A bit of playing, and quite a bit of reading got this


#!/bin/bash
PASS=`cat /path/to/0600/google-password-file`
SHEET="https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/download/spreadsheets/Exportkey=addyourownsheetIDhere&exportFormat=csv&gid="

curl --silent --output /path/to/file --header "GData-Version: 3.0" --header "Authorization: GoogleLogin ${AUTH_TOKE}" "${SHEET}${TAB}"


seemed to do the trick

Exportkey could be defined in the script, as a variable, thinking about it. You’ll need to supply that; I typically grab it from the web-based URI, but there is a warning in the docs about that:

To determine the URL of a cell-based feed for a given worksheet, get the worksheets metafeed and examine the <link> element in which rel is http://schemas.google.com/spreadsheets/2006#cellsfeed. The href value in that element is the cell feed’s URI.

YMMV.

I’ve added in &exportFormat=csv&gid= because I wanted CSV outputs, and gid’s value is provided via a for … and case deviation.

--header "GData-Version: 3.0" was needed to avoid the redirection.

Hopefully, this might be of benefit — as a working (when written) example of using curl and google docs/google spreadsheets.

This worked fine, until today, when I noticed apt-listbugs complaining, and causing the script to fail to dist-upgrade.

Not a problem, thought I. I’m sure others have had this issue too. Being lazy, I thought first point of call would be the internets. I’d have thought something like:


"DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive" "apt-listbugs"


might have done the trick. It didn’t (that I could find).

So I went back to doing what a lot of the new-breed of ‘devops’ fail to do, and what I’m quite hypocritical of; looking at the manpage.

The manpage provides us with this gem:

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
o APT_LISTBUGS_FRONTEND If this variable is set to “none”
apt-listbugs will not execute at all, this might be useful if
you would like to script the use of a program that calls
apt-listbugs.

So there we go.


for M in $MACHINES
do
echo "Connecting to ${M}.no2id.net"
- ssh root@${M}.no2id.net 'export TERM=xterm; export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive; apt-get update && echo "" && echo "" && echo "This is "'${M}'".no2id.net" && echo "" && echo "" && apt-get dist-upgrade'
+ ssh root@${M}.no2id.net 'export TERM=xterm; export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive; export APT_LISTBUGS_FRONTEND=none; apt-get update && echo "" && echo "" && echo "This is "'${M}'".no2id.net" && echo "" && echo "" && apt-get dist-upgrade'
done


hopefully, this will help others, whose first port of call is the internets, and not manpages.

You may, however be sensible — and have had the time to roll out Puppet (ugh, when did they change their website! Why‽) or Chef though.

One of the things that I noticed was the apparent lack of renaming within Transmission (and the curious way earlier tickets are marked as duplicitous of later ones).

So, erm, I’ve written something that works for me. And hacked out the mailer-script to something a little cleaner— at least in my view.

The premise is that you’re using a POSIXish operating system — my NAS runs on Debian — and that all of your exports are within the /nas directory, and your torrents directory is /nas/torrents.

The changes needed are (with transmission not running, apparently) to include /path/to/post-download as the value for
script-torrent-done-filename in settings.json

You’ll need to echo in "/path/to/store/the/completed-file" to a file named as per the torrent (see your incomplete directory for that), but with “.move” appended; the rest should all happen automagically.

You might find it useful to chown the directories you’ll be moving things to that of the user running the transmission processes; I tend to setgid to my GID too.

The other file, mvtor, is one for doing a manual move, specify the torrent as an arguement; e.g., ./mvtor "ubuntu-10.04.1-alternate-i386.iso"

I did. And couldn’t see anyone else’s script to steal, so here’s a really ugly way to do it


# arpinfo:
# pull hardware info from the arp() table
#
# Copyright (c) 2010 Adam McGreggor. Some rights reserved.
# Email: Web:
#
# $Id:$
#

arp | awk '{print $3}' | awk -F: '{print $1"-"$2"-"$3}' | while read ARP
do
grep $ARP ${DOC}
done
arp


Works for me… although it could do with a tidy-up. As a quick and dirty thing, mind…

Anyhow, I would appear to have these firefox extensions installed:

• Adblock Plus
• AutoPager
• BetterFlickr
• Better YouTube
• Delicious Bookmarks
• DownloadHelper
• Echofon
• Extended Statusbar
• Fast Video Downloader (with SearchMenu)
• Firebug
• Firefox (default)
• Firefox (en-GB)
• Flagfox
• Flashblock
• Gmail Manager
• Greasefire
• Greasemonkey
• Image Download
• Image Zoom
• Inline Code Finder for Firebug
• is.gd Creator
• JavaScript Options
• keyconfig
• Magic’s Video Downloader
• oldbar
• Password Exporter
• Save Image in Folder [sic]
• ShowIP
• SkipScreen
• TinyUrl Creator
• Ubuntu Firefox Modificiations
• URL Fixer
• VMware Remote Console Plug-In
• Xulrunner (en-GB)
• YesScript

A few of those don’t have links I can identify from the URI.

Want some code that vaguely does this for you?

#!/bin/sh
#
# ffexts:
# list firefox extensions: names and URIs for download/homepage
#
# Copyright (c) 2010 Adam McGreggor. Some rights reserved.
# Email: <adam@amyl.org.uk> Web: <http://blog.amyl.org.uk>
#
# $Id: ffexts 119 2010-01-10 00:38:04Z adam $
#

# grab the interesting bits from the RDF file
for K in name homepageURL
do
# nice fix-up, eh?
grep "NS1:${K}" ${INFILE} | sed -e "s/NS1:${K}=//" \
-e 's/"//g' -e 's/>//' \
-e 's/^[ \t]*//' | sort | uniq > ${OF}-${K}
# using wc here is entirely optional
wc -l ${OF}-${K}
# append
cat ${OF}-${K} >> ${OUTFILE}
done


To work around my hatred of PBWiki’s “notification” system, I’ve just re-appropriated (and made ‘ukgovweb-check‘) my dell-order-checking script to work for the wiki-page; changelog is that the script now uses lynx instead of wget, and that we send the difflog, rather than the whole-bloody-changed file.

If you’re still in the dark-ages like me, and haven’t written one yourself, here you go. If there’s a demand and people are feeling lazy, I suppose I could whip up a list.

Let me know if you do.

There’s some discussion going on on email, I do believe.

RSS.

I say kinda, ‘cos, despite having finally found something non-intrusive, and with a UI that doesn’t suck, I still don’t check the webpage it makes. Despite it updating.

Of course, I should have thought “I know who would have written something useful” donkey’s years ago. But I never did. Only recently, when hunting for Matilda did I think about it. *sigh*

So, there we have it. Next up is working a fix for it, to handle rss feeds which require basic-auth (trac-tastic!), and getting xkcd to display inline…

Next up: populating it a bit more, and then unsubscribing from some lists… well, maybe filter ‘em out…

So, with this existing laptop really getting on my nerves, and the lack of email coming from Dell regarding the new ‘un I ordered, I thought I’d tidy up some diff-scripts used $ELSEWHERE, and re-appropriate for quick-and-dirty order-tracking.

Fairly simple: fetch a web-page, in this case the order page (which is accesssible with the order number & email address used for the order), compare it with an existing copy (should it exist), and mail specified addresses when/if there are changes. Do this whenever (@hourly works fine for me), and forget about website visiting.

Bingo.

So, erm, just in case anyone else wants it (yes, the licensing blurb is probably about the same length as the code itself, i dunno why I bother, but maybe someone’s got some hints/tips/comments…), ‘dell-order-status‘ (it’s a tidied up version of the one I’m actually using, so i may need a nudge to update the web-version if I change the one in use)