Google Project Hosting and gcli

Google is offering project hosting for free/open source software projects. I had heard a rumor this might be coming, and I'm glad to see it's true. Actually, I wasn't thinking this would be a big deal to me, but having seen Google project hosting, I'm very excited about this.

I've just moved gcli to Google hosting from my own personal SVN repo. I had considered hosting gcli on sourceforge, but honestly, just didn't like dealing with the tools when dealing with other projects. gcli is something I hack on for fun, so I need hosting that gives me the basic toolset and is easy to come back to after breaks between coding spurts.

Google's hosting looks promising. The issue tracker really looks simple to use and interesting. And hey, if anyone wants to contribute to gcli, please do!

Link | Posted by deryck on July 27, 2006 | 0 comments

Google Login Script Example

I've been playing with Google's Account Authentication API. This was released with the Google Data API. The Calendar API, based on Google Data, seems to have gained some traction, at least in terms of people writing about it. But it's the authentication stuff that grabs my interest (not that GData isn't cool).

I've worked up a little Python script that will get an auth token, given a Google account name and password.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Google Account Login Script

import urllib
import re

# Replace these variables, or pass them as args to the script
USER = 'YOUR_GOOGLE_USER_NAME'
PASSWD = 'YOUR_PASSWD'
APP = 'COMPANY-APPNAME-VERSION'

AUTHURL = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin'

# Only known service is calendar at this point
SERVICE = 'cl'

# Build POST query string, and regxep the returned token
query = 'Email=' + USER + '@gmail.com&Passwd=' + \
    PASSWD + '&service=' + SERVICE + '&source=' + APP
response = urllib.urlopen(AUTHURL, query).read()
token = re.search('Auth=(.*)', response).groups()

The script is available if anyone would find it useful to have an example.

This only works with the Calendar service as far as I know. Has anyone heard of any other Google services that will allow use of the authentication API?

Link | Posted by deryck on June 2, 2006 | 1 comment

Mailing Lists Galore in Gmail

Now that Gmail allows sending from alternate "From:" addresses, I've started using it as my mail client for samba.org mail. The labels are ideal for handling massive amounts of mailing list mail.

With a typical mail client, I have to set precedence on filter rules. If I get a message to our commits list, and then later, there are several replies regarding the mail on our samba technical list, I would have to store the same piece of mail in either one or the other of the two folders, samba commits or samba technical.

Gmail allows me to apply both labels to the same piece of mail. So a search for recent commits or the latest technical discussion contains the same mail. It's fluid folders. And since I'm comfortable with Google search syntaxes label:samba_commit subject:samba-web from the search input is quick and convenient for me.

I've also got a neat little Greasemonkey script for doing PGP signing of mails. A bit novelty perhaps, but I'll share it when it's ready to show.

Link | Posted by deryck on December 19, 2005 | 0 comments

gcli 0.2 Released

gcli (Google Command Line Interface) is a tool I started working on as part of my "Google-Driven Web Development" tutorial. I released 0.1 just after doing the tutorial for the first time at LinuxWorld San Francisco in August. This update comes as I prepare for LISA 05. I feel very much like gcli is still at an infant's stage, but I think it's far enough along that you can get the idea.

This new version has a much improved install process using a setup.py script. You now have to create a .gcli directory in your home directory to house you Google developer's key and an optional config file (for changing gcli defaults.) I've also further seperated the gcli command line code from the libgcli library, which should make life easier for anyone wanting to build their own program around this code.

To try this 0.2 version of gcli, get the gcli-0.2 tarball. See the README for a brief overview of the libgcli interface. See the INSTALL file for using the setup.py script. I hope to have this site updated with some propoer documentation before the end of the year.

Link | Posted by deryck on October 23, 2005 | 0 comments