Lars Eggert : Software

Please Note

This page looks much better in a browser that supports current web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device in the plain format you are currently seeing. Please consider updating your browser.

iCal Export from checkmytrip.com

So checkmytrip.com is pretty neat. Given your last name and AMADEUS airline booking code, it shows you a summary of your travel itinary and lets you import it into your calendar. That is, if you use Windows. God knows why they've chosen to go with some proprietary single-platform browser plugin, but they have.

This little script helps (checkmytrip.pl). It parses through the HTML of the checkmytrip.com web page for your reservation, extracts the relevant flight details and dumps them into individual iCal calendar events for easy importing into Apple iCal or many other calendars. It's actually better than checkmytrip.com's own export function, because it applies some perl magic to create most events in the correct timezones. Whee!

Mailboxlist-Filtering IMAP Proxy

Apple Mail looks pretty slick, but its IMAP support is rudimentary at best. For starters, it doesn't even let you subscribe to mail folders selectively! When you work at a place that has a couple of thousand shared folders, that's not very useful.

Enter this little perl script (imapfilter.pl). It's an IMAP proxy that runs on your local machine and filters the full list of mail folders returned by the IMAP server before handing the result to the mail client. This effectively hides all folders by default, only showing the ones you told it to let through. (Nothing else - mail content, for example - is filtered.)

You have to edit the source to point it at your IMAP server and edit an ugly regexp to change the filter, but it's still better than waiting for thousands of folders to synchonize. Also, you need to install the IO::Socket::SSL perl library, which doesn't come with the MacOS X perl. I suggest you use fink for this. Also note that if something goes wrong, the script logs diagnostics to /var/log/system.log.

Put something like this in /etc/crontab to have it start at each boot, assuming you have installed the script as /usr/local/bin/imapfilter.pl:

@reboot  root  env PERL5LIB=/sw/lib/perl5:/sw/lib/perl5/darwin /usr/local/bin/imapfilter.pl

Jeffrey Wescott suggested this way to autostart the script for all users of a machine and it seems to work more reliably:

# sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /usr/local/bin/imapfilter.pl

Stephan Roth suggested yet another way to autostart the script, by copying this file into ~/Library/LaunchDeamons/de.larseggert.imapfilter.plist. (I have not tested this method.)

Update (2007-7-18): I no longer maintain this, thanks to working at a place that doesn't use public folders.

Project Name Generator

Tired of thinking up slick acronyms for DARPA, NSF or EU proposals? This little script (pname.pl) does it for you. Hand it a phrase and it will grind away, looking for any ordered character subsequence that is an English word:

[eggert@lars: ~] pname.pl domain name system

daisy       DomAIn name SYstem
dames       DomAin naME System
dimes       DomaIn naME System
dines       DomaIN namE System
doest       DOmain namE SysTem
domain      DOMAIN name system
domains     DOMAIN name System
domes       DOMain namE System
dominate    DOMaIN nAme sysTEm
...

DOMINATE is just so much cooler than DNS, and DAISY so much cuter...

Miscellaneous IETF Scripts

I've hacked together various scripts related to the IETF. These have some local things hardcoded (paths, etc.), so you will need to tweak them a bit.

important-dates.pl makes an iCal calendar out of the IETF Secretariat's "Important Meeting Dates" web page, for easy importing into various calendaring software
find-replaced-by attempts to identify Internet Drafts that have been replaced by other Internet Drafts, so the IETF Secretariat can update its databases
rsync-ietf keeps a local repository of Internet Drafts and RFCs current, using HTTP instead of the rsync method offered by the RFC Editor, because rsync is blocked by some firewalls

Maybe someone else finds these scripts useful.

Old Stuff

There is also some older software available, but I would be surprised if anyone actually found that stuff useful still.

Lars»Eggert