A Tasty Pixel » Blog » Scripts

Supporting WordPress shortcodes and captions in MarsEdit preview

Michael Tyson — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:50:49 +0000

I noticed that WordPress these days uses a shortcode to define image captions, of the form:

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="630" caption="Image title goes here"][/caption]

I’ve recently redone our blog template at Technomadics, and while setting up the new preview template in MarsEdit, thought I’d take a stab at implementing support for captions, too, via some javascript in the template.

I was successful! Here’s how I did it:

Added the following to the “head” section:

<script type="text/javascript">
var prior_content;
function watch_for_changes() {
  var check = function() {
    var elt = document.getElementById('content');
    if ( elt.innerHTML != prior_content ) {
       elt.innerHTML = apply_filters(elt.innerHTML);
	   prior_content = elt.innerHTML;
    }
    setTimeout(check, 100);
  };
  setTimeout(check, 100);
}
 
function apply_shortcode(source, name, callback) {
   return source.replace(new RegExp('\\[' + name + '\\s*([^\\]]*)\\]((.|[\s\n])*?)\\[/' + name + '\\]', 'g'),
                         function(match, paramString, content) {
                           params = new Object();
                           reg = /([a-z]+)="((:?="[^"]+"|[^"])*)"/gi;
                           while ( (match = reg.exec(paramString)) != null ) {
                             params[match[1]] = match[2];
                           }
                           return callback(params, content);
                         });
}
 
function apply_filters(html) {
  html = apply_shortcode(html, "caption", function(args, content) {
     return '+
               'class="wp-caption ' + (typeof(args.align) != 'undefined' ? args.align : '') + '" '+
               'style="width: ' + args.width + 'px;">' + content +
             '' + args.caption + '
';
  });
 
  return html;
}
script>

…changed to ‘body’ tag to…

…And wrapped a div around the main “#body#, #extended#” content with an id of content:


#body#
#extended#

Basically, it polls the content area for changes, and when triggered, runs it though a filter. The above is extensible, and by adding additional “apply_shortcode” calls from “apply_filters“, more shortcodes can be simulated.

Fixing Xcode 4′s symbolicate utility to get comprehensible crash logs

Michael Tyson — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 19:30:58 +0000

‘symbolicatecrash’ is the Developer Tools utility which replaces all those meaningless addresses from crash logs with actual symbol names and source code references. It lives at some obscure folder within /Developer – use find to dig it up and symlink it into /usr/local/bin if you wanna use it conveniently from the command line.

Anyway, after plenty of frustration, I noticed some chatter about the damn thing being busted in Xcode 4. Figures!

There’s an alternate third party version on GitHub, but this didn’t really help me – I still got inscrutable errors, so I took a look at the original.

The version that comes with Xcode 4 appears to have some problems distinguishing, say, an iPhone Simulator build of the app from a native build sitting in the Archives folder. I’d just see an error about otool and some binary living in the iPhone Simulator folder.

Digging into the errant symbolicatecrash source, I noticed that the code that finds the executable path tests each candidate using otool, but doesn’t seem to be able to comprehend the output from otool caused by running it on the wrong architecture.

So, replacing the rather unhelpful ‘die’ statement on line 323:

die "Can't understand the output from otool ($TEST_uuid -> '$otool -arch $arch -l $path')";

With a “No, it ain’t this executable” response:

return 0;

…solves the problem immediately. Now I can drag crash logs straight into the Organizer in Xcode, and it’ll symbolicate correctly.

Objective-C + Cocoa on the Command Line

Michael Tyson — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:04:58 +0000

Sometimes there’s just one tiny snippet of Cocoa code that you want to test — maybe to find out the output of NSDateFormatter for various cases, testing out some text replacement routine, or testing out some image drawing code.

It’s often too much trouble to create a new XCode project and set up the framework to do one simple test, which is why I put together this little shell script that lets you run Cocoa code from the command line:

$ runcocoa 'NSDateFormatter *formatter = [[[NSDateFormatter alloc] init] autorelease]; [formatter setDateFormat:@"d MMM, h:mm a"]; NSLog(@"%@", [formatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]]);'

2011-02-23 20:02:10.313 runcocoa-output[28025:903] 23 Feb, 8:02 PM

You have full access to all Cocoa libraries, and in iOS mode, access to most iOS stuff too, straight from the command line.

Update: This is now available as a GitHub project

You can invoke it either by specifying the code to execute on the command line as a parameter, or through standard input, so you can pipe stuff to it. This is particularly convenient for use with TextMate: Type some code, hit Cmd-Option-R, type “runcocoa”, hit enter, and the result appears as a tooltip.

Awesome, no?

You can include other frameworks (use “-include AudioToolbox/AudioToolbox.h -framework AudioToolbox" as command line arguments, for example), and run the code in gdb (with -gdb as a command-line argument).

You can also run it as iOS code by supplying the -ios commandline parameter — try this:

runcocoa -ios 'UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(CGSizeMake(100,100)); CGContextRef ctx = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext(); CGContextSetFillColorWithColor(ctx,[[UIColor whiteColor] CGColor]); CGContextBeginPath(ctx); CGContextMoveToPoint(ctx, 50, 0); CGContextAddArc(ctx, 50, 50, 50, M_PI/2.0, M_PI/2.0 + (2*M_PI), 0); CGContextFillPath(ctx); UIImage *icon = [UIImage imageWithData:[NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://atastypixel.com/favicon.ico"]]]; [icon drawAtPoint:CGPointMake((100-[icon size].width)/2.0,(100-[icon size].height)/2.0)]; UIImage *i = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext(); UIGraphicsEndImageContext(); [UIImagePNGRepresentation(i) writeToFile:@"output.png" atomically:NO];'; open output.png;

Any other libraries to link in can be specified — command line arguments will be passed on unmolested to GCC. Add #imports with the -include parameter.

Grab the script from the Commandline-Cocoa GitHub project — make it executable (chmod +x runcocoa.sh), and move it to /usr/local/bin/runcocoa.

Resuming ADC downloads (‘cos Safari sucks)

Michael Tyson — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 21:27:48 +0000

So, Safari’s resume facility is just awful — it’ll randomly restart downloads from the beginning, clobbering anything that’s already been downloaded, and the resume button will frequently disappear entirely and mysteriously from the downloads window. And if the session has expired, it’ll cause all kinds of havoc.

Anyone downloading the gazillion-gb iOS/Mac SDK + XCode on a slow and/or expensive connection will know the sheer fisticuffs-inspiring irritation this creates — speaking personally, living on a mobile broadband connection that’s usually changed at £3 per gig and often runs about as fast as I could send the data via carrier pigeon, this usually makes me want to storm Cupertino with a pitchfork.

Okay, so I could probably use Firefox or something else, but instead I figured I’d whip up^* a shell script that lets me use my favoured long-haul download tool – curl. And in case there were any other sufferers of insanely-priced broadband and Safari’s antisocial behaviour, I thought I’d share it.

It’ll ask for your Apple ID and password, and store it in the keychain for you, and it’ll resume from the current working directory.

Chuck it somewhere like /usr/local/bin, make sure it’s executable (chmod +x /usr/local/bin/adc_download.sh) and call it from Terminal like:

adc_download.sh https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/download.action?path=/Developer_Tools/xcode_4_gm_seed/xcode_4_gm_seed_.dmg

If you’ve already started the download in Safari, just grab the partially-downloaded file from within the .download package Safari creates.

Here ’tis:

adc_download.sh

Update: Now includes team support, thanks to Christopher Bowns — see the comments at the top of the script for usage instructions.

P.S. I’d be interested to see how incremental updates fare when transferred from an intermediate server with rsync. It’s rather bizarre that Apple reissue the whole 3.x gb SDK with each update, rather than offering a ‘patch’ (I guess Apple lives blithely in the world of cheap bandwidth!), and it makes me wonder whether there’d be sufficient correlation between versions to save some bandwidth by avoiding transferring the similarities…

^* read: spend hours on, as is my way.

OS X service to filter selected text through a shell command

Michael Tyson — Sun, 23 May 2010 13:50:07 +0000

The UNIX shell provides a host of extremely useful utilities for modifying text. This OS X Automator service makes all of them available for filtering text in all OS X applications.

This can be handy for performing quick operations, like replacing text with regular expressions, sorting lists or swapping fields around.

When triggered, the service requests a command to use for filtering, then runs the command and replaces the selected text with the result.

Some sample operations:

Sort lines alphabetically/numerically: sort or sort -n
Change to lowercase: tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"
Replace a spelling mistake, taking care of case: sed -E 's/([tT])eh/\1he/g'
Re-order elements in a tab- or comma-separated list: awk '{print $2 $1}' or awk -F, '{print $2 "," $1}'

Put it in Library/Services, and it should appear in the ‘Services’ menu.

Filter through Shell Command.zip

Browsing Core Data databases using F-Script

Michael Tyson — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 12:00:37 +0000

F-Script, the Cocoa-based scripting environment, now provides some great tools for exploring Core Data databases.

I couldn’t figure out how to easily open up my databases, other than manually creating a managed object model, then a persistent store coordinator, then a managed object context on the console. I couldn’t find any existing tools, and I wanted a quick workflow for opening up my databases, so I put together a script that prompts for the application bundle or .xcdatamodel(d) data model file, then prompts for the XML (.xml), binary (.binary) or SQLite (.sql or anything else) database file, and opens up the inspector.

I wrote it as an Applescript that just calls upon F-Script to evaluate the script, and saved it in an application bundle so I can pull it up quickly.

Here it is:

Core Data Browser.app

It just needs the F-Script app to be available.

Upon opening, the managed object context is available on the console as “context“. So, aside from using F-Script’s object browser, you can also do things like:

> request := (NSFetchRequest alloc) init
> request setEntity:(NSEntityDescription entityForName:'MyEntity' inManagedObjectContext:context)
> request setPredicate:(NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:'type = 3')
> result := context executeFetchRequest:request error:nil
> result
_PFArray {: 0x2006cf740> (entity: MyEntity; id: 0x20064c9e0 -coredata://BAC82A67-CC41-48C2-8A96-693B67A501D6/MyEntity/p1> ; data: ), 
: 0x2006bdc80> (entity: MyEntity; id: 0x20064c9c0 -coredata://BAC82A67-CC41-48C2-8A96-693B67A501D6/MyEntity/p2> ; data: ), 
: 0x2006bc680> (entity: MyEntity; id: 0x200651180 -coredata://BAC82A67-CC41-48C2-8A96-693B67A501D6/MyEntity/p3> ; data: )
...

Update: Now has better error reporting, and the option to load classes from a bundle.

For those interested, here’s the original F-Script:

panel := NSOpenPanel openPanel.
panel setAllowedFileTypes:{'xcdatamodel', 'app', 'framework'};setTitle:'Data model';setMessage:'Select a data model file or bundle containing a data model'.
classesButton := (NSButton alloc) initWithFrame:(0<>0 extent:200<>30).
classesButton setTitle:'Load classes in bundle';setButtonType:NSSwitchButton.
panel setAccessoryView:classesButton.
model := nil.
[model == nil] whileTrue:[
	error := FSPointer objectPointer.
	(panel runModal = NSFileHandlingPanelCancelButton) ifTrue:[ (NSException exceptionWithName:'CancelException' reason:'Cancelled' userInfo:nil) raise ] .
	(((panel URL) absoluteString) hasSuffix:'xcdatamodel') ifTrue:[
		model := ((NSManagedObjectModel alloc) initWithContentsOfURL:(panel URL))
	] ifFalse:[
		bundle := (NSBundle bundleWithURL:(panel URL)).
		(bundle == nil) ifFalse:[
			model := (NSManagedObjectModel mergedModelFromBundles:{bundle}).
			(model ~~ nil & (FSBoolean booleanWithBool:(classesButton state) = NSOnState)) ifTrue:[
				(FSBoolean booleanWithBool:(bundle loadAndReturnError:error)) ifFalse:[
					model := nil.
					(NSAlert alertWithMessageText:'Could not load bundle' defaultButton:'OK' alternateButton:nil otherButton:nil informativeTextWithFormat:((error at:0) localizedDescription)) runModal
				]
			]
		]
	].
	(model == nil & ((error at:0) == nil)) ifTrue:[ (NSAlert alertWithMessageText:'Could not load model from file or bundle' defaultButton:'OK' alternateButton:nil otherButton:nil informativeTextWithFormat:'') runModal ]
].
panel setAccessoryView:nil.
store := ((NSPersistentStoreCoordinator alloc) initWithManagedObjectModel:model).
panel setAllowedFileTypes:nil; setTitle:'Database file';setMessage:'Select Core Data SQLite database'.
opened := nil.
[opened == nil] whileTrue:[
	(panel runModal = NSFileHandlingPanelCancelButton) ifTrue:[ (NSException exceptionWithName:'CancelException' reason:'Cancelled' userInfo:nil) raise ] .
	type := NSSQLiteStoreType.
	((((panel URL) absoluteString) lowercaseString) hasSuffix:'xml') ifTrue:[type := NSXMLStoreType].
	((((panel URL) absoluteString) lowercaseString) hasSuffix:'binary') ifTrue:[type := NSBinaryStoreType].
	error := FSPointer objectPointer.
	opened := (store addPersistentStoreWithType:type configuration:nil URL:(panel URL) options:nil error:error).
	(opened == nil) ifTrue:[ (NSAlert alertWithMessageText:'Could not load database' defaultButton:'OK' alternateButton:nil otherButton:nil informativeTextWithFormat:((error at:0) localizedDescription)) runModal ]
].
context := ((NSManagedObjectContext alloc) init).
context setPersistentStoreCoordinator:store.
context inspectWithSystem:sys

Searching through Subversion history

Michael Tyson — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:55:21 +0000

Occasionally I need to search back through old versions of projects to find a piece of code I want to resurrect or just use as reference — I haven’t found any easy built-in way to do this, so I adapted this useful script to allow me to grep through all history from within a Subversion working directory, like:

$ svngrep SecItemCopyMatching *
LSAddAccountController.m @r7: SecItemCopyMatching((CFDictionaryRef)[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
LSAddAccountController.m @r4: SecItemCopyMatching((CFDictionaryRef)[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
LSAddAccountController.m @r2: SecItemCopyMatching((CFDictionaryRef)[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
LSAddAccountController.m @r1: SecItemCopyMatching((CFDictionaryRef)[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:

Here’s the script:

#!/bin/sh
pattern=$1
shift
 
for file in $@; 
do
  svn log -q "$file" 2>/dev/null | perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /^r(\d+)/' | 
  while read r 
  do
    match=`svn cat -r $r "$file" | grep "$pattern"`
    result=$?
    if [ $result -eq 0 ]
    then
      /bin/echo -n "$file @r$r: "
      /bin/echo $match;
    elif [ $result -ne 1 ]
    then
      exit 2
    fi
  done
done;

Using custom DNS servers from the iPhone and over Internet Tethering

Michael Tyson — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:01:17 +0000

For those of us the roam around on network connections, OpenDNS and Google Public DNS provide public DNS servers which offer better security than using arbitrary DNS that’s assigned to us when we connect to a network. This means that rather than trusting the assigned DNS server — which could be a malicious third party that’s attempting a man-in-the-middle attack — we always use a trusted server.

In OS X, normally, one can specify custom DNS servers in Network Preferences, but when using Internet Tethering with the iPhone, no options are available.

It’s possible to set DNS configuration on the command line, though, as mentioned in this MacOSXHints article.

This technique can be used within a shell script to make things easier.

As it happens, if you have a jailbroken iPhone, the trick works there too — just ssh in as root, copy the script over, and run it from the iPhone.

The one caveat is that the DHCP client both on the iPhone and on Mac OS X will routinely reset the servers — I haven’t found a way to combat this yet, other than routinely re-running the script.

We have been using mobile broadband from my iPhone while we’ve been travelling; our current provider seems to go offline almost every evening — a quirk which I’ve just discovered is related to their faulty DNS server.

Using Google’s public DNS servers instead fixes this problem, so I was after a way to configure both the iPhone and OS X to use the servers.

Textmate: ‘git diff’ in FileMerge

Michael Tyson — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:50:01 +0000

I found myself wanting to pick through some changes I made under a git repository recently, discarding some and adapting others. The FileMerge utility that comes with the Mac OS X Developer Tools is great for this purpose, but in TextMate, there’s currently no way to compare uncommitted changes in a git repository using FileMerge.

Now there is!

View Uncommitted Changes in FileMerge.tmCommand.zip

Double click to install it in Textmate; it appears under the ‘Git’ bundle. I suggest you then select the ‘Git’ bundle group header, and drag this command (‘View Uncommitted Changes in FileMerge‘) up to the top of the menu list on the right, so it’s accessible via Control-Shift-G, 1.

It’s based on filemerge.tmbundle.

Align comments in Textmate

Michael Tyson — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:30:02 +0000

Unless I’m using Objective-C, which is fantastically self-documenting, I often like to add comments to parameters to remind me of what they do. For example:

imagecopy($image, $frame, 
          ($x=max($width-$this->topRightCap[kCapWidth], $this->topLeftCap[kCapWidth])), // Destination x
          0,  // Destination y
          $x,  // Source x
          0,  // Source y
          min($this->topRightCap[kCapWidth], $width-$this->topLeftCap[kCapWidth]),  // Source width
          $this->topRightCap[kCapHeight]); // Source height

The only thing is, it looks terrible and is very hard to read. I usually carefully insert spaces before the comments so they line up, but that’s really hard to maintain.

I use Textmate, and found an ‘Align Assignments’ script by Chris Poirier which applies very nice formatting to a block of assignments.

Some trivial modifications resulted in a similar script to align comments. Hit Ctrl-Option-Command-/, and:

imagecopy($image, $frame, 
          ($x=max($width-$this->topRightCap[kCapWidth], $this->topLeftCap[kCapWidth])), // Destination x
          0,                                                                            // Destination y
          $x,                                                                           // Source x
          0,                                                                            // Source y
          min($this->topRightCap[kCapWidth], $width-$this->topLeftCap[kCapWidth]),      // Source width
          $this->topRightCap[kCapHeight]);                                              // Source height

Here it is:

Align Comments.tmCommand.zip

Facebook News Feed RSS

Michael Tyson — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:26:13 +0000

Tired of either logging into Facebook frequently, or being entirely oblivious to friends’ activities, I was searching for a way to view the Facebook front page news feed as RSS, so I could load it into my news reader and forget about it.

‘Nemik’ has created such a thing and kindly made it available. It was a bit elderly, and didn’t work with the new Facebook, so I jazzed it up a bit.

Put it on a webserver, configure it, and access the URL to view the RSS feed. Probably a very good idea to provide password protection, as well.

Use at your own risk, and Facebook, please don’t sue me.

Download the script here

Counting words in LaTeX documents with TextMate

Michael Tyson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:06:51 +0000

When working on LaTeX documents in TextMate, the default word count feature isn’t too helpful, as it also includes all of the LaTeX control sequences in the count. There are plenty of suggestions out there, but this is one I came up with, which works the same way as the default word count facility (Ctrl-Shift-N):

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU
 
def pretty(number)
  number.to_s.gsub(/\d{1,3}(?=\d{3}+(?!\d))/, '\0,')
end
 
counts = `detex -l | wc -lwc`.scan(/\d+/)
counts[0] = counts[0].to_i + 1 # increase one to the line count
 
%w[ line word byte ].each do |unit|
  cnt    = counts.shift
  plural = cnt.to_i != 1 ? 's' : ''
  printf("%11.11s %s%s\n", pretty(cnt), unit, plural)
end

This is just a copy of the default statistics action from the Text bundle, but with the ‘detex’ utility added into the pipeline to remove all LaTeX control sequences.

Put this in a new command in the LaTeX bundle, with ‘Selected Text’ for input, and ‘Show as Tool Tip’ for output. I assigned Ctrl-Shift-N as the key equivalent.

Apple iTunes Connect Trend/Transaction Report Processor

Michael Tyson — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:34:52 +0000

I’ve written a droplet which takes a transaction report, as downloaded from iTunes Connect and containing a summary of sales, and produces a single figure representing the total earnings, in a particular currency.

Because the report shows sales for each separate region, a bit of work is required to get a total earnings figure, involving multiplying royalties by number of sales for each region, and then converting each currency type and adding all results together. This droplet does it all for you – just drop the downloaded text file from iTunes Connect onto it and it’ll bring up a summary. A preferences window allows configuration of the currency.

Currency conversion information provided by timegenie.com.

p>Download it here: Process Transaction Reports droplet

A OS X service to encode HTML characters

Michael Tyson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:08:13 +0000

I find myself frequently writing HTML code in comment forms which support use of HTML formatting, which means that I have to encode the html entities if I want them to show up (as in representing ‘>’ with ‘>’, for example).

This gets rather tiresome, particularly if there’s a fair chunk of text to encode by hand.

I used the always-useful ThisService app with a short PHP script which does a htmlspecialchars() on whatever’s passed to it, to create a OS X service called ‘Encode HTML‘. Put it in your Library/Services directory, possibly log out and back in again, and you’ll be set.

Select the text to encode, click the system menu, Services, Encode HTML, and it’ll be automatically encoded in place.

Keeping iChat and Adium status in sync with Twitter

Michael Tyson — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:39:58 +0000

I’ve been using Twitter for a while now, and I’ve just started doing ‘global’ status updates across Twitter, Facebook, and my instant messenger account statuses for iChat and Adium. Usually I use MoodBlast, a really nice application which lets me use a global keyboard shortcut to quickly enter a tweet and hit enter to update everything simultaneously.

However, if I want to update from, say, Twinkle on my iPhone (side-note: Wow, Tapulous need to do some serious SEO – their Twitter site isn’t even on the first page of Google hits. I’m on the first page of Google hits for it, ferchrissake) the sync won’t happen. This Ruby script will do the trick.

Download: Sync Status With Twitter

To use it:

Extract the .rb file to ~/Library/Scripts
Open it in, say, TextEdit and edit ‘Username’ at the top of the file to match your username
Open Terminal (in Applications, Utilities)
Make the script executable: chmod +x ~/Library/Scripts/sync-status-with-twitter.rb
Open your crontab: crontab -e
Add a line to crontab to run the script regularly:
- Press ‘o’ to insert a new line
- Paste the following line:
  */30 * * * * ~/Library/Scripts/sync-status-with-twitter.rb
  The ‘30’ here means run every 30 minutes. Change it if you want. Some alternatives are:
  */10 * * * *… – Every 10 minutes 0 * * * *… – Hourly, on the hour 0 */2 * * *… – Every second hour, on the hour
- Press escape to stop editing
- Hold down shift and press ZZ (Z key twice) to save and quit
You’re done. Wait a little bit and it’ll update, or if you like, run it immediately from Terminal (~/Library/Scripts/sync-status-with-twitter.rb).

If you want to update Facebook too, you have two options: ~~Either use the excellent Facebook plugin for Adium (comes with the latest version), and it’ll happen all by default~~ [Edit: Looks like I'm wrong; Adium won't update Facebook] , or add the Twitter application to Facebook itself.

This script was inspired by a similar script by John Nunemaker over at RailsTips.org. Thanks, John.

Update: Bed has made some changes which will ignore @reply messages.

Update: I’ve also added an implementation to ignore @reply messages

Update: I’ve added a provision to only update the status if you’re not set as away – if you’re away, the status message will remain unchanged.