For an example of the ClientLogin method in Python, take a look at my libgreader library on github. It automates the ClientLogin auth and tokens that you are required to have for any requests. I'm working to merge this code below into a more generic Google Reader library supporting both auth methods.

I've written my code using v1.1.3 of the OAuth2 python library to help wrangle OAuth. This was my first foray into OAuth and using the library certainly helped for figuring out all the required data and security that you need to have on every request. If you haven't used OAuth before, definitely check out http://oauth.net/ and the Google docs for using their OAuth implementation. If you just want to experiment with the process not using Python, use this interactive JS/AJAX app.

The Code

First, let's setup some imports and definitions. You can also view this source code on Github.

	import urlparse
	import oauth2 as oauth
	
	#Unsecured http for testing, should be https for production
	scope = "http://www.google.com/reader/api"
	#Alphabetical list of a user's subscriptions
	sub_url = "%s/0/subscription/list" % scope
	#JSON list of a user's unread feed items
	reading_url = '%s/0/stream/contents/user/-/state/com.google/reading-list' % scope
	
	#Google Auth urls
	request_token_url = "https://www.google.com/accounts/OAuthGetRequestToken?scope=%s" % scope
	authorize_url = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/OAuthAuthorizeToken'
	access_token_url = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/OAuthGetAccessToken'
	

Now, you have to setup a consumer key with Google, for the future domain your webapp will run at. The url to manage your domains is https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageDomains

	oauth_key = "www.asktherelic.com"
	oauth_secret = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
	
	consumer = oauth.Consumer(oauth_key, oauth_secret)
	client = oauth.Client(consumer)

From here, most of the code mirrors the example code from the OAuth2 library, using a 3-step process to verify and get your required tokens from Google. In step 2, you have to manually open the link and authorize your script with Google.

	# Step 1: Get a request token. This is a temporary token that is used for 
	# having the user authorize an access token and to sign the request to obtain 
	# said access token.
	
	resp, content = client.request(request_token_url, "GET")
	request_token = dict(urlparse.parse_qsl(content))
	
	print "Request Token:"
	print "    - oauth_token        = %s" % request_token['oauth_token']
	print "    - oauth_token_secret = %s" % request_token['oauth_token_secret']
	print
	
	# Step 2: Redirect to the provider. Since this is a CLI script we do not
	# redirect. In a web application you would redirect the user to the URL
	# below.
	
	print "Go to the following link in your browser:"
	print "%s?oauth_token=%s" % (authorize_url, request_token['oauth_token'])
	print
	
	accepted = 'n'
	while accepted.lower() == 'n':
	    accepted = raw_input('Have you authorized me? (y/n) ')
	
	# Step 3: Once the consumer has redirected the user back to the oauth_callback
	# URL you can request the access token the user has approved. You use the
	# request token to sign this request. After this is done you throw away the
	# request token and use the access token returned. You should store this
	# access token somewhere safe, like a database, for future use.
	token = oauth.Token(request_token['oauth_token'], request_token['oauth_token_secret'])
	client = oauth.Client(consumer, token)
	
	resp, content = client.request(access_token_url, "POST")
	access_token = dict(urlparse.parse_qsl(content))
	
	print "Access Token:"
	print "    - oauth_token        = %s" % access_token['oauth_token']
	print "    - oauth_token_secret = %s" % access_token['oauth_token_secret']
	print
	print "You may now access protected resources using the access tokens above."

An annoying process, but once completed, you can create an authorized client which can hit any Google Reader url and access data. First, let's start off with the user's subscription list. Then the user's reading list.

	#Authorized client using access tokens
	token = oauth.Token(access_token['oauth_token'], access_token['oauth_token_secret'])
	client = oauth.Client(consumer, token)
	
	#Get user's subscription list
	resp, content = client.request(sub_url, 'GET')
	print content
	print 
	
	#Get user's reading list
	resp, content = client.request(reading_url, 'GET')
	print content

In this CLI example, the user experience is pretty disjointed, but in a webapp setting, you would like for a more fluid experience. The way to do that is using a callback: a location that google will punt the user to after the 2nd step, when they have authorized your application. Checkout the code below for a simple example or the google docs for options.

	#Google Auth using a callback
	callback = "http://www.asktherelic.com/thenextstep/"
	request_token_url = "https://www.google.com/accounts/OAuthGetRequestToken?scope=%s&oauth_callback=%s" % (scope, callback)

Possible Issues

The Google Reader API is still pretty undocumented, most knowledge comes from sniffing Google Reader traffic that their webapp generates or experimenting on your own. One difference between the ClientLogin and the OAuth login is that ClientLogin method requires your script to get a token from the Reader API. I haven't seen the OAuth method require that token in my testing, but it might be something that is still required.

Another thing I noticed while testing, with the 2nd OAuth auth step that occurs when you have multiple Google accounts, is that Google Apps accounts don't seem to work with my code. I'm using a regular gmail account but Google Apps appear to be a different affair.

Goodluck with the Reader API.

Spark

Spark is a shortcut manager that has been around for years, but I just recently found out about. I am a very keyboard driven user who loves to customize things and Spark lets me do that. Spark allow you to rebind keyboard shortcuts to do pretty much anything: Applescript, launch Applications, open Documents, call window/menu commands in specific programs or call other keyboard shortcuts. It's very versatile and has replaced a few other applications for me.

Here is my current Spark configuration, which I am mainly using to reconfigure iTunes. I listen to iTunes 24x7 and like to be able to easily rate the currently playing track. I have CTRL + F15-F19 keys setup to do so. I also have a CTRL key setup to display the current track, along with album cover, current position in the song, and song length. Having all of this info is really nice, because I have seen other pay-for iTunes control programs skimp and not provide it.

One of the things not shown, is that you can bind keys per-application or system wide. I have a shortcut in iTunes for Apple + D to bring focus to the search music window because the default shortcut key is Apple + Shift + F, which is awkward for a shortcut I use frequently. iTunes has Apple + F bound to set the visualizer to fullscreen mode, which I never even use the damn visualizer.

Some of this might seem minor, but the overall package that Spark provides is stellar. You can export and import your database of commands, which is great for future portability and backups. The Spark Daemon seems to average around 10MB of memory usage, which is less than other iTunes control programs I've seen and it does more than other programs. Combined with the expandability to control any other program, I think Spark a good choice.

iStat Menus

As you have seen, I love being able to customize and tweak my system. iStat Menus is one of the best packages I have seen to monitor your system and what it is doing. It is very much a power user program, most people don't need to know as much info as it provides, but you do want that info, iStat provides it very well. The website for iStat provides a very thorough description, worth checking out.

Teleport

Teleport is another piece of software that I just found out about recently, but has been around for awhile: it allows you to share control of 2(or more) OSX systems via 1 keyboard/mouse. Very similar to Synergy, which allows you to share control between any OSX/Windows/Linux system, but I always found Synergy to be buggy and not that fluid. Teleport works quite well, you can configure it to switch systems when you get to the edge of the screen and it works near instantaneously. If you have a main machine and a laptop, you can have Teleport run in the background on both and control the laptop via the main system, whenever the laptop is plugged in. Teleport is nearly invisible and is one of the reasons it is so good.

Sequel Pro

As a developer, I work with mySQL frequently and installing phpMyAdmin is annoying. Sequel Pro is a mySQL database management program, which has evolved quite a bit over the last few years and is way better than the default mySQL admin tools, which have not seen an update in years.

Sequel Pro lets you create/edit/delete tables using the OSX Cocoa goodness. It has built-in support for SSH tunnels, so you can securely connect to your mySQL server on your development/production server and view/edit data there. You can import/export data as well. Sometimes working in a console isn't always the best choice, especially when dealing with lots of data. This program is a great option beyond the console.

These are great OSX programs that I use all the time. Have any other programs that you like? Post them in the comments!

Here is my general color scheme/terminal look. I'm running OSX 10.6.3 with 64-bit Terminal. All of these tweaks depend on SIMBL, a bundle loader which loads these tweaks. I'm running version 0.9.7a.

Visor

Visor is a "system-wide terminal on a hot-key". I have Visor bound to Apple ~. Having simple access to the Terminal whenever I want is very important.

Visor also adds "copy on select", a very useful little tweak for text. Additionally, it allows you bind the Terminal to a specific position; having it drop down from the top and take up 50% of the screen, reminiscent of the Quake style visor. I bind my Visor to use the full screen.

Terminal Tab Switching

Visor only uses one main window, which means you can have multiple tabs in the window. Getting easy access to the specific tab I want is very important. Chrome, Firefox, and many other tab based applications bind Apple 1-9 to the specified tab location and I like having that functionality in Terminal. I rarely work with more than 9 tabs anyways.

TerminalTabSwitching was originally posted as a 32-bit plugin for SIMBL 3 years ago here. Since then, Terminal and OSX went 64-bit and the plugin stopped working. dabeeeenster has ported the plugin and you can download the latest version on github.

Another useful tweak I do is bind the left and right bracket, Apple [, to select the next or previous tab, like in every other program. Terminal defaults to using curly brackets, Apple {, to switch tabs, but doesn't let you change that. In the OSX System Preferences, under the Keyboard settings, you can rebind window commands to any key you want and I do so!

Terminal Colors

This is mostly cosmetic, but when in Vim and coding, having the specific color for a function or variable is useful and every color has huge implied meaning. Being able to better select the right color and using more eye pleasing colors is useful.

TerminalColors is a plugin that updates the default colors to be less jarring and lets you use the standard OSX color picker to choose any color you want. Downloadable here.

Addendum: If you are getting "Terminal version errors" or something equivalent, you may have to modify your plugin to support the latest version of Terminal. Goto ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL, right click on the broken plugin and select "Show Package Contents". Then open the Contents folder and open the Info.plist file with a text editor. Generally it is the MaxBundleVersion number that gives problems. Increase that number until it works, I'm using 280 for my bundles and Terminal is at version 273 as of now.

These tweaks help me use Terminal better and make my life easier. If you want more tips on OSX Finder and Terminal integration, check out my other post here. Hope they help you as well!

I found a fix on the MacFusion Google Group. A third-party developer, nall, fixed the problem and updated the binary to 2.0.4, available at http://github.com/downloads/nall/MacFusion2/Macfusion-2.0.4-SL.zip. This version works fine for me on 10.6.3. While this might not be a long term fix, it works now and I will update this post if an official way comes out.

This latest version also now correctly shows the volume size for the mount point, which previously would only show "1TB" for me. Hooray for working software!

Ask the Relic (this blog) will focus on programming, sys admin, web dev, and other tech things I'm trying to make a career out of, while TheBehrensVenture will focus on my random travels, stories, and adventures. Two very different themes, deserving of different methods of display. The Behrens Venture had running on Wordpress and will continue to do so. I love WP's simple plugins and content management capabilities. It's damn simple to upload a picture and write something up. However, when posting longer how-tos or source code, WP wasn't cutting it. This blog, AskTheRelic will now be run off Blogofile, a Python static file compiler. It's Python, which I love using, and is super easy to tinker with. I can also now keep this entire site under source control, git specifically, which is awesome.

I've split up most of my travel/tech posts and moved them to their respective sites. I'm still cleaning up AskTheRelic, but I hope to keep moving things forward slowly. This is all work in progress, bear with me!

By default, Bash just stores history commands sequentially with a number and the command. To store the command with a timestamp, you must set the HISTTIMEFORMAT variable in your bashrc. That variable is used to format the output from "history", but it must be set to something for Bash to store the timestamp.

    export HISTTIMEFORMAT='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S - '
   

With a timestamped .bash_history file, you can figure out when you were using your terminal! Someone else had already come up with this idea using git history data, so I borrowed most of their code and created a new project on github.

http://github.com/askedrelic/Bash-History-Punchcard

Sample output from my account on this server (thebehrensventure.com)

Sample output from my main machine (jofur)

So for both of these, my bash history goes back about 7 months, when I turned on the variable. It's not 100% accurate either because I have duplicates being ignored and some other settings altering my bash history. It looks like Tue/Wed/Thur are my big days for getting stuff done!

Awhile back I wrote a command to print the total number of lines contributed per author for my svn repository because I wanted to see how awesome I am. I decided to port this command over to git.

    git ls-files | xargs -n1 -d'n' -i git-blame {} | perl -n -e '/s((.*?)s[0-9]{4}/ && print "$1n"' | sort -f | uniq -c -w3 | sort -r
    
    Output:
     217167 mattb
      11592 bob
       3975 alice
       1276 jim
        358 tom
         64 brad
         13 Not Committed Yet
   

This output includes a bunch of binary files which throw off the total. If you mess with the ls-file options, you can remove them or only include specific source filestypes.

    #to remove really random binary files
    git ls-files -x "*pdf" -x "*psd" -x "*tif"  
    #to only include specific file types
    git ls-files "*.py" "*.html" "*.css" 
   

I crossposted this over at commndlinefu, so there might be some helpful feedback over there too.

    svn ls -R | egrep -v -e "/$" | xargs svn blame | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r
    
    Output:
       2038 matt
        433 john
        263 ryan
        186 alice
        167 bob
   

This command will print an full repository listing of all files, remove the directories, run svn blame on each individual file, and tally the resulting line counts. It seems quite slow, depending on your repository location, because blame must hit the server for each individual file. You can remove the -R on the first part to print out the tallies for just the current directory.

I posted this over at commandlinefu.com as well for feedback, so check here for possible helpful commentary of the command! If you haven't been to commandlinefu before, definitely check it out for some great one-liner-commands!

The most recent change I've done is to use MacFUSE to mount my ssh connections to remote machines as network files systems, via SSHFS. Any machine that you have an ssh connection connection to, you can mount as a shared drive, allowing you to browse it via the Finder, copy and paste like any normal folder, and most important of all, edit files on that share using local programs. I've used SMB or FTP before, but neither has worked as smooth as this or as easily. Using this method also gives you the security of SSH.

This guide will show how to install MacFUSE, then install and setup the GUI or CLI version of SSHFS, depending on your preferences. The GUI version is sweet and simple, but takes up more RAM and is not as customizable as the CLI version. This is aimed primarily for OSX 10.5 users (The GUI version is 10.5 only, CLI should be 10.4 compatible). Linux users should have most of this functionality already built-in and I have not seen much free support for any of this in Windows.

Install MacFUSE

Download: http://macfuse.googlecode.com/files/MacFUSE-2.0.3,2.dmg

MacFUSE will be installed as a Preference Pane in your System Preferences.

Install the GUI SSHFS

Download: http://www.macfusionapp.org/files/mf2_latest.zip

You then get a GUI with options to create new SSH or SFTP shares. Fill in your connection details and hit the "Mount" button. Your share should appear on the desktop, mounted at /Volumes/XXXX where XXXX is the share's hostname, but both the mount location and share name are customizable in the options.

You can set MacFusion to run on login and have a menu item for easy mounting/unmounting of shares. Quite easy!

Install the CLI SSHFS

First, checkout the code from Google Code using Subversion, following the official install instructions. OSX 10.5 should have Subversion installed.

    $ cd ~/Desktop
    $ svn co http://macfuse.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/filesystems/sshfs/binary sshfs-binaries
   

The binaries for 10.5 and 10.4 are the latest version of SSHFS, 2.2.0. Now you need to create a folder to mount to and then mount the shared drive!

    # Mounting the SSH file system
    $ mkdir /some/mount/point # or use one that already exists
    $ sshfs user@host:/some/directory /some/mount/point -oauto_cache,reconnect,volname="some vol name"
    #My usual mount command
    $ mkdir /Volumes/thebehrensventure.com
    $ sshfs-static-leopard askedrelic@thebehrensventure.com:/home/askedrelic \
         /Volumes/thebehrensventure.com -oauto_cache,reconnect,volname="thebehrensventure.com"
   

From here, you link the binary to your /usr/local/bin perhaps and create a script to automount the drive on login. Generally I prefer doing things via the Terminal, but that's just me.

Working with SSHFS

One thing to watch out for is applying commands for the remote server on the local folders. SVN or GIT will generally work in the local folders because their commands are directory specific. I have heard of issues when working with a large amount of folders before, with slow response times, but that is why I would recommend to apply all commands remotely over ssh. My main usage of SSHFS is over a LAN connection with a server sitting 10 feet from me. Browsing directories via the Finder in the Icon view over a slower connection, with Finder previews turned on and other bandwidth intensive accessories, will definitely dampen performance. Try browsing in List mode if you have slow performance.

Hope this helps! My next guide will detail my VIM setup, which takes advantage of these mounted ssh drives.