Gmail and GreaseMonkey

So I finally got around to playing with GreaseMonkey... and I regret not doing it sooner, there's so much I could have done already!

If you're not familiar, GreaseMonkey is a Firefox plugin that lets you add your own/custom javascript code to websites. And it's dead simple - based on a handful of specially formatted comments and a file-naming convention, your javascript becomes custom code you can use to modify any site you want.

I used it to write a scripts for Gmail - when I switched over recently from mutt and pine (I know, to all you text-purists out there: I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it...) I lost the ability to use my nifty cron-based signature auto-rotater. I had written this dead-simple script a while ago to rotate my signature file names every 5 minutes, so essentially every time I sent an email I'd have a different/random sig. Not too useful for business communication, but great for my personal box.

Anyways, Gmail obviously doesn't do this by default, but I managed to get it working with a little bit of custom javascript code via GreaseMonkey in VERY little time... even considering the nasty size (depth) of Gmail's html tree (navigating this with the DOM inspector actually took more time than creating the script).

I'll post a link/the source once I've polished it - at the moment I just have a couple signatures hard-coded in that it chooses from, but I'll add a basic interface for managing signatures as well as post it to userscripts.org and/or SourceForge shortly...

Command-Line Highlighter

I was grepping through some logs the other day at home and I figured "wouldn't it be nice if I could pipe this through something that would highlight lines matching a regex instead of just having grep pull those lines out?" Wouldn't you know it, such a tool doesn't exist, as far as I can tell. Which is very weird, since I've already found it VERY useful...

grep *will* give you context lines if you ask for them explicitly, ie: give me 2 lines before and 4 after the matching line, but I wanted to see ALL the output, with the matches highlighted for easy-spotting.

Anyways, I wrote a little perl script to do the work - it just inserts 'standard' shell color-escape sequences before and after the matching word/line to highlight it (in bright-green-on-black by default... if you're a Matrix fan/l33t hax0r and use a green-on-black setup anyways, there's an option that lets you change the highlighting colors.

It's fairly basic at the moment, but I plan on porting this to C as soon as I have time (possibly tonight) now that it's up on SourceForge, and modify it a bit so that the options/usage syntax matches grep wherever possible/appropriate.

HighLite