Get Gmail search queries as terminal output or RSS feeds

Since i’ve implemented GTD in my Gmail account i always find myself in need to see a specific query result, outside gmail interface. Such functionality was one of the main reasons of using Remember The Milk, where queries was really powerful.  IMAP wasn’t an answer, since it was able to export only one label.

Meanwhile i’ve found out about libgmail, a Gmail API for Python. After couple of minutes i’ve got a custom search results inside my terminal :) This could allow to embend it almost everywhere and mainly in conky. After that i’ve decided to build an RSS feeds, scheduled in cron which send them to external server. Problem was that i didn’t want to store the password inside the script nor type it in each time.

As i’m (un)happy user of KDE4 and i know that it comes with quite wide range of language binding so why not try them out. That was PyKDE4 and PyQt4 modules. This one took some more time, since for example every app communicating with KWallet needs to have a window instance, even if it’s windowless. But there were also good sides. I’ve already had my username and password inside KWallet – i’ve configured kopete before. So basically, script doesn’t need any account information. After some struggling i’ve ended up with something like this (gmail-search.py):

Personal torrent stream (part 1)

I really don’t like reading movie reviews before actually seeing them. For this reason, i found a new nanocrowd.com service quite useful. It claims to provide very specific movie recommendations based on opinions of anonymous masses. Although it’s accounts are unfortunately still in private beta, we can test recommendations based on one movie.

Long time i’ve been thinking about downloading movies, without actually downloading them. Finding out nanocrowd convinced me to do this. Of course i’ve used phpQuery’s WebBrowser plugin. Scenario is as follows:

1. Connect to torrentz.net
2. Fill search box and submit
3. Filter results
4. Print results and ask which to download
5. Get result sites and find supported one
6. Download to local filesystem
7. Optionally, send via SSH to another machine

To be practically usefull, script supports following filters:

–min-size
–max-size
–min-peers

So to get a 1st matching movie in most common cases would be

echo 1 | torrent-download.php “Movie Name” –min-peers=50 –max-size=1500 –min-size=500

Now almost every decent torrent downloading app supports autoloding torrent files found in specified directory. As for today, only thing you need to do is to type movie name. Like i’ve mentioned before, nanocrowd is still not open to registration. When it will be, i will post an update (or maybe someone have a free invitation ?). Anyway, don’t use this code to download illegal movies…

QueryTemplates development progress

QueryTemplates 1.0 Beta3 is out since a week or so and next release is around the corner, so i decided to do some wrap-up of latest facts in library development:

• Extended data targets are no supported by all methods. This means each method can be re-targeted with jQuery insert methods like for example varsToSelectorBefore or even varsToSelectorAttr.
• New codeTo method type. It simply injects code groups. Idea evolved from methodTo approach, which would inject method calls. I find codeTo amuch more flexible and useful, but it can be less readable.
• New valuesToLoop method. In opposite to varsToLoop aka loop(), it will iterate existing data over DOM structure and commit it right away. This has less purpose on server side (but can be useful), but it’s essential on the client-side when you don’t want to make a server request.
• New conditional chains methods – onlyJS() and onlyPHP(). They allow to highly customize template for certain language. For example, everything between onlyPHP() and endOnly() will be applied only to PHP template, even when the same chain is used to create JS template.
• Light version for JavaScript is available. It contains all valuesTo methods which includes valuesToSelector, valuesToStack and valuesToLoop. Form methods and mutation events support will be next. It’s a jQuery plugin and demo is available.
• formFromVars will generate full form templates from structure and variable informations. Such form supports error messages and default values. Of course input-wrapper template is customizable. As for today there are couple of things to be done in this area and formFromValues will also be available soon.
• Syntax reference is complete. Each method has it’s own wiki page with 6-part example: markup, data, formula aka code, template, tree dump before and tree dump after. Also, new JavaScript Light version is included in this reference. User comment are allowed. Personally i think it’s the best part of project’s page ;)
• Some API refactorings had taken place. Old names are still accessible, but marked as deprecated.
  • varsFrom type was created from such methods as saveTextAsVar, saveAsVar, valuesToVars.
  • loop, loopOne and loopSeparate now becomes varsToLoop, varsToLoopFirst and varsToLoopSeparate and are grouped in ToLoop type.
• dumpTree is now more verbose and can be used both via HTML and plain text. Just do ->dumpTree() anywhere in the chain to see readable representation of selected structure. It’s used for syntax reference examples.

As you can see project is quite close to 1.0 final. Code seems stable and each method has pseudo-unit-test in form of example available in Syntax reference, which is generated as a real template. I just can’t wait to start implementing CSS interface i wrote before. Additionaly, as JavaScript version is out, there can be some use for jQueryServer.