mikerochford.com

Ever write a script that you have to enter a elevated users password? or even your own? Check this out.

Using Term:ReadKey you can disable echo for STDOUT. This way no one will see your password from over your shoulder.

I designed a website for a friend to sell a litter of puppies. He wanted a simple site that had galleries for each dog and one for the litter. I didn’t want to maintain the site at all so I used a lot of pre built software. I chose to use Gallery2 to do all the picture stuff. It did everything I wanted (resize,rotate,etc). I didn’t like how it looked though. I wanted to just have it do the back end stuff and I wanted to design the layout. To do this all I needed was the urls to access the images. Below is a function I wrote that will output all the information of a picture and its uri.

The script is located here

which outputs:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [title] => IMG_0028.JPG
            [width] => 2272
            [height] => 1704
            [large_picture] => /p/d/71-1/IMG_0028.JPG
            [thumb_picture] => /p/d/72-2/IMG_0028.JPG
            [resized_picture] => Array
                (
                    [0] => /p/d/73-2/IMG_0028.JPG
                    [1] => /p/d/74-2/IMG_0028.JPG
                    [2] => /p/d/75-2/IMG_0028.JPG
                )

        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [title] => IMG_0029.JPG
            [width] => 2272
            [height] => 1704
            [large_picture] => /p/d/77-1/IMG_0029.JPG
            [thumb_picture] => /p/d/78-2/IMG_0029.JPG
            [resized_picture] => Array
                (
                    [0] => /p/d/79-2/IMG_0029.JPG
                    [1] => /p/d/80-2/IMG_0029.JPG
                    [2] => /p/d/81-2/IMG_0029.JPG
                )

        )
)

You will need to modify the paths in the function to your installation.

A side note… To find gallery ids you will need to to run the following query.

Say you have a hash element that contains an array and you want to loop through the array set. You usually have these types of data sets when you are trying to gather data.

example:
We will use the following code to build the hash:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Data::Dumper;
my %data_set;
$data_set{'users'} = ();
$data_set{'users'}[0] = "testA";
$data_set{'users'}[1] = "testB";
$data_set{'users'}[2] = "testC";
$data_set{'users'}[3] = "testD";
$data_set{'users'}[4] = "testE";
$data_set{'users'}[5] = "testF";
print Dumper(%data_set);


Output:

$VAR1 = 'users';
$VAR2 = [
'testA',
'testB',
'testC',
'testD'
];


Now that we know the hash element is populated we want to access each array element. This can be done with making some crazy counter in a while loop. Check it out.

foreach my $user (@{$data_set{'users'}}){
print $user,"\n";
}


Now knowing you can access a array with in a hash using @{} you can push,pop,splice and shift on the array that is in a hash.

Here is the same script above but using push:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Data::Dumper;
my %data_set;
$data_set{'users'} = ();
push(@{$data_set{'users'}},"testA");
push(@{$data_set{'users'}},"testB");
push(@{$data_set{'users'}},"testC");
push(@{$data_set{'users'}},"testD");

foreach my $user (@{$data_set{'users'}}){
print $user,"\n";
}

This information was giving to me by my friend Matt
use Data::Dumper;
my @array;
push @array, {‘key1′ => ‘value1′, ‘key2′ => ‘value2′};
push @array, {‘key1′ => ‘value1′, ‘key2′ => ‘value2′};
push @array, {‘key1′ => ‘value1′, ‘key2′ => ‘value2′};
print Dumper(@array);

Will give you:

$VAR1 = {
‘key2′ => ‘value2′,
‘key1′ => ‘value1′
};
$VAR2 = {
‘key2′ => ‘value2′,
‘key1′ => ‘value1′
};
$VAR3 = {
‘key2′ => ‘value2′,
‘key1′ => ‘value1′
};

There is no easy way to find a host header in IIS. Unless you think clicking on each site is easy. I have found it difficult to find them in large installations. I wrote a script that will go through each site on the server and look at the host headers and then if found it will print the Site comment. You then use the site comment to find the main site in the MMC.

Here is the script.

I was put in charge of a filer migration from a old netapp f810 to a new netapp 3040 cluster. One of the systems we have that used the netapp backend was a web cluster running MS Windows 2003. When it was first built it was using a cifs shares by system name (ie: \\f810..tld\customer-home). This is great if you never changed filers but a poor idea on our part. In theory you could have just changed the record to point at the new filer, but that was a temporary fix. We wanted to change the path completely to a arbitrary name like “web”. This will allow us to change it to any back end device no matter what it is. I like to do things programmaticly so below are the two scripts I used to get the job done. You will need to modify these script to fit your needs (ie: Paths).

Bulk IIS path change script: Link

Bulk Active Directory change script: Link

I have done much searching on the internet on how to convert mp3 files to Itunes m4r files. I really dont like using Itunes if I dont have to so I thought I would write something that will use my unix box.

This perl script will convert most mp3s to m4r.

I used 4 applications that can be installed on any GNU based system.

• mp3info – An MP3 technical info viewer and ID3 1.x tag editor
• mp3splt – Mp3Splt-project is a utility to split mp3 and ogg files selecting a begin and an end time position, without decoding.
• Mplayer
• Faac – FAAC is an open source MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 AAC encoder, it is licensed under the LGPL license.

or if you are running debian/ubuntu:

Nothing motivates like having another programmer tell you they’re rewriting your code because it sucks.

It’s as true in life as it is in client-server programming: the only secret that can’t be compromised is the one you never revealed.