lines (actually one line) are shorthand for setting "AppleScript's text item delimiters" -- the character that AppleScript uses to separate text items in a block of text -- to the return character and store the current text item delimiter in a variable so we can restore it with the last line. Using the paragraphs command, which automatically uses the return key to separate paragraphs, we turn the quote into a list of paragraphs, starting with the first and ending with the third from last. This is because the last two "paragraphs" are always an empty line and a permalink (even if you use the API's parameters to turn off the permalink). The last part of that line, "as string", is where the text item delimiters come into play, putting the list items back together with a return after each one, reconstructing the original formatting. Note: You could do the same thing by adding |sed -n '$!p' to the end of the do shell script line, right before the last double quote. I suppose you might as well, as long as you're dipping out to the shell anyway ... From there it's the same as before, just building a final output string from the pieces we've created. This method provides a much wider variety of randomized signatures than constructing your own list by making use of a small section of the wide array of data on the interwebs. The use of curl in an AppleScript can open a lot of possibilities, such as posting to Twitter in various ways. or shortening urls on the fly. Have fun.
ssh on iPhone
Over at the #iphone channel at irc.osx86.hu, the thoroughly awesome NerveGas has figured out how to enable ssh on the iPhone without using restore mode. The secret lies in overwriting an existing binary and plist to trick the iPhone into calling chmod on the Dropbear ssh server and making it executable. At this time, NerveGas has used Nightwatch's compiler to create iPhone-compatible versions of curl and ps as well as a number of other useful Unix utilities. (He's working on grep, as I write). So what does this mean? Well, once you've got ssh installed on your iPhone and active, you can access your iPhone from a shell on your Mac. You can send and retrieve files using scp or sftp. And you can use the compilation toolchain to build other Unix utils or even your own software. It's just a short matter of time until perl and other command-line utilities are iPhone-ready.
Monday man page: curl
Today's man page covers one of my favorite utilities: curl. No, it's not a haircare product -- it's one of the most flexible download tools in the kit bag, with the ability to handle almost any protocol that can be addressed via a URL (hence the name, short for "client for URLs"). If there's a server out there that's reachable via HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, SCP, and lots of other alphabet soup, curl can talk to it. curl http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/05/monday-man-page-curl/ -- display the source of this very article in Terminal curl ftp://ftp.panic.com -- list the contents of a remote FTP site, in this case one with a pretty good FTP client curl -o ~/Desktop/curl-man.html http://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html -- copy the curl manpage to your desktop; if you use capital -O, the local file mirrors the remote filename curl has an excellent usage manual at its site, detailing examples of use and advanced techniques. While there are zillions of ways to use curl in site testing, analysis and uploading, my favorite way of using it is as a quick file downloader. Read on for the details.
