Forcing firefox to remember passwords

There are a handful of websites out there that decide that they know better than your browser and tell it to not offer to save passwords. They do this by setting a form autocomplete attribute to off.

Since we already agree that HTML and the web are a terrible idea, hopefully we can find a way to hack around this. It turns out that I didn’t have to, because many others have solved this hack before me. The cleanest version I found is here: http://www.howtogeek.com/62980/how-to-force-your-browser-to-remember-passwords/

It’s not that complicated actually, a little bookmarklet (javascript code, stored in a bookmark, and activated when you open it) is saved in your browser, and on activation, it loops through all the page’s forms and turns on the autocomplete off‘s.

I’ve copied the code here, in the interests of archiving this very useful hack. Here you go:

Shortened form:

javascript:(function(){var%20ac,c,f,fa,fe,fea,x,y,z;ac="autocomplete";c=0;f=document.forms;for(x=0;x<f.length;x++){fa=f[x].attributes;for(y=0;y<fa.length;y++){if(fa[y].name.toLowerCase()==ac){fa[y].value="on";c++;}}fe=f[x].elements;for(y=0;y<fe.length;y++){fea=fe[y].attributes;for(z=0;z<fea.length;z++){if(fea[z].name.toLowerCase()==ac){fea[z].value="on";c++;}}}}alert("Enabled%20'"+ac+"'%20on%20"+c+"%20objects.");})();

Long form:

function() {
   var ac, c, f, fa, fe, fea, x, y, z;
   //ac = autocomplete constant (attribute to search for)
   //c = count of the number of times the autocomplete constant was found
   //f = all forms on the current page
   //fa = attibutes in the current form
   //fe = elements in the current form
   //fea = attibutes in the current form element
   //x,y,z = loop variables

   ac = "autocomplete";
   c = 0;
   f = document.forms;

   //cycle through each form
   for(x = 0; x < f.length; x++) {
      fa = f[x].attributes;
      //cycle through each attribute in the form
      for(y = 0; y < fa.length; y++) {
         //check for autocomplete in the form attribute
         if(fa[y].name.toLowerCase() == ac) {
            fa[y].value = "on";
            c++;
         }
      }

      fe = f[x].elements;
      //cycle through each element in the form
      for(y = 0; y < fe.length; y++) {
         fea = fe[y].attributes;
         //cycle through each attribute in the element
         for(z = 0; z < fea.length; z++) {
            //check for autocomplete in the element attribute
            if(fea[z].name.toLowerCase() == ac) {
               fea[z].value = "on";
               c++;
            }
         }
      }
   }

   alert("Enabled '" + ac + "' on " + c + " objects.");
}

Happy hacking,

James

PS: Best friends forever if you can get firefox to natively integrate with the gnome-keyring. No I don’t want to force it to myself, get this code merged upstream please!

Overriding attributes of collected exported resources

This post is about a particularly elegant (and crucial) feature in puppet exported resources: attribute overriding. If you’re not already familiar with exported resources, you should start there, as they are the killer feature that makes configuration management with puppet awesome. (I haven’t found any explicit docs about this feature either, so feel free to comment if you know where they’re hidden.)

Setup: I’ve got a virtual machine which exports a resource to N different nodes. I’d like to define the resource with just one exported (@@) definition on my virtual machine.

Problem: One (or more) of the attributes needs to be changed based on which node it gets collected on. To make things more complicated, I’m using the same class definition on each of those N nodes to collect the resource. I don’t want to have to write N separate node definitions:

@@some::resource { 'the_name':
    foo => 'bar',
    #abc => 'different_on_each_node',
    tag => 'magic',
}

Solution: It turns out that for exported (or virtual) resources, you can specify attributes that get set upon collection. Naturally they can depend on a variable such as $name, which is unique to where they get collected:

Some::Resource <<| tag == 'magic' |>> {
    abc => "node-${name}",    # override!
}

Bonus: You can obviously use other variables throughout including in the collection (tag == ‘magic’) area, on both the source and the destination. Instead of a simple equality like I’ve used, you can actually specify a more complex expression, including other variables such as title (the $name).

Hope this takes your puppet coding to another level,

Happy hacking,

James

 

Mothers day hacks

Firstly Happy Mother’s day to my mother.

Google is, as usual, busily releasing doodles. Today, the doodle takes you through a Rube Goldberg -esque sequence, giving you four decisions to make along the way. Each decision gives you one of three different choices, and at the end, a unique drawing is displayed. I expect:

3 * 3 * 3 * 3 = 81

different permutations. At the end of the process, you can print your image. I got directed to:

https://www.google.ca/logos/2013/mom/print/3311.html

which suspiciously has a four digit filename composed of three’s and ones. Inspecting the file in firefox shows that the main image url is:

https://www.google.ca/logos/2013/mom/hdcards/3311.jpg

with a similarly suspicious “3311“. I decided that I wanted to see all the permutations without having to refresh google’s page. Jumping to a terminal, and using some bash expansion magic:

$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir hack1
$ cd hack1/
$ wget https://www.google.ca/logos/2013/mom/hdcards/{1..3}{1..3}{1..3}{1..3}.jpg
[snip]
FINISHED --2013-05-12 07:07:22--
Total wall clock time: 1m 23s
Downloaded: 81 files, 138M in 1m 19s (1.75 MB/s)

I am pleased to see that 81 files have downloaded, and that they’re all unique:

$ md5sum * | sort | uniq | wc -l
81

and all png’s:

$ file * | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq | wc -l
1
$ file * | head -1
1111.jpg: JPEG image data, EXIF standard

Now I can very easily browse through the images with eog, and select my favourite.

Hope this has been instructive,

Happy hacking,

James