Over the weekend I got the bright idea of asking OmniGroup to ask an iPhone voice recognition application (like Dragon Dictation) to add a link to the OmniFocus iPhone application. That way I could simply dictate new inbox items on the iPhone rather than laboriously typing them with the on-screen keyboard. Before making the suggestion, I searched the OmniFocus User Forum for “voice recognition” to see if anyone else had suggested the same thing. As it turns out, there were a few posts that had instructions from people using Twitter as an intermediary. Unfortunately, they either required a desktop Twitter client to be running all of the time or used the now deprecated BasicAuth-based Twitter authentication scheme. So I created my own.

The Script

Registering your Application with Twitter

Tweet Privacy Checkbox

Because I marked it as private, the script can’t read the home timeline of tweets without authentication. In order to authenticate with Twitter, I need to register the script with the Twitter API service to get a “Consumer Key” and a “Consumer Secret”. The registration page looks similar to below, but you’ll need to pick a different name. (Application names must be unique across Twitter.)

New Twitter Application screen for twitter-to-omnifocus

After submitting that form, you’ll see a page that will have your key information. Replace the sample keys in the tweettoOmniFocus.cfg file with the ones from this page.

You’ll need to run the twitter-to-omnifocus application once interactively on the command line in order to complete the process of registering the script with Twitter. First, change the mode of the script so that you can execute it, then run the script:

  chmod u+x twitter-to-omnifocus

  ./twitter-to-omnifocus

You’ll be promted to go to a website to get a PIN:

  Authorize this app at http://twitter.com/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=nnn and enter the PIN#

When you get the PIN, paste it into the terminal window and hit return. Two new security tokens will be added to the configuration file.

Getting the Script to Run Periodically on the Mac

Lingon configuration for twitter-to-omnifocus

All Done!

iPhone Dragon Dictation screen

In the end, this is quite an effort and a moderately fragile setup for doing what I want. In particular, the dictated entries don’t immediately appear in my iPhone OmniFocus app database. I’d like some tighter integration between the applications, but I’ll settle for this for now.

You are using lockdown security cables to protect your PCs, but your accessories — keyboards, mice, and other cables — are still vulnerable to theft. You can use one of these specially built products to lock down the cables, or you can use a 20¢ flat washer from the hardware store to protect these components from minor mischief.

Close-up of mouse cable protected by flat washer

The Setup

1. Create a loop with the keyboard or mouse or USB cable.
2. Pass the loop through the flat washer.
3. Pass the security cable through the loop.

Note that this technique doesn’t deter a determined despoiler because it can be defeated by dissecting the cable, but for will work in simplest case. If someone really wants the keyboard or the mouse and is willing to cut the cord in half to remove the flat washer, they will get the component. They will also have to patch the cable back together to make it useful, so odds are it isn’t worth it.

Last week I posted about a Yahoo Pipes construct that turns a Zotero website library into an RSS feed. As Dan Cohen noted in a twitter response to the posting, the Zotero team is planning to add an RSS capability in a future release of the website, so this pipe will ultimately be usurped by that capability, but in the meantime it is a handy tool. It was my first full-scale foray into creating a Yahoo Pipes construct from scratch, so I thought it would be useful to document how it works (in case I need to do something similar again). You might find this useful, too; especially the part about how to put a pubDate element into the RSS feed.

A couple of things to note: The basic structure is to iterate over a list of items. The modules on the right side (above) work to construct a URL to the Zotero Library page while the modules on the left actually get that page, find the list of items (by defining where the list is located in the HTML structure), and massage them into an RSS feed. In the case of this example, the Pipe is iterating over a list of <tr> elements in the table that displays the library items. Strings with elements separated by periods are XPATH-like constructs. For instance, the “Path to Item List” in the upper right module is body.div.1.div.div.1.table.tbody.tr. The corresponding XPATH is /html/body/div[2]/div/div[2]/table/tbody/tr. Note a few things: the leading element (html) is omitted, slashes are replaced by periods, and ordinal numbers are separated from their base elements with periods and are subtracted by 1. Later on there are examples where attribute names (“href“) and references to text nodes (“content“) are also included in these path strings.

Graphic representation of the Yahoo! Pipes construct to turn a Zotero library web page into an RSS feed.

The process starts with the two Private Text Input modules at the top right — one each for the Zotero Username and the Zotero User Number. The defaults are set to my values, and they are marked private — meaning that if someone clones this pipe, these values are not carried along.

Directly below is a URL Builder module. The base URL is http://www.zotero.org, and there are three path elements: the first is a connection from the Zotero Username Private Text Input, the second is a connection from the Zotero User Number Private Text Input, and the third is the literal “items“. This builds a URL that looks like http://www.zotero.org/dltj/683/items and that corresponds to the Zotero user’s library items page.

Starting at the upper left of the diagram, the output of the URL Builder is connected to the URL field of a Fetch Data module. The “Path to Item List” parameter is set to body.div.1.div.div.1.table.tbody.tr and that is a pointer to the portion of the XHTML document that contains the library items. Because the Zotero website is outputting XML (as XHTML), we can use the Fetch Data module and parse the page as if it was an XML document. The Path to Item List is an XPATH-like structure that points into the document structure (see note above). The result of this module is a list of items — the table rows in this case — that are processed by the remaining modules.

The next module down is a Rename module, where the value of the XPATH-like path item.td.0.a.content is copied to the item title element. The XPATH, from the root of the “Path to Item List” in the module above, is td/a; note here the added item at the front and the content at the end. Specifying the zeroth td element isn’t needed, but it brings symmetry with subsequent modules. content corresponds to the text node under the a element when viewing this as an XML document.

What follows is a series of Loop modules that act on different parts of the items in the list. The first builds the link element of the item using the String Builder module. The href in the XML is a relative path, so the String Builder adds the literal “http://www.zotero.org” to the value found in item.td.0.a.href (the href attribute of the anchor element of the first td element). The resulting string is assigned to the link element of each item in the list.

The second Loop module encapsulates a Date Builder module, and this is the inspiration for writing this post. It took a very long time to figure out how to get the pubDate element into each item of the resulting RSS feed. As it turns out, one cannot simple assign the pubDate element like we did the title element above. Instead, one sets the timestamp to the y:published element and Yahoo Pipes takes it from there. And it isn’t enough to assign a text string to that element; it has to be a Date type, constructed using the Date Builder module. The Date Builder module is very flexible in what it accepts, and it creates a canonical timestamp form that can be used by other modules. In this case, the Date Builder module takes as a source input the string value found at item.td.2.a.content. Believe me — it took a long time to figure this out, and it was only done by piecing together various suggestions and examples; there doesn’t seem to be any clear documentation about this.

The third and fourth Loop modules go together. The third takes the value found in item.td.0.a.span.class and applies a String Regex module to it. The value of that class attribute contains the type of item in the Zotero library, and it takes the form of “img-book” or “img-journalArticle” or “img-conferencePaper“. There are two regular expressions defined: the first removes the “img-” prefix from each value and the second replaces all instances of an upper case letter with a space plus the lower case version of the letter. The latter rule turns “journalArticle” into “journal article” (note that there is a space in this field prior to the \L part). The result is assigned to the item.itemType element. This is used in the final Loop module to build a item.description element to create the string: <p>This journal article was saved to my Zotero library.</p>.

That’s all there is to it. Yahoo Pipes applies all of these modules to each of the items in the list retrieved from the Zotero library page and generates the corresponding RSS feed.

Dealing with SPAM e-mail is a real hassle. Dealing with SPAM e-mail as a mailing list owner is an even bigger hassle. Here are some tips for dealing with SPAM e-mail on mailing lists using the Mailman software package.

The Symptoms

Hold Nonmember setting in Mailing list administration, Privacy Options, Sender filters

This will hold all of the messages sent by non-members — all of those spamy e-mail addresses — to a queue on the Mailman server. You’ll receive a notification that a message is being held for you:

As list administrator, your authorization is requested for the following mailing list posting:
 
  List:    mailingListName@mailingListHost
  From:    spam-email-address
  Subject: :)
  Reason:  Post by non-member to a members-only list
 
At your convenience, visit:
 
  http://mailingListHost/mailman/admindb/mailingListName
 
to approve or deny the request.


You’ll also get a message once a day telling you that these messages are being held and insisting that you do something about it.

The mailingListName@mailingListHost mailing list has 3 request(s) waiting for your consideration at:
 
  http://mailingListHost/mailman/admindb/mailingListName
 
Please attend to this at your earliest convenience.  This notice of pending requests, if any, will be sent out daily.


A Solution

Discard Messages setting in Mailing list options, General options

I use “4″ in that field: two days to cover weekends plus a two day grace period. For a message that is errantly caught in the queue (because it was too large, was sent by a subscriber who’s email address changed, or other reason), I now have four days to release it. If I do nothing, the message disappears from the hold queue after that time, and I get this final e-mail message:

From:    mailingListName-bounces@mailingListHost
Subject: mailingListName moderator request check result
Date:    July 16, 2008 8:00:08 AM EDT
To:      mailingListName-owner@mailingListHost
 
Notice: 1 old request(s) automatically expired.


Customize these instructions

Note that this JavaScript probably doesn’t work in feed readers, but you can make it work by viewing this post on the DLTJ site.

The text was modified to update a link from http://dltj.org/article/mailman-spam-howtomailman-spam-howto/ to http://dltj.org/article/mailman-spam-howto/ on December 30th, 2010.

In this How-To guide, I show a combination of software and configuration to clean up URLs by removing the port numbers of the Java servlet engine (Tomcat) and the context path of the application. The goal is to create “cool URLs” that are are short (removing the unnecessary context path) and follow conventions (using the default port “80″ rather than “8080″). OhioLINK also uses a custom access control module — built for Apache HTTPD — which makes the fronting of Apache HTTPD for Tomcat even more desirable.

Requirement

The Plan

The first half of this problem, modifying a request as they come into the Apache HTTPD server, will be handled by a mod_rewrite rule that rewrites the request to something Tomcat can understand then internally redirects it Tomcat via the AJP proxy. (Note that we are not using simply ProxyPass here because we want to send the request through the AJP interface to the Tomcat server, and RewriteRule allows us to do that with a [P] flag at the end of the RewriteRule line.) The second uses a combination of ProxyPassReverse (a part of Apache-supplied mod_proxy extension that adjusts the URL in the Location, Content-Location and URI headers), ProxyPassReverseCookiePath (also a part of the Apache-supplied mod_proxy extension; it rewrites the path string in Set-Cookie headers), and ProxyHTMLURLMap (from mod_proxy_html, a third-party extension that rewrites URLs inside X/HTML documents).

Preparations

wget 'http://apache.webthing.com/mod_proxy_html/mod_proxy_html-2.5.2.c'
apxs -c -I/usr/include/libxml2 -i mod_proxy_html-2.5.2.c

Note that we are not using the mod_proxy_html author’s 3.0 version here. In my set-up, the 3.0 version was causing Apache HTTPD to dump core on every request (whether proxied or not), and the prior release works just fine for our purposes. The apxs line will compile, link, and copy the resulting library to the Apache modules directory for us.

The Configuration

#
#  Information about 'mod_proxy_html' can be found at 
#   http://apache.webthing.com/mod_proxy_html/
LoadFile    /usr/lib/libxml2.so
LoadModule  proxy_html_module    modules/mod_proxy_html-2.5.2.so
 
# DON'T TURN ProxyRequests ON!  Bad things will happen
# http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy.html#access
# http://www.akadia.com/services/prevent_abuse_proxy.html
ProxyRequests off
 
# Necessary to have mod_proxy_html do the rewriting
RequestHeader      unset  Accept-Encoding
 
# Rewrite the URLs to proxy ("[P]") into the Tomcat server
RewriteEngine     on
RewriteRule ^(/.*)      ajp://localhost:8009/context_path/$1    [P]
 
# Be prepared to rewrite the HTML/CSS files as they come back
# from Tomcat
SetOutputFilter proxy-html
 
# Rewrite JavaScript and CSS files in addition to HTML files
ProxyHTMLExtended on
 
# Output Strict XHTML (add "Legacy" to the end of the line below
# to output Transitional XHTML)
ProxyHTMLDoctype XHTML 
 
# Rewrite HTTP headers and HTML/CSS links for everything else
ProxyPassReverse /context_path/ /
ProxyPassReverseCookiePath /context_path/ /
ProxyHTMLURLMap /context_path/ /

That’s pretty much all there is to it. You should note that mod_proxy_html, like any HTML scraper, requires modestly well-formed X/HTML. If the markup is bad, the output from mod_proxy_html is likely to be unpredictable.