export http_proxy=`proxy-config -h`
export https_proxy=`proxy-config -s`
export ftp_proxy=`proxy-config -f`

This will set your environment proxy variables to whatever they are currently set to in your Network Preferences. I got part of this also from Ryan Tomayko's blog.This is important if you are inside a firewall at work.

The simplest way to post a tweet to twitter from the command line would be to do so using cURL. If you don't have cURL installed, you will need to install it. If you aren't familiar with cURL, it is basically a command-line tool for grabbing html documents (or whatever else). See this post for another use. I got this idea, as well as the applescript for using it with Quicksilver, from Coda Hale's blog. Read that post for a full explanation of using Quicksilver and an applescript for posting to twitter from Quicksilver -- it has a pretty thorough explanation.

If you are inside a firewall, however, this will likely fail because the cURL command requires that the proxy settings be provided. So, I took the script from Coda's post, combined it with the comment on his post from Daan Kortenbach, and then enabled that for use with the system's proxy settings. The new script follows:

using terms from application "GrowlHelperApp"
	-- Register Growl
	on growlRegister()
		tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
			register as application "Tweet" all notifications {"Alert"} default notifications {"Alert"} icon of application "Quicksilver.app"
		end tell
	end growlRegister

	-- Notify using Growl
	-- Example: growlNotify("This is an Alert","This is a test of the Growl Alert System")
	on growlNotify(grrTitle, grrDescription)
		tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
			notify with name "Alert" title grrTitle description grrDescription application name "Tweet"
		end tell
	end growlNotify
end using terms from

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
	on process text tweet
		tell application "Keychain Scripting"
			set twitter_key to first Internet key of current keychain whose server is "twitter.com"
			set twitter_login to quoted form of (account of twitter_key & ":" & password of twitter_key)
		end tell
		set twitter_status to quoted form of ("status=" & tweet)

                -- I have proxy-config in a directory "~/bin"
		set the_proxy to do shell script "~/bin/proxy-config -h"

		try
			if (the_proxy = "") then
				set results to do shell script "curl --user " & twitter_login & " --data-binary " & twitter_status & " http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"
			else
				set results to do shell script "curl --proxy " & the_proxy & " --user " & twitter_login & " --data-binary " & twitter_status & " http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"
			end if
			growlRegister()
			growlNotify("Tweet Sent", tweet)
		on error
			(* In case curl fails for some reason,  alert us *)
			growlRegister()
			growlNotify("Error", "There was an error sending your tweet.")
		end try

	end process text
end using terms from

However, I stumbled on this gem the other day:

curl -C - -O file:///Volumes/samba_share/file/path/here.txt

Basically, curl allows you to copy a file with url syntax in the terminal. The capital "O" tells curl to copy the file to your desktop with the same name as the file on your server, and the capital "C" tells it to continue where it may have left off. You can monitor the download in the terminal window. If you need to leave work and finish the copy the next day, simply enter the command again in the terminal and it will pick up the copy where it left off.

View as Plain Text

In a nutshell, as the comments indicate, we capture the contents of the field in the dialog that is opened, and stick them into the applescript that we want to run. The applescript part checks to see if there is already a Terminal session window open, and will run the command in the Terminal. If Terminal isn't open, then it launches it. You (or maybe me in the future) could fancy this up a bit if you wanted by having the Terminal change directory to the directory in which the file you are working on exists. Not sure that is always desirable though for my purposes.

Enjoy it. (if you're a total geek you probably will, at least in principle)

Additional work needed:
1. Escape quotes (you have to do that manually now).
2. Have Terminal spawn a new window if it is already running but has no open windows. (need to check for window count in addition to process running)

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

So, to accomplish this, you need to create 2 files, ".bashrc" and ".bash_profile" in your user directory. The contents of the .bash_profile file need to be as such for starters:

. ~/.bashrc
ENV=$HOME/.bashrc
export ENV

Then, the contents of .bashrc need to be something like this:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin
alias ls="ls -a"
SHELL=/bin/bash

This will get you started. If you have any questions beyond that, do some online searches for .bashrc and shell configuration. (I'm no expert, I just figure out what I need to do to get stuff done...)

#!/bin/sh
osascript -e "tell application \"TextMate\" to open POSIX file \"$TM_SELECTED_FILE\""

You can set a Key Equivalent if you like. When done, select a folder in your project drawer. If the folder is a file system folder (rather than a group), the script will spawn a new project window containing all the files in that folder. Selecting a "group" folder will do nothing (may work on that one later...).

However, for those of you out there in Mac OSX land, I wouldn't recommend downloading the current version listed on the site for OSX, entitled "as2api-allinone-osx-0.4.sit" in the downloads section. I think that it is missing files, or that it just doesn't work correctly at all. I would recommend instead downloading the first link for "as2api-0.4.tar". The downside of downloading this version is that there is no OSX command line executable in there, so you have to run the Ruby script "ruby as2api.rb packages --classpath classpath" which works just fine.

Honestly, I don't know enough about ANT scripts yet to know if you can run Ruby scripts from an ANT script target, so I used rubyscript2exe, another handy little application to convert the Ruby scripts into a mac command line executable. (Incidentally, and to add a little geek comedy to this post, you have to install the Pascal compiler and compile a piece of the rubyscript2exe library in order to run it...so I had to compile one application in order to create another one...).

Anyway, I have included below 2 downloadables in this post. The first is the command line version of as2api that is compiled from the package that you can download as Ruby code from the as2api site. The down side is that you cannot tweek the css and html templates that are part of that code; the up side is that you can actually use it as a command line executable, which is entitled "as2api_darwin". You can used it exactly as you would the as2api.rb Ruby script.

PlasticWare Downloadable ::
Darwin Executable of As2Api (JavaDoc for Actionscript) (Sep. 5, 2006)
Download (~4.5mB) :: as2api-0.4.zip

The second downloadable I have included here is the rubyscript2exe download, altered to include the eee_darwin file that I compiled from the pascal source on my mactel laptop in OSX 10.4.7, and repackaged using tar2rubyscript.rb, which was also necessary to get it running properly. I have also included the example hello world script "hello.rb" from the tutorial, which you can use to test the code and make a hello world exe.

PlasticWare Downloadable ::
RubyScript2Exe with eee_darwin for OSX environment (Sep. 5, 2006)
Download (~1.1mB) :: rubyscript2exe.zip.gz

Both of these pieces of software are released by their proper creators under the GNU License, and I have included the source and license for each as well, as posted on their sites. Please download judiciously, the executable for as2api package is 4.5 mb.

This works great most of the time -- I connect to the dev VM via a windows share using an SMB connection from my Mac, so the Ant scripts point to the remote box as /Volumes/D$. Unfortunately...

...my router is flaky and times out my cable connection about 2-3 times a day, rendering my connection to my dev VM non-existent. Here is where the slight problem occurs - the mount-point on the Windows box is D$, so when OSX makes an SMB connection, it creates a D$ temporary folder in the /Volumes directory on the Mac. When the connection is unexpectedly broken, the clean-up to remove that directory fails, and when the share is reconnected, OSX creates a new version of the directory, as "D$-1" (or -2, -3, etc.), which breaks the Ant scripts.

The solution, simply, is to open the Terminal after such an unexpected disconnect, and perform the command:

sudo rmdir /Volumes/D$

to remove the unmounted directory.

I have tried to connect directly to the smb share in the terminal utilizing the specific share directory:

sudo mount_smbfs -W workgroupname //username@ipaddressofserver/D$ /Volumes/D$

but unfortunately, you have to su in the terminal (switch to root user) in order to access the contents -- otherwise the directory is read only. When running the Ant scripts from Eclipse, you don't have root user permissions, and copying to the remote machine fails. Anyone have any thoughts on this?