2008-05-02 at 1:04am
Grazr now has a paid version with monthly fees ranging from $9.99 to $149.99.
fe: command line Fire Eagle updater
When Fire Eagle first came out, I spent about fifteen minutes writing a script to update my location from the command line, the place where nerds commune with the Platonic forms of beauty, truth and goodness free from the distractions of bloated graphics libraries and so on. It’s pretty simple. I can type ‘fe’ and it’ll set my location back to home, or I can append a location and it’ll tell Fire Eagle that too. It’s written in Ruby, and is - befitting a shell script - quite hacky. I was going to release it a long time ago, but frankly the authentication was a bit crummy. I’ve fixed it up so that the authentication works nicely, and will even try to open your browser automatically (I don’t know whether that works on Linux, and my Ubuntu install is currently broken so I haven’t been able to test - and I’m pretty sure that it will not work on Windows) using the open command. But since the people tragically hip enough to have a Fire Eagle account are all Mac people, that shouldn’t be a problem.
To use the script, you need to have Ruby 1.8, Ruby Gems and the fireeagle gem. You can see what gems you have installed by typing gem list and you can install gems by typing, for instance, sudo gem install fireeagle. Next, you need to install the script. Since you are at the command line, you can do this easily by running the following command: sudo curl http://tommorris.org/files/fe.rb.txt > /usr/local/bin/fe; sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/fe
Then it’s time to run fe. Type fe into your shell. This should do all that’s necessary to get started. fe will try and open a browser window so you can authenticate. fe asks for both update and read rights to your Fire Eagle account - although currently it’s only a dumb updater. In the future, it may do more, but feel free to grant it whatever rights you wish.
Once you’ve authenticated, you are able to set a default location. I have set mine to home, and done the same on my iMac. If you have an office computer, you may want to set it. If you don’t want to set a default, leave it blank. If you have set a default, you can just type fe to set your location to it’s default. Either way, both your credentials and any default you set will be stored in ~/.fireeagle in YAML. If you didn’t add a default, feel free to just add it in the YAML file.
Then you can start updating. fe "London" or fe "San Diego" or maybe even fe "Brighton"! Or once you get home, fe. One thing I’m going to do on my iMac is have it so that when I log in, it posts my location automatically (I need some way of making sure that I am logging in physically, not over SSH or VNC). Similarly, you may want to use fe from your scripts - maybe building it into Quicksilver or Marco Polo.
The client makes only one API call, and doesn’t do any checking. If you type in “Lodnon” or “Bostin” or whatever, then you better hope Fire Eagle understands that (having typed in “Ashurst”, it told me I was in Southern Illinois, which was slightly disconcerting, since I thought I was in Kent). This is a deliberate design decision. When I wrote the script, I was using a very slow connection while out-and-about (a GPRS connection through my phone) and didn’t want the overhead of performing anything but the most minimal of actions. I’m sure all singing, all dancing location services will come around which use Fire Eagle’s features to the full, but this is not one. This is a hacky scratch for a personal itch. That said, it’s published under the GPL, so fork away (please get and use new authentication keys if you are doing something substantially different). If there’s some glaring problem with the version I’m distributing or a way to improve it, I take patches by e-mail.
If you find this script useful, you can always leave a small cash tip or present.
fe gem dependencies
The Fire Eagle gem has a strange dependency problem. I’m hoping the author of the Fire Eagle gem author will fix it very soon, but until that happens, fe now requires the OAuth 0.2.2 version gem. If you’ve downloaded it before a few minutes ago you should download it again as it now requires the 0.2.2 gem. To install this, type in sudo gem install oauth --version '0.2.2'
Dependencies are such a pain.
