YUI-Magnifier Released

josh — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:54:41 +0000

A coworker of mine, Dustin McQuay, released the YUI Magnifier, a YUI implementation of other popular image zoom utilities. We were actually surprised to see that nothing else like it already existed for YUI, so Dustin took the challenge of building his own, with the hopes that it might be included in other larger YUI libraries.

It boasts the features:

Display a magnified portion of an image, which is controlled by where the mouse is hovering over the image
Control over styling
Control over location of magnification lens
Magnified image can be wrapped by a larger element

Though the release wasn’t very public, it was still quite an accomplishment. It happens to be one of the first open-source releases from Backcountry.com (preceded to my knowledge by only Bucardo, a Postgres replication application written for Backcountry.com by Endpoint). It was originally designed to be used for our 900×900 images, but got cut after development has essentially finished due to changed requirements.

It’s a pretty solid application, and hopefully the start of more open source to be coming out of Backcountry.com

Python Script For Automated Voting

josh — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:07:13 +0000

This was a python script created by me a while ago to automate voting for a particular user. It may not work anymore, as this script was written quite a while ago. It’s not commented or anything. Here is the original post:

I created a small script to do the clearing of the cookies for you and everything. I tried to have it solve the captcha for you automagically, but it just wasn’t happening (I used ocrad and tesseract, and cleaning the image using imagemagick first). Anyways, you can sit there all day and enter the captchas to keep voting.

A few requirements:
* I wrote it using python 2.5.1. Not sure what other version it will work on.
* PIL required
* mechanize required

both of the required modules are available in the ubuntu repositories. I think that’s all you need, let me know if you run into any troubles.

sudo apt-get install python-imaging python-mechanize

A couple notes about it:
* You don’t have to hit “submit”, you can just press enter
* check the console for updates on whether it was submitted ok or not

Let me know if you want help learning how to set it up.

#!/usr/bin/python
 
# Displays the Captcha from http://basketball.seniorclassaward.com/public/men/vote.aspx?usr=public&gen=M
# so that you can enter it so that Jacee Carroll will win. It automagically keeps track/clears cookies (via mechanize)
# so you can submit more than once every 24 hours
 
# Written by Josh
 
import pygtk, gtk
import StringIO
import ImageFile
import re
from mechanize import Browser
pygtk.require('2.0')
 
# taken from http://www.daa.com.au/pipermail/pygtk/2003-June/005268.html
def image_to_gtkpixbuf(image):
    file = StringIO.StringIO ()
    image.save (file, 'ppm')
    contents = file.getvalue()
    file.close ()
    loader = gtk.gdk.PixbufLoader ('pnm')
    loader.write (contents, len (contents))
    pixbuf = loader.get_pixbuf ()
    loader.close ()
    return pixbuf
 
class Submitter:
 
    def get_image(self):
        # Get the image
        image_url = 'http://basketball.seniorclassaward.com/Captcha.aspx'
 
        image_response = self.br.open_novisit(image_url)
 
        p = ImageFile.Parser()
        while 1:
            data = image_response.read(1024)
            if not data:
                break
            p.feed(data)
        image_response.close()
        return p.image
 
    def __init__(self):
        self.br = Browser()
        self.br.set_handle_robots(False)
        self.url = 'http://basketball.seniorclassaward.com/public/men/vote.aspx?usr=public&gen=M'
        self.br.open(self.url)
 
        self.captcha = self.get_image()
 
    def submit(self, captcha_text):
        captcha_textbox = 'ctl00$DefaultContentPlaceholder$PublicBallot$CaptchaTextBox'
        jaycee_checkbox = 'ctl00$DefaultContentPlaceholder$PublicBallot$BallotCheckBoxList$0'
 
        br = self.br
        br.select_form( name='aspnetForm' )
        br[captcha_textbox] = captcha_text
        br[jaycee_checkbox] = ['on']
 
        response = br.submit()
 
        r = response.read()
        if re.search(r"ATTENTION:\\n([^']+)'", r):
            res = re.search(r"ATTENTION:\\n([^']+)'", r)
            print "Error submitting: " + res.groups()[0]
            return False
        elif re.search(r"COMPLETE:\\n([^']+)'", r):
            res = re.search(r"COMPLETE:\\n([^']+)'", r)
            print "SUCCESS! " + res.groups()[0]
 
        return True
 
class Control:
    def __init__(self):
        self.window = gtk.Window()
        self.window.connect("destroy", gtk.main_quit)
 
        self.submitter = Submitter()
 
        self.box = gtk.HBox(False, 0)
        self.window.add(self.box)
 
        self.submitButton = gtk.Button("Submit")
        self.submitButton.connect('clicked', self.submit)
 
        self.box.pack_start(self.submitButton, True, True, 0)
        self.submitButton.show()
 
        self.text = gtk.Entry()
        self.text.connect("activate", self.submit)
        self.box.pack_start(self.text, True, True, 0)
        self.text.show()
 
        self.set_image(self.submitter.captcha)
        self.box.pack_start(self.image, True, True, 0)
        self.image.show()
 
        self.box.show()
        self.window.show()
 
        self.text.grab_focus()
 
    def set_image(self, image):
        self.image = gtk.Image()
        self.image.set_from_pixbuf(
                image_to_gtkpixbuf(image))
 
    def change_image(self):
        self.box.remove( self.image )
        self.set_image( self.submitter.get_image() )
        self.box.pack_start(self.image, True, True, 0)
        self.image.show()
        return True
 
    def submit(self, evt):
        if self.submitter.submit( self.text.get_text().upper() ):
            # reset the submitter
            self.submitter = Submitter()
            self.change_image()
 
            self.text.set_text('')
            self.text.grab_focus()
 
def main():
    gtk.main()
    return 0
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    Control()
    main()

This was a just-for-fun thing for me, so I could test out some various web tools for python. I tried simple urllib/urllib2, ClientForm, ClientCookies, and mechanize, and found mechanize to be the most robust and easiest to use, although it was missing out on some features that I thought may be useful (as higher-level modules normally do).

Also, I didn’t like this:

        if re.search(r"ATTENTION:\\n([^']+)'", r):
            res = re.search(r"ATTENTION:\\n([^']+)'", r)

CrapFlingingMonkey.com » Code

YUI-Magnifier Released

Python Script For Automated Voting