Ruby - [ANN] The MouseHole Proxy 1.0 -- a Greasemonkey alternative

Author

[ANN] The MouseHole Proxy 1.0 -- a Greasemonkey alternative

why the lucky stiff

2005-08-29, 9:57 pm

And now I ask these gaunt faces, "Is anyone in the mood for fledling
software, a few hours old?"

[*] the MouseHole proxy [*] 1.0 [*] with complimentary hoodwink.d free
pass [*]

= Background =
Lately, on RedHanded, we've been trying out an experiment with a
Greasemonkey script and a Ruby script. What we're doing is cladestine
off-web experimentation and it is of the utmost importance that we
remain concealed and uncatalogued by the major search engines.

Now we've challenged ourselves to replace Greasemonkey with a proxy
composed of Ruby.

= The Workings =
How does this proxy work? Well, THAT I can tell you.

* The proxy has a directory named `userScripts' which contains a bunch
of files with a .user.rb extension.
* You start up the proxy on your machine.
* Setup the proxy in the connection settings in your browser.
* As you surf, the proxy will rewrite the web, based on the scripts you
have in your `userScripts' directory.

The proxy is currently quite slow. And the HTML gets pretty munged
sometimes. And there is no caching.

But it's definitely cross-browser. And uses REXML for XPath support,
open-uri as a replacement for XMLHttpRequest, and JSON reading and printing.

= Crawling into the Hole =
A few MouseHole links:

* Project page: <http://rubyforge.org/projects/mousehole>
* Downloads: <http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=895>
* Announcement: <http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/...eholeProxy.html>

Over the next few days, we'll feature some basic user scripts on
RedHanded, so you can get the hang of scripting this thing.

_why

Phil Tomson

2005-08-30, 3:57 am

In article <43139857.30803@whytheluckystiff.net>,
why the lucky stiff <ruby-talk@whytheluckystiff.net> wrote:
>And now I ask these gaunt faces, "Is anyone in the mood for fledling
>software, a few hours old?"
>
>[*] the MouseHole proxy [*] 1.0 [*] with complimentary hoodwink.d free
>pass [*]
>
>= Background =
>Lately, on RedHanded, we've been trying out an experiment with a
>Greasemonkey script and a Ruby script. What we're doing is cladestine
>off-web experimentation and it is of the utmost importance that we
>remain concealed and uncatalogued by the major search engines.
>
>Now we've challenged ourselves to replace Greasemonkey with a proxy
>composed of Ruby.
>
>= The Workings =
>How does this proxy work? Well, THAT I can tell you.
>
>* The proxy has a directory named `userScripts' which contains a bunch
>of files with a .user.rb extension.
>* You start up the proxy on your machine.
>* Setup the proxy in the connection settings in your browser.
>* As you surf, the proxy will rewrite the web, based on the scripts you
>have in your `userScripts' directory.
>
>The proxy is currently quite slow. And the HTML gets pretty munged
>sometimes. And there is no caching.
>
>But it's definitely cross-browser. And uses REXML for XPath support,
>open-uri as a replacement for XMLHttpRequest, and JSON reading and printing.
>
>= Crawling into the Hole =
>A few MouseHole links:
>
>* Project page: <http://rubyforge.org/projects/mousehole>
>* Downloads: <http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=895>
>* Announcement: <http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/...eholeProxy.html>
>
>Over the next few days, we'll feature some basic user scripts on
>RedHanded, so you can get the hang of scripting this thing.
>

This looks like some kind of revolution starting over there at RedHanded. I
have this feeling that someone could end up winning next year's
'Hacker-of-the-year award' over all this... or perhaps a very slight
chance of banishment to Guantanamo (unlikely, but look on the bright
side, it's a tropical paradise).

Kudos and keep up the good work!

Phil

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