Dodgeball Cannon » Code

Short and sweet OAuth

John Tantalo — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 05:28:37 +0000

I recently grew quite frustrated when I had to update Emend’s Twitter bot to use OAuth.

There are, of course, readily available implementations of OAuth in python, even some specifically engineered for App Engine with lovely persistence and caching and KILL ME NOW.

I gave up after a couple hours of staring at this nonsense. I grew so displeased because my app doesn’t need 95% of what these libraries offer. I only need to sign requests with a fixed oauth_consumer_key, oauth_consumer_secret, oauth_token, and oauth_token_secret. However, this simple task would require me to subclass or instantiate several object with Culver’s library, and I can’t even begin to fathom what I’d need to do with Knapp’s offering.

(Aside: if you want to authorize and build access tokens for your app, I highly recommend this excellent OAuth test client)

I finally teased apart the core function of signing requests, thanks in large part to the great reference example. If all you need is to access a protected resource, this will get the job done with a single function call, no object-orientation required.

Source code and unit test of short and sweet OAuth.

Strip tags with html5lib

John Tantalo — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:14:37 +0000

There are a couple posts out there that discuss stripping tags with html5lib, but they seem intent on preserving the “acceptable elements” such as and .


This is fine unless you really want to friggin’ strip out the tags, like I needed for Emend. The following is my solution.

Source code for stripping tags with html5lib and unit test.
For example,
>>> from strip_tags import strip_tags
>>> strip_tags('foo
 ')
u'foo bar'
Thanks go to Edward O’Connor for pointing me towards html5lib in the first place. It’s a huge improvement over HTMLParser.



IPA TTS bookmarklet
John Tantalo — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:33:49 +0000
I present the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) TTS (text-to-speech) bookmarklet. (Source)
Bookmarklet: IPA TTS (drag to your bookmark bar)
How to use: select any text that contains IPA and click on the bookmarklet. Wait a second for the iframe at the bottom of the page to load.
Try these examples: /ˌɪntəˈnæʃnəl/, /ˌɪntɚˈnæʃnəl/



IE6 submit-click on text input submit
John Tantalo — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 23:15:44 +0000
Found this fun bug in IE6 today. If you have a text input and submit input unassociated with a form, then submitting the text input (by hitting return or enter when focused) will cause a click event on the submit input.
The solution is simple and intuitive: eliminate unassociated submit inputs and submit buttons.





Demo (IE only)



Dangers of anonymous function closures
John Tantalo — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:43:57 +0000

John Resig’s jQuery uses a standard technique of anonymous function closures to namespace its internal functionality.
(function(){
  // jQuery stuff goes here...
})();

This is all well and good until you want to inline this code under some of your application code, as I did while working on Eventful’s MySpace application. Consider this example, written in standard Javascript style.
var foo = function(bar) {
  console.log("foo");
  return bar;
}

(function(){
  console.log("bar")
})();

What do you expect this code to print? If you say “bar”, you’re wrong. It prints “foo bar” because in this context the anonymous function closure becomes a call to the function that prints “foo” and returns the function that prints “bar”, which is then called.
Most of us probably wouldn’t notice what just happened because we are so used to Javascript interpreters automatically inserting semicolons after function definitions.
The danger is assuming, as John Resig and hundreds others have, that your anonymous function closure is the first token in a new line. In my case, it wasn’t. The solution? Either start meticulously sprinkling semicolons in your application code, or just add a single semicolon before your parenthetical block, guaranteeing it’s the first token in the line.
;(function(){
  // jQuery stuff goes here...
})();