Coredump

At work, I do a lot of directory traversal: going from one location to another within the whole (global) filesystem structure. So, to conveniently go back to a previous directory, I use pushd and popd, aside from the usual cd:

$ pwd
/home/iandexter
$ pushd /etc/sysconfig
$ pwd
/etc/sysconfig
$ popd
$ pwd
/home/iandexter

You can even echo $DIRSTACK to list the current directories in the stack, and push multiple directories.

I made several improvements in the previous script:

#!/usr/bin/python
 
import flickr
import urllib
import time
import re
 
flickr.API_KEY = 'Flick API goes here'
print "Registered using API key"
user =  flickr.people_findByUsername(u'username')
print "Found user %s - username" % user.id
try:
        photos = flickr.people_getPublicPhotos(user.id, 500)
        print "Found the photos"
        total = 0
        for photo in photos:
                p = flickr.Photo(photo.id)
                title = re.sub('\s+', '-', p.title)
                title = re.sub('[^-\w]', '', title)
                title = "%s_%s" % (title, p.datetaken.split()[0])
                for s in p.getSizes():
                        url = s['source']
                        photoFile = "%s_%s" % (title, url.split("/")[4])
                        data = urllib.urlretrieve(url, photoFile)
                        total = total + 1
                        print "Retrieving %s ..." % photoFile
                        time.sleep(1)
except AttributeError:
        exit
print "%s photos retrieved." % total

Python is pretty simple, once you get the hang of it. It also helps that the source for flickr.py is open — I got to fetch some more info regarding the photos I’m downloading, thus incorporating them in the code.

The code could use some more improvement, though: I should have opted for the Flickr error code (flickr.FlickrError) instead of AttributeError. The regex can certainly use more trimming. Perhaps I can save the photo information in a database instead of glomming them in the filename (so I can include tags, group and set memberships, etc.),

This should be elementary to Python devs out there, but for me, it’s just a hobby.

Flickr Leech is a cool web app. It displays all Flickr photos, including those already rendered invisible because of the 200-photo limit in free accounts. But I need more: I want to download these photos for backup.

After looking around, I found several tools that does the job. They didn’t quite work for me, so I decided to hack my own.

Using the Flickr API and a Python wrapper, I came up with the following:

1. Get flickr.py and manually add it to the host Python library.
2. Get an API key from Flickr.
3. Write the script:

   #!/usr/bin/python
    
   import flickr
   import urllib
    
   flickr.API_KEY = 'API key goes here'
   user = flickr.people_findByUsername(u'username')
   photos = flickr.people_getPublicPhotos(user.id, 500)
   total = 0
   for photo in photos:
      photoURL = "http://static.flickr.com/%s/%s_%s_o.jpg" % (photo.server, photo.id, photo.secret)
      photoFile = "%s_%s.jpg" % (photo.title, photo.id)
      data = urllib.urlretrieve(photoURL, photoFile)
      total = total + 1
      print "Downloading %s" % photoFile
   print "Done with %s photos." % total

4. Make the script executable, create a directory where to download files, and execute the script from there.
5. Rinse, dry, press.

I know, the script is very rudimentary. It’s my first Python script, and it needs a lot of work: there’s no exception-handling for one. But it worked perfectly for me.

Okay, watching movies in the workplace is a definite no-no, but they didn’t say anything about listening to movies. But I’d rather do it offline, so I whipped up a little bookmarklet that will snag the .MP3 URL off the movies I chose.

1. First off, select a movie from the list.
2. Then list all the URLs in that page by using Javascript’s document.links object.
3. I noticed that the URI for the MP3 link is always the ninth, so just get the ninth URL: document.links[8].href.
4. Using a regular expression, winnow the URL:

   document.links[8].href.replace(new RegExp('[?&=]','g'),' ').split(' ')[2]

5. Drop in the javascript resource header, and voila! here’s the bookmarklet that will grab audio track’s URL for download. Right-click and bookmark the link. Or, drag and drop the link to the bookmarks toolbar.

I know there are scripts out there that does full-blown SMTP testing. I’ve used smtp-sink and smtp-source in Postfix for this purpose:

$ smtp-source -s 100 -m 100 -f sender@domain.com -t recipient@domain.com server.address:25

So this was what I recommended to a friend, a Unix engineer in Singapore. But she had a different requirement: she has to establish an SMTP connection through telnet to a remote server, and send a template mail to thousands of recipients. The telnet session goes something like:

[user@host ~]$ telnet remote.host 25
Trying 123.456.789.10...
Connected to remotehost.remotedomain (123.456.789.10).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.remote.host ESMTP Postfix
EHLO some.domain
250-mail.remote.host
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE 10240000
250-VRFY
250-ETRN
250 8BITMIME
MAIL FROM:sender@this.domain
250 Ok
RCPT TO:recipient@another.domain
250 Ok
DATA
354 End data with<cr><lf>.<cr><lf>
Subject: This is a test
From: Sender
 
This is only a test.
.
250 Ok: queued as D81D7FA927
QUIT
221 Bye
Connection closed by foreign host.
[user@host ~]$</lf></cr></lf></cr>

With thousands of recipients (no, her employer is not a spammer), this can be quite tedious. I thought of using an alias file at first, but the requirement was SMTP through telnet. So I told her to do the following:

1. Create a recipients file, /tmp/recipients:

   recipient1@some.domain
   recipient2@another.domain
   ...
   recipientX@yet.another.domain

2. Create a message file, /tmp/message:

   Subject: This is a test
   From: Sender
    
   This is only a test.

3. Create a script, smtp-telnet.sh:

   #!/bin/bash
    
   SENDER=sender@this.domain
    
   (echo "HELO some.domain";
   sleep 1;
   echo "MAIL FROM:" $SENDER;
   sleep 1;
   for i in `cat /tmp/recipients`; do
     echo "RCPT TO:" $i;
     sleep 1;
   done;
   echo "DATA";
   sleep 1;
   cat /tmp/message;
   sleep 1;
   echo ".";
   sleep 1;
   echo "QUIT") | telnet remote.host 25

4. Do a chmod 744 smtp-telnet.sh and run the script:

   $ ./smtp-telnet.sh

The sleep parameter can be increased to compensate for delays. I tested it on 50 users in my local test environment, and it worked for me.