Category: geek

CSC491 – Second Milestone

Not quite as far along as I want to be, but definitely getting there.  Refreshed my rpm and general sysadminning memories in the process.  Still a lot to get done to have anything interesting…

A bit of background is in order to understand what I’ve been up to.  I’ve been working this week on getting the hang of working with the Planet-Lab infrastructure, and can mostly find my way around it manually now.  I haven’t figured out how to automate the interactions with it in the way that will be needed for this project, but it’s a start.

Planet-Lab is a network of computers around the world which researchers can obtain access to (eventually).  As a user, one gets a “slice”, which as far as I can tell is just a project-specific username.  The user can assign virtual machines on the “nodes”, which are the actual machines.  Users have limited root access on the nodes, and can install software, set up cron jobs (scheduled tasks), and run scripts.

So where has this gotten me? Well, read on….

Continue reading “CSC491 – Second Milestone” →

Exporting cookies from Firefox 3.x into cookies.txt format

I’ve been searching for a while for a way to extract cookies from Firefox 3.x in order to use them with stuff like wget and Perl’s libwwwperl, which I have been using for a bunch of scripting.  Firefox 3.x uses sqlite to store cookies, whereas apps which let you load cookies files are looking for IE or Netscape formatted ones.  The latter were used up to Firefox 2, but I’ve had trouble keeping FF2 and 3 happy on the same machine… And going back to FF2 feels really painful without the magical search bar of awesomeness.

There’s now a beta extension up to save your FF3 cookies to the right format, which makes me a very happy camper!  It’s on the official addons.mozilla.org site but you need to sign in to the site to download it here as it’s still experimental.  Super useful though!

Also very useful and something I’d forgotten about until yesterday is this list of bookmarklets (snippets of javascript which you save as bookmarks) to manipulate form properties before submitting them, which lets you save passwords in your browser in forms where that function has been disabled, among other things.

-Leigh