Archive for category Automator

Fix for Barcode/Credit Card Readers?

Posted by clark in Automator on 2010/03/29

With Snow Leopard my Credit Card reader stopped working. Someone referred me to this tech note. Sounds like you just delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist, reboot and reconnect the device. I’ll be trying this tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

If I get it working I’ll update my credit card scanning scripts.

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SalesForce to FedEx

Posted by clark in Applescript, Automation, Automator, Python, SalesForce on 2010/02/06

A lot of my scripts are designed to make shipping easier. I usually use FedEx for my shipping and have discussed in the past filling out the packing forms in Safari in an automated way. I don’t know about you, but this saves me a lot of time. I’ve been using SalesForce a lot of late and one thing I do frequently is ship samples to leads or to existing contacts. Since I don’t (yet) have a safe syncing between my leads and Address Book I wanted a way to use a Service to print a FedEx packing slip for the displayed contact or lead.

This script makes a few assumptions. First it assumes you are logged into FedEx. (If you have an open window in Safari somewhere that’s sufficient) It then assumes the front window is your SalesForce window. It does check to ensure you are in a detail. If you’re not then it doesn’t do anything.

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Shell and Automator

Posted by clark in Automator, TextMate on 2010/01/29

I’ve been doing far too much “punditry” the past few weeks here. So I wanted to give a few tips.

To start let me give a great way to keep infrequently used shell scripts. If you are like me you have some shell commands you run only occasionally. For instance when I am trying to debug a network I often use nmap (installed via MacPorts). However because I do it so infrequently I have to remember the arguments to the command and then how I mapped the NAT. (Some networks use 10.0.0.x while others use 192.168.1.x and others 192.168.0.x) So I put the following as a service in Automator.

nmap -F 192.168.1.0-255 | mate

This makes it easy to find the machine I need to ssh into. (I make several automator actions for each network) I can also see, from a security point of view, what services are up (and what services shouldn’t be up).

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Automator Question

Posted by clark in Automator on 2010/01/05

So a quick Automator question to everyone. Why do the image manipulation actions not work with images that one gets off the clipboard with “Get Contents of Clipboard.” Is there a workaround? This seems like an odd limitation as one has to then save images to do anything with them.

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