Brian's Blog

I've been working with Linux for a relatively short time, I'd say between 1.5 to 2 years total. In that time I've learned many things but one thing that has always scared me is Regular Expressions. Most of the books I've read so far in my Linux adventures have only touched on the subject not really going into any practical depth. I did take a brief look at Mastering Regular Expressions but it's way over the top for my purposes. The problem is or was that I just could not find a book that was somewhere in between these two extremes.

On a whim while killing time at Borders I bought Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes. And you know what? I'm glad I did. This book claims to be the middle ground that I was looking for and it does it by practical example. Each subject section begins with a brief explanation of the concepts and syntax then goes on to demonstrate the concept with examples and easy to understand explanations. The explanations even break down the expressions into smaller easier to swallow chunks. Some of them even show you what you would come up with off the top of your head, then go on to demonstrate how that expression would fail and end by explaining how to improve the expression.

The one feature that I feel will make the book a good reference for me is the cheat sheet on the inside back cover. It gives a list of all the syntax broken down into categories such as Backreferences and Lookaround along with a short description and the lesson that it was covered in. Also, the lessons are short but complete for my purposes with each one taking 10 minutes or so to complete on average. This way I could go back and reread an entire lesson if I needed and not have to slug through page after page of text to find what I want. Also Appendix B contains a list of extra examples showing how to solve common problems such as matching phone numbers, credit card numbers, IP addresses and URLs.

The only negatives that I ran into were a couple of obvious typos and a few examples that did not want to work with the downloadable regex tester. As far as the typos go they were so obviously wrong that I could tell what was really meant by the context clues. And I'm not 100% sure that the few examples that didn't work were because of a flaw in the regex tester or my system. Either way though they were not bad enough to hinder my ability to learn what was being discussed.

To give better idea of what is covered here is the table of contents:

1. Introducing Regular Expressions
2. Matching Single Characters
3. Matching Sets of Characters
4. Using Metacharacters
5. Repeating Matches
6. Position Matching
7. Using Subexpressions
8. Using Backreferences
9. Looking Ahead and Behind
10. Embedding Conditions

Sam's Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes does not claim to be a complete coverage of everything regular expressions. It does claim to be a guide to help you get up and running fast with regex and it does just that in my opinion. I can't wait till I run into something that lets me use my new found skills.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price
My wife pointed out to me yesterday that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is to be released July 16th. I'm not as huge of a fan of Harry Potter as I am of The Lord of the Rings but I find myself following Harry Potter anyway. One of these days I'll actually read the books but until then I'll watch the movies.

Fantastic Four
The Fantastic Four movie is supposedly going to be released in early July. In the Pre-Release Buzz section of movies.com there is a sweet looking trailer that they just released.

Star Wars: Episode III
Even after the disappointment I felt with Episode 1 and Episode 2 I'm still anticipating this one. After all, we are going to get to see, supposedly, an epic battle between Obi-wan and Anakin along with the fall of Anakin to the Dark Side. Of course, there is a trailer at movies.com. Maybe we'll get lucky and get to watch Jar-Jar die a horribly slow and torturous death! One can only hope.

X-men 3
This one is projected to be released some time in 2006. I haven't heard to much about this one and there isn't much on movies.com about it. What little there is seems like there is some turmoil going on. Hopefully this will make it off the ground. I want to see how they do Phoenix.

For those who care I've recently updated my gallery by adding some family related pictures. Also, Bob came over and we bottled up the beer we brewed so I've updated the section related to that with more pictures and comments.

By the way, I just had to put this picture of Angie on the front page here because it's to cute to keep to myself.

Not much to update, but this morning I got a reply to my Paypal complaint with vinylguitarguy related to an eBay bid I had won. The specifics can be found here in my initial clog entry about it. Anyway, the reply didn't contain any sort of explanation or apology but simply provided a tracking number and that it was shipped via the USPS. I checked the tracking number tonight and USPS.com claims that tracking service was not purchased for it. So I sent him an E-mail in forming him of this that he'll probably ignore like all the others but we'll see. Just out of curiosity I checked his current feedback and it looks like he's screwed a few others recently. Needless to day I'm not canceling my complaint.

This week I finally got a chance to put Microsoft AntiSpyware to the test in the real world on a very spyware infected laptop. This one had among more benign things a variation of CoolWebSearch that just would not go away. Adaware and CWShredder both wouldn't even find it yet alone remove it.

I thought I'd give Microsoft's (well actually GIANT's) software a crack at it. So I headed over to the Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta site to download it. I was promptly nagged to prove the validity of my installed version of Windows. This sort of annoyed me a little but I eventually got it downloaded and installed. The install was no brainer and runs you through a wizard to setup auto updates and things like that. One thing it points out though that is actually a nice idea is a thing called SpyNet. SpyNet is a database where you can report your found spyware to. I assume the idea is supposed to be like Vipul's Razor but I'm just guessing.

So after doing all the updates I ran a full system scan which actually found the CoolWebSearch hijack and offered to remove it for me. I was really impressed at this point and used the Browser Hijack Restore feature to put back all of IE's default setting and opened IE to make sure MSN was the home page. Still feeling impressed I did a system reboot as a final test and got to witness MS AntiSpyware fall flat on it's face like every other program. The hijack returned and reinstalled itself. MS AntiSpyware did get farther than Adaware by just finding it and restoring defaults but it didn't finish the job. It did get rid of all the other bits of nastiness on the system though.

Over all I guess it performed as well as any other Spyware/Adware killer I've worked with like Adaware, Spybot S&D, and Spywareblaster so I can't really hold it against it that it failed on the CoolWebSearch. And I do think it is good that Microsoft is finally acknowledging the fact that Spyware is a large problem with their OS. But that being said why don't they put their energy into making Windows less vulnerable to the junk and crap and prevent it from getting in rather than using add on software to do the job? The only thing that I think stands out as having potential to make MS AntiSpyware better than what is already available is SpyNet. Also, the fact that it did as well as other products that are released while it is still in beta bodes well for it.

We'll see what the final product is like but I still say Linux and MacOS are the best AntiSpyware software you can use.

I just thought I'd take a moment to create a shameless plug for a Firefox extension with some major potential for usefulness. The other night while hanging out with my friend Rik he pointed out Wikalong which is literally a wiki that is embedded in the sidebar of your browser. What it does is it shows you the wiki associated with the URL you are currently viewing. I think this could be a majorly useful thing. On their site there are a few possible uses given like note taking or sharing adblock settings but it seems to me that the uses are limited only to the imagination.

The only thing I've noticed is that there really isn't much info in the Wikalong sidebar yet for any of the sites I go to. Now, I figure this is simply because this project just started out and hasn't reached critical mass yet. Basically, the more people who use it the more info that will get into it.

I hope Wikalong does well, I'd like to see the creative ways people come up with to use it.

At BBC News they are running an article about deploying robot troops to fight against insurgents in Irag. These things are based on the same robot that is used to disarm mines and is equipped with a camera and machine gun. They aren't automatic though being remote controlled by a human which is good. Just what we need is Johny-5 going crazy and blowing the heck out of people.

The advantages mentioned over humans are the robot doesn't require food, clothing, training, motivation or a pension. Notice how keeping a living human being out of harms way is not mentioned as an advantage? My gut reaction is that the mentioned points equate to saving money. But for who? I'm sure there won't be any for us, the regular people.

On a more fun note though, it's mentioned that there are plans to replace the joystick and screen currently used on the remote control unit with a Gameboy like controller and virtual-reality goggles. Now that would be fun to play with!

Oh, I just hope this thing doesn't run Windows!

I finally finished Thief II tonight. I literally only had to walk out of the building and the final level was done but put it off for weeks. All in all, it was very enjoyable being essentially more of what was in Thief: The Dark Project which was excellent. I think the story in TDP was better than Thief II and I was a little disappointed with the final movie but I'm still glad I played it. Now, I can actually think about playing Thief: Deadly Shadows sometime soon. Just in case TDS is more of the same and to avoid on overdose on a good thing I think I may just give Planescape Torment, Warlords Battlecry, or Warcraft III a whirl.

I can't believe it. I've bought a mess of things over the years on eBay and never had a problem. Then my first won auction after not even looking at eBay for a couple of years I get screwed.

I've already mentioned that I bought my wife a new turn table for Christmas. This, of course, prompted me to break out all the old vinyl and spend some time reliving my younger days. One of my favorite LPs from my childhood was the Original Grease Soundtrack, which much to my dismay turned out to be scratched beyond playability. I figured if I could get a replacement anywhere it would be on eBay so off I went and searched. I was happy to find a near mint copy of it being sold by a guy named vinylguitarguy and won for a grand total of $3.50 + $5.00 shipping. I payed the day the auction ended via Paypal and waited for my item to arrive.

I've been waiting a grand total of 19 days as of today and still nothing has shown up on my doorstep. I've made multiple attempts to contact this fellow who has not responded in anyway. I even gave a time limit of 7 days for a response after which I'd take action, still no answer.

I took a deeper look at his feedback and, even though he has a high positive rate, all his negatives center around the theme of accepting payment, not sending the item, and ignoring contact attempts. Now, this is my bad, because I didn't review as deep as I usually do. And if I had I know I would have never even bid. But to late now.

So, I've left some pretty darn harsh negative feedback for this fellow and initiated an investigation to get my money back with Paypal. After I started this I notice he actually left me a positive feedback, which has brought a small tinge of guilt at my harsh words but still, ignoring a customer is not excusable. At best, if he resolves this issue he'll get the negative bumped up to a neutral rating.

It seem silly to go off over $8.50 total but it's the principal of the matter.

Yesterday I woke up to find my home "server" system dead. It looked like it was turned off so I tried to turn it on. Nothing happened, no drives spinning up, no display, no beep from the POST, nothing except the power supply fan and the hard drive LED on solid. Oh boy, what fun. I hate it when this happens even when it is a secondary system that my daughter plays Dora the Explorer and Tux Paint on. So I grabbed an extra hard drive I had thinking it was one of the drives bringing it down. I disconnected all of the drives, including the CD-Roms and floppy and this darn thing still refused to reboot! What the heck... So, I simplified even more, by striping it down to the power supply, CPU, motherboard, and memory but still no life could be breathed into this thing. I even tried an extra power supply just in case. You'd think that it would give the BIOS beeps about not having a video card but it didn't. Time to simply even more so out came the memory and BOOM now I get BIOS beeps about missing memory. I don't have any PC2100 memory laying around so I guess I'll have to put Newegg's return policy to the test and start ordering parts to trouble shoot with. 512MB of memory is on the way, if this works then I'll have a nice memory upgrade in the name of troubleshooting. I just hope it isn't the CPU or motherboard.

To continue the technology theme so far I finally decided to check out the M$ AntiSpyware Beta. It looks to have promise but let us not give M$ all the credit. In the normal Microsoft fashion they simply acquired the technology when they bought out GIANT Company Software Inc and stuck their name on it then called it an innovation. We'll see what they turn it into though. I'm always on the lookout for good Spyware/Adware removal tools since the majority of my job seems to boil down to cleaning up the PCs of hapless users. I think I spend a good 70% or more of my time dealing with Spyware/Adware, browser hijacks, and viruses. I'm glad I use Linux at home so I can actually use my time to do something useful or fun with my system instead of endlessly defending it. I've only played with Microsoft AntiSpyware for all of 15 minutes but it did find and remove several bits of nastiness and looks like it can help you remove browser hijacks. I'll know more after I get a chance to see how it stands up against a badly overrun client PC.

That being said though on Monday I had a chance to actually use some of my MCSE skills! This is a rare thing since most of our customers are so small that they don't bother using most of what I was used to doing at IQE. I got to help a couple of internal IT guys who needed an "expert" to help them adjust from NT to Windows 2003 SBS. So I got to be teacher at the same time as helping them use Group Policy to reach their goals. One of these days my Linux skills will be sufficient enough to actually use them in a work environment but not yet. Speaking of increasing skill I need to actually get back into some reading and experimentation. I just haven't been in the mood lately for some reason.

Now for a total subject change. Tonight was a fine night spent with the family. We had a really nice warm fire in the fireplace since the weather is so darn cold and we watched The Sound of Music (again) while Cindy and I played with the kids. We all really like having a fire but the only problem with the open face style of fireplace we have is when the fire goes below a certain level the amount of heat sucked up the chimney is more than the fire is giving off. A fully enclosed stove like my parent have is more efficient but it doesn't look nearly as nice. It's a worthwhile trade off though.

Oh, I checked the status of the fermenting beer and it's well underway. There is a thick foam on the surface and you can see the yeast has grown significantly. The beer itself is cloudy but should clear up when fermentation stops. The cool thing is if you sniff at the pressure release lid it smells just like beer! So I guess we are on the right track.

I was poking around Bloglines and came upon this article on Dean's World entitled "Red Tape May Have Killed Thousands in Tsunami" which links to this article at The New Zealand Harald that suggests that bureaucracy played a roll in the recent tsunami deaths.

A quote from the article:

"It was used to alert Pacific countries to the tsunami, even though it affected hardly any of them, and could have been used in the Indian Ocean if the threat had been from a typhoon, officials said, but it could not be used to warn about a tsunami."

What in the world is the difference between a typhoon and a tsunami that is important enough to prevent using an existing system that could help save hundreds or maybe thousands of lives? I don't care if they are both radically different natural phenomena. People killed by a typhoon are just as dead as those killed by a tsunami. I'm not sure what else to say, all I can do is shake my head in disbelief that garbage like this is even possible.

Perhaps they could have used the typhoon approved warning system if they had only filled out their Twenty-Seven B-stroke-six?

I recently read Beowulf in which it is mentioned fairly often about the warriors drinking in the Mead Hall. Since it's mentioned so often it got me thinking, what the heck is Mead and how does one make it? Especially since I've never seen Mead offered anywhere on a menu. This got me searching the net and browsing a slew of home brew websites covering Mead, Wine, and Beer. To made your own Mead isn't hard. In its most basic from it consists of water, honey, and yeast. The problem is the process takes a year or more. I don't want to invest a year of time into making something like that until I know I can actually brew something successfully.

This got me thinking of beer. I checked the yellow pages looking for any kind of home brew shops in the area and found none. Google gave plenty of hits though and I found three types of kits. One was so simple a retarded monkey could probably make beer. If you can add water and mix in a pouch of beer mix powder then that's about all the skill you needed for this one. That's not making beer to me, I want to feel like I made a difference in the final product so I looked farther. This time I came up with what looked like a mad scientists setup from some horror movie. I don't have a chemistry degree so that was out for now. Then I came across Mr. Beer which seems to be a happy medium. This is what I wanted so I ordered it up.

While I was waiting for it to arrive Ricardo S pointed out that a new home brew shop opened close to us called Keystone Homebrew Supply. I stopped in and they have all the stuff of the mad scientist setup but, after talking to the person at the store it didn't seem that bad. Well, to late now, Mr. Beer was on the way but at least I have a place to go to get ingredients and advice. If this turns out to be something I like to do then maybe I'll upgrade.

Anyway, through all this I'd been talking to one of my fishing buddies, Bob. And we decided to go into this together as a treat for the rest of the guys on the next annual fishing trip.

So, Mr. Beer arrived yesterday. We got the Premium Edition which comes with the keg, the ingredients to make West Coast Pale Ale, and eight 1 liter bottles with caps. We also bought the recipes and ingredients for Dutch Apple Ale and Ginger's Castaway Ale. Bob stopped by this evening and we decided to go with the basic West Coast Pale recipe that it came with to get a little experience before we tried anything else out.

We had a hell of a good time setting up and starting our first batch of beer which is currently sitting on top of my dresser getting ready to ferment. It'll take at least a week before it's ready to bottle and then another week after that to carbonate. Until then we took a few pictures of our fun and I put them up in the Photo Gallery for the world to see. I'll take more photos of the bottling process and add them to the gallery when it's ready.

A minimum of 2 weeks to wait! I hate waiting. I guess I'll just have to buy some beer to drink in the meantime.

I don't recall what Google search I was doing but I saw down toward the bottom of the list a site titled What Torture Method Would You Be?. Well, this is the kind of thing that I just have to click on out of morbid curiosity. So, once I clicked on it I discovered that it's a quiz to answer the question posed by the title. And tells you, based on your answers, what kind of torture method you'd likely be or what method would be your favorite if you were an inquisitor, executioner, or say the US Government.

After answering a series of 20 questions asking this about what I like to do with I'm mad it spit back that my favorite method would be Burning at the Stake. It then provides a prioritized list below that of what your 2ND favorite would be down to 25 possible methods. Luck for us they provide little graphics with an explanation. They even provide the HTML code to past into your site if you want to show off how much of a psychopath you really are. Here are the results of my test:

Witches were tied to you, and burned to a crisp. A classic, though not very nice. People probably tiptoe around you a little.

There are all kinds on the net I guess. I'm just glad I wasn't The Pear. Youch!

Actually, what a past 4 work days. For the past 3 days I got to take heat for problems caused by the stupidity of others, unreasonable customers, and customers downright lying about what I did seemingly trying to get me into trouble. Or to at least make us reduce the price in an effort to keep their business.

However, today I got the distinct honor and pleasure to waste an hour or so of my precious time speaking with Compaq's "World Class" Technical Support Professionals located in sunny India. The conversation went something like this:

Compaq: Thank you for calling Compaq Technical Support. What kind of issue are you having today?

Brian: Hello, I have a Presario 1700 laptop that locks up solid but seemly under heavy load only. It's kind of random. It seems better since I just ran the restore disk but it happened again during Windows Update and I'd like to just rule out hardware. Do you have any diagnostic software that I could run?

Compaq: It locks up?

Brian: Yes, it locks up solid. The mouse stops working, CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't bring up the Task manager, and pressing Caps lock doesn't even toggle the caps lock LED. The only way I can get back into it is to power cycle it.

Compaq: OK, what I need you to do it to reboot the system, then press F8 repeatedly. Then in the menu that comes up select Safe Mode.

Brian: Safe mode? Why safe mode? The system isn't locked up, like I said, it only locks up under heavy load and I've already rebooted it. The software should be fine since I just finished the Restore Disk moments before I called.

Compaq: It's not locking up then?

Brian: Yes, it is, but not right now. Like I said, it's random and I'd like to just run some diagnostics if you have them available to rule out hardware.

Compaq: OK, then what I need you do it is click on Start, then Run. In there type in msconfig and click OK.

Brian: What are we doing in msconfig?

Compaq: I want to remove anything that isn't needed during start up. Now, click on the Start up tab and...

Brian: But the software is at factory default. How could there be anything in there other than what Compaq ships with it?

Compaq: ...and list off one by one the items in the list.

Brian amuses the clueless tech and disables all the items in msconfig and reboot. Amazingly enough the system starts perfectly.

Brian: I'm not sure what this is proving. Usually when there is a software problem you just run the System Restore to rule out software. Since I've already done that I just want to test the hardware. Can you check if you have any kind of Diagnostics available please?

We argue for a little over hardware vs software. Compaq puts me on hold to "search their database".

Compaq: I've searched our database thoroughly and the solution to this problem is to upgrade the RAM. You will need to upgrade from 256MB RAM to 1GB.

Brian: Uhhh, how can upgrading the size of the RAM fix this problem? I mean, it's running with the OS and drivers supplied with it freshly installed. It ran for a couple of years without problems with this amount of RAM. If anything is wrong, it's a subtle hardware problem and I would really just like to run a diagnostic program. Dell used to have actual hardware tests to run, including Diagnostic floppies to stress the system. Compaq doesn't have those?

This isn't even the entire conversation but at this point I was totally frustrated. This person was obviously working off of a script and chances are that the lint from my belly button knows more about computers than this woman did. The worst thing about this situation is that she mindlessly keeps going with her script and ignores my questions about diag procedures related to hardware. On top of that, the laptop is out of warranty so Compaq charged $40 to talk to a clueless, mindless tech who didn't resolve my problem or even get me closer to resolution.

The truth is I don't really care who I talk to, what gender they are, or where the hell they live. What I really want it someone who I can understand, who understands me, is knowledgeable, and above all is willing to work with me instead of against me to resolve a problem. Is that really so much to ask for?

I spent the majority of my youth in arcades in the mall. And I could probably buy a car with all the money I spent there. I have fond memories of the 80's and the technology of the time. Between the arcades, my Atari 2600, and my Commodore 64 I'm surprised I had time for anything else. Anyway, with this in mind I bought my wife a retro Atari 2600 game controller that comes with things like Adventure, Circus Atari, Yars Revenge, Break out, and Missile Command. I thought maybe I'd be bored with these old games but both of us have been playing and enjoying most of these. Well, except for Gravitar which is just hard to play. Circus Atari was Cindy's favorite, but the joystick isn't the best way to control it, but there is a paddle retro game controller out there that my buddy Bob brought over for us to try. Much better controls for Pong and Circus Atari, plus the paddle has other retro classics like Night Driver, Warlords, and Breakout. He's lucky she let him take it home.

Then there is also the Namco one that I acquired over the holidays. This one is full of some run games from the early 80's that look 100% the same. I've read that there are some subtle differences, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper than buying an actually arcade game and much smaller. Games I've been killing time on are Pacman, Dig Dug, Rally-X, and my favorite one on the controller, Bosconian.

Some other game's I may buy are the Activision 10 in 1 and maybe the Commodore 64 30 in 1 .

I have to be careful though or I may never sleep again because I'll be up all night reliving my childhood.

I feel the need for a theraputic rant. I'll try not to dump to much here but I am fully convinced that humans suck in general. I mean, there are those who really care about things, have moral character, and are willing to think of people other than themselves. I know quite a few of them. But I think those of us who are really decent beings are a small percentage of our population. That being said, I have a few things that make me feel this way. Most of them are IT related since that's my work and exposes me to the general population. Here are a few examples of things that drive me up the wall about people in general.

• People who feel they can judge your work as an IT Professional because they used to run a BBS on their Commodore 64. And then are critical about your work when they haven't touched any sort of computing device beyond the power button for 20+ years.
• Anyone who makes technical decisions based on poli-ticks and ignores the technical issues. Poli-ticks must have very little to do with technical decisions or you get crappy solutions. Technological decisions need to be made based on things like how easy is the implementation, administration, and maintenance of the solution in question. Not if it will make you look good. Poli-ticks played a big roll when I was layed off from work in 2003. It's a topic that really gets me going so I'll stop now or I'll have written a book before I realize it.
• People who ask you a million questions about what you are doing, then turn around and complain that you are being to technical behind your back. Especially when the answers are watered down to the point where the only way to water them down farther is to use terms like Thingamajig, Doodad, and Whosits. Please people, if the answer is getting to technical just tell me, I'll shutup and get back to work. And, above all, don't ask more questions, especially if they are asking for yet more info on the topic I'm getting to technical for you on.

That's just three, but the more I work with the humans the more I grow to dislike them. Especially when I'm doing my best to do the best work I can and then they pull crap like that listed above.

I just wish the mindless masses would stop walking around in thier self-centered, what's in it for me, tunnel vision little worlds, and stop acting like nothing more than huge hunks of meat. Why do people act this way? I just don't understand.

I don't see articles on the goodness that is Slackware very often. Usually they are talking about Fedora, Suse, Mandrake, or some other "cutting edge and user friendly" distro. But this article pretty much sums up why I like Slackware. I think Slack would be use more often if it was put in the forefront a bit more. Even so, I know Slack isn't for everyone, that's why there are the other distributions to choose from. But, due to lack of mainstream publicity, I think it gets overlooked by most new Linux users. I admit, I didn't know of Slackware until a coworker pointed it out to me. Before that time I was only considering Mandrake and Redhat and found my self having some similar frustrations to using Windows. But, now that I've been using Slackware for over a year or so I can't see myself using any other distro. Like the article says, "It just works".

It was pointed out to me from B10m that you can use Show Old Extensions to get mozex to work in Firefox 1.0. I just installed it and it works great. While I'm proud of my little script to handle the mailto links mozex is much better and lets you handle ftp, news, irc, and telnet links in addition to mailto links.

Tomorrow my wife and I are officially married for 7 years making the grand total from the first date to now about 13 or 14 years. Yes, we dated a log time. Anyway, tonight we celebrated by going to dinner at Olive Garden then went to the movies. Originally we were going to see National Treasure, but it was sold out so the backup plan was to see The Phantom of the Opera. I'm glad National Treasure was sold out because, finally, we have a Phantom movie that does not suck. It was very well done. I've always been a Phantom fan and saw it on Broadway some years ago. The movie is essentially the play but into movie form, music and all. It's directed by Andrew Loyd Webber, and the screen play is also written by Andrew Loyd Webber and some other guy. It brought back many memories of that trip with my wife to NYC to see it. The movie is very well done and we both enjoyed it immensely.

I just realized that mailto_helper relies on the URL being all lowercase, so I changed it to work with both cases. It sure looks ugly now.

#!/bin/bash
MAILTO_URL="$1" 

#Strip off the protocol
MAIL_DATA=$(echo "$MAILTO_URL" | /bin/sed -s 's/^[Mm][Aa][Ii][Ll][Tt][Oo]://') 

#Get Recipient and strip it off
RECIPIENT=$(echo "$MAIL_DATA" | cut -d? -f1 -)
MAIL_DATA=$(echo "$MAIL_DATA" | /bin/sed -s s/^$RECIPIENT//) 

#Get Subject,BCC, and CC
SUBJECT=$(echo "$MAIL_DATA" | \
/bin/sed -s 's/.*?[Ss][Uu][Bb][Jj][Ee][Cc][Tt]=//' | /bin/sed -s 's/?.*//')
BCC=$(echo "$MAIL_DATA" | /bin/sed -s 's/.*?[Bb][Cc][Cc]=//' | \
/bin/sed -s 's/?.*//')
CC=$(echo "$MAIL_DATA" | /bin/sed -s 's/.*?[Cc][Cc]=//' | \
/bin/sed -s 's/?.*//') 

#Call mutt in an aterm
aterm -fg white -bg black -geometry 80x50 -fn 9x15 -e \
mutt "$RECIPIENT" -b "$BCC" -c "$CC" -s "$SUBJECT"

I love Firefox but one thing that has been bugging me is getting it to handle mailto URL's in Linux. For some reason there is no actual way to configure this easy in the preferences. So, I Googled about figuring someone has to have done it already but I could only find references to getting Thunderbird and Firefox working together. I like mutt, so I decided to try my hand for the first time ever at actually writing up something that was kind of useful. Well, useful for me anyway.

Inspired by the example helper scripts I saw for Thunderbird I came up with this:

#!/bin/bash
MAILTO_URL="$1"

#Strip off the protocol
MAIL_DATA=$(echo "$MAILTO_URL" | /bin/sed -s 's/^mailto://')

#Get Recipient and strip it off
RECIPIENT=$(echo "$MAIL_DATA" | cut -d? -f1 -)
MAIL_DATA=$(echo "$MAIL_DATA" | /bin/sed -s s/^$RECIPIENT//)

#Get Subject,BCC, and CC
SUBJECT=$(echo "$MAIL_DATA" | /bin/sed -s 's/.*?subject=//' \
| /bin/sed -s 's/?.*//')
BCC=$(echo "$MAIL_DATA" | /bin/sed -s 's/.*?bcc=//' | /bin/sed -s 's/?.*//')
CC=$(echo "$MAIL_DATA" | /bin/sed -s 's/.*?cc=//' | /bin/sed -s 's/?.*//')

# Call mutt in an aterm
aterm -fg white -bg black -geometry 80x50 -fn 9x15 \
-e mutt "$RECIPIENT" -b "$BCC" -c "$CC" -s "$SUBJECT"

I named this script mailto_helper, made it executable, and stuck it in a logical place for me. Then I opened the URL "about:config" in Firefox. In there I right clicked and created a new string called "network.protocol-handler.app.mailto" with a value of the path to where I put mailto_helper and to my surprise it worked. I'm sure a real programmer/scripter could do something better but I don't think it's all to bad for a novice like me.