Scraping NAB Internet Banking with Mechanize
This week I wanted to write a script that would get my account balances from nab Internet Banking. These types of things are generally quite simple with Ruby and Mechanize. I got the basics of the script up and running fairly quickly but when I ran it the site always rejected my username and password.
After a lot more time in the Safari Web Inspector I finally worked out that the site actually expects the password submitted to the login page to be ‘mixed’ with a key that is unique for each page load. The ‘mixing’ (for lack of a better description) is performed by a javascript function. After I reimplemented this function in my Ruby script I was then able to sucessfully login and retrieve my account balances. My code is supplied below for anyone else who is wanting to do something like this.
VirtualBox News Atom Feed
A few days ago I decided I wanted a feed of the VirtualBox News page. I mainly wanted this to know when new releases are made. Whilst the application does update itself, sometimes I go a while without firing it up so seeing the release in Fever would be nice.
After some brief Googling I didn’t come across anything that was obviously designed to create feeds from Ruby (outside of Rails). So I opened up the Atom Feed spec and built the feed manually. The end result is a Ruby script and a feed (updated daily) at: http://home.wezm.net/files/virtualbox.atom. Thanks to the brilliant nokogiri this was relatively straightforward.
My script is below:
To Title Case Bookmarklet
I’ve make a bookmarklet out of David Gouch’s Javascript implementation of John Gruber’s Title Case Perl script.
Drag this link to your bookmarks bar: Title Case
Seems to work ok in Firefox, IE 6 has issues.