22 Jan 2010

The Hit List Forever

Let me get the cheesy redundant joke done right off the bat:

On top of my list of things to get done is to finish Dave Allens Getting Things Done.

How droll. What fun.1

On top of the personal hit list of Andy Kim of The Potion Factory I’m willing to bet a few shillings you’ll find “Finish The Hit List Touch”, the fabled iPhone companion app to The Hit List Mac. I’m not sure that’s sound prioritizing though. I think perhaps he should bump up “Reconsider customer communication strategies” to number 1.

If you’re unacquainted with the app, its history and the state of things today, let me offer a brief summary.

Read More »

Footnotes:

  1. And in my case actually the plain truth. I’m still halfway through after trying both dead tree and audiobook. For now I’m settling for getting something done. ↩
By Martin | Posted in Opinionated, Software | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)
15 Jan 2010

Another sad indication of societal ass-hattery

I use 2Do app on the iPhone to Get Something Done. It’s a beautiful, well-functioning and well-considered application of the Delicious Persuasion, and I’ve mused more than once that the best thing in-danger-of-vaporware company The Potion Factory could do would be to sub-contract these guys to handle their iPhone companion app. That’s a story for another day though. Suffice it to say that Guided Ways has produced a sterling piece of software and regularly updates the app with new functionality.1

So I was browsing their site over my microwaved cup of mud this morning and stumbled over this FAQ item. For the unclicky of you; It’s a reply to what seems to be an actual Frequently Asked Question about why the Guided Ways Software site contains links to software and utilities for reading the Quran, calculating prayer timings and so forth. Not on the 2Doapp.com site mind you, on the external site of the software company. 2Doapp.com, as far as I can tell contains no references to any religious practices. It is, in its nature, a wholly secular app.

It saddens me deeply that Guided Ways needs to address this “issue”. I had some notion, perhaps naive, that the people who were somewhat ahead in technology 2 were somehow above petty religious hatred and bigotry. I attributed that kind of moronic attitudes to backwards and isolated luddites who refused to deal with the inevitable globality 3 of today. Alas. Fear-mongering, narrow-mindedness and hate speech seems to have made Islamophobia ubiquitous.

Personally I find all religion disgusting, but that is my a personal view, and I don’t equate the flaws I perceive in religion with the ethical backbone of individuals of that faith. If the developers were using their site to preach in favor of, say, discrimination and persecution of homosexuals I wouldn’t want to give them my business, just as I wouldn’t with any christian fundamentalist spouting the same crap. So long as that is not the case I have no bigger qualms about buying from Guided Ways than from a christian, hindu, buddhist or atheist developer. I disagree with their view on the world, but as long as they don’t infringe upon the freedom and happiness of others I would die defending their right to hold those views. 4 The Quran does, as do the bible, contain views that are in conflict with my, and hopefully your, ethics but as long as we differentiate between the faith of Reverend Phelps and that of, say, the Bishop of Oxford5 it’s downright hypocritical if we don’t also differentiate between the faiths of, say Muhammad Ali and that of Osama Bin Laden.

I could go on, but I’ll try to sum up my stance now. If you equate Islam with terrorism and are frightened of muslims, and do not maintain the same attitude towards christians you are a hypocrite, and would do well to read Amin Maloofs texts on religious bigotry.
If you do refuse to do business with both muslims and christians out of disregard for religion you are, as we say in Norwegian “shooting sparrows with cannons”, and as we say in English “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”. Good luck with that.

Oh. And check out 2Do on iTunes.

Footnotes:

  1. And even provides a roadmap of features to come months into the future…Andy. ↩
  2. I.e. the people who are likely to seek out the developer of a program and read their FAQ ↩
  3. I made that word up. I’m such a well writeguy ↩
  4. So maybe I wouldn’t run off to die personally per se, but you get my drift. ↩
  5. Highly recommended link for anyone who need a break from US religious “war”. ↩
By Martin | Posted in Opinionated, iPhone | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)
14 Jan 2010

A few random AppleScript snippets

I was just writing an AppleScript to look up words on the excellent NinjaWords and decided to post it in case someone else needs something similar. Since one snippet of AppleScript is not a very meaty post, I’ll throw in a couple extra.

Look up word on NinjaWords

Select a word and copy it to the clipboard. Then invoke this script via Quicksilver or LaunchBar or whatever is your favorite tool for invocations.

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set clip_url to (the clipboard as string)
set lc_url to do shell script "echo " & clip_url & " | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'"
set ninjaURL to "http://ninjawords.com/" & lc_url
do shell script "open " & ninjaURL

Wrap link in ‘a href…’

Note: This one will look slightly different depending on whether you are using Quicksilver, LaunchBar, whatever. The key is that you pass a string value into the script and it returns one back to you. This example is for LaunchBar.
Copy a link to the clipboard, invoke the script, paste your now a-tagged link.

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on handle_string(vanillaStr)
  set quote to ASCII character 34
 
 
  set openTag to "<a href=" & quote
  set closeTag to quote & ">"
  set finishTag to "</a>"
 
  set TempTID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
  set AppleScript's text item delimiters to space & ":" & space
  if (count of text items of vanillaStr) is greater than 1 then
    set urlStr to text item 1 of vanillaStr
    set linkStr to text item 2 of vanillaStr
    set returnStr to openTag & urlStr & closeTag & linkStr & finishTag
  else if (count of text items of vanillaStr) is 1 then
    set urlStr to text item 1 of vanillaStr
    set linkStr to "linkage"
    set returnStr to openTag & urlStr & closeTag & linkStr & finishTag
  else
    beep
    return
  end if
  set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
  tell application "LaunchBar"
    perform action "Copy and Paste" with string returnStr
  end tell
end handle_string

New File

Sometimes you just want a dang text file to magically appear.

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try
  tell application "Finder" to set the this_folder ¬
    to (folder of the front window) as alias
on error -- no open folder windows
  set the this_folder to path to desktop folder as alias
end try
tell me to activate
set thefilename to text returned of (display dialog ¬
  "Create file named:" default answer "filename.txt")
set thefullpath to POSIX path of this_folder & thefilename
do shell script "touch \"" & thefullpath & "\""
do shell script "mate \"" & thefullpath & "\""

That’s it for now. I have some gems saved for a later post, but they wouldn’t make sense out of context so you’ll just have to wait.

By Martin | Posted in Automation, Code, Downloads and Copy-Pasteables, programming | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
10 Jan 2010

Set up your own lifestream using FriendFeed and… Dirty hacks

Lifestream
When Iceland went bust and started selling .is domains I grabbed martin.is. Of course I did. That’s the kind of guy I am. Even as I swiped that credit card (and by “swipe” I mean “typed in all my info into the appropriate boxes.”) I knew I had no idea what I was going to use it for, but what the hey; I’ve done plenty of even stupider domain purchases that never led to anything1.

So finally, the other day I decided to set up a “lifestream”. An aggregate feed of all the highly interesting stuff I do on the web. Not because I think anyone particularly needs or wants to know. It just seemed like the kind of thing that goes on a domain called “martin is”.
I really didn’t want to spend loads of time on this. I have a job, a daughter and a blog that are all already wailing for my attention, so tried plugging all my stuffs into a WordPress install using FeedWordPress and a couple of other similar plugins, but I found the results to be (unreliable | explosive | bewildering)2.

Alrighty then. What services do I know of that aggregate information like this? FriendFeed! I headed over to FF, and sure enough; Within half a minute I had managed to plug all the crap I generate into one massive hunka’data. In addition to supporting a bunch of services Friendfeed actually does pretty well parsing feeds from other sources and cutting the entries into little blurbs. Now only to get it out of there and onto my domain.

Read More »

Footnotes:

  1. Seriously. Need a domain? ↩
  2. Pick one. ↩
By Martin | Posted in Automation, Code, Web Dev | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
8 Jan 2010

O’Reilly iPhone app update

A short while ago I wrote about my disappointment with the O’Reilly iPhone apps. The other day I noticed that three of the four titles I originally bought had an update. I’ve finally had time to have a look at them and I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised.

The 1.1 versions are infinitely more readable but also feels a lot more responsive. The code isn’t breaking lines as often and not in such awful ways when it is.

Making code properly formatted on the iPhone is hard, and there’s still room for improvement but these new versions certainly wouldn’t have prompted me to write angry blog posts.
Thanks O’Reilly.

By Martin | Posted in Code, Opinionated, Software, iPhone | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)
31 Dec 2009

Another day, another decade

Throughout the year I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about some of the personal stuff that has been going on lately. There’s been a lot of it. Every time I wrote a post however I decided it was too revelatory, too emo, too whiny or too something else. This is a personal post, and it’s probably too “something”, but I decided to go ahead and post it anyway in the spirit of “not letting shit go unsaid just because you can’t decide on all the words.”

I was twittering the other day about how the noughties have been a pretty eventful decade for me on a personal level, building up to a crescendo and culminating in a pretty spectacular oh-nine.

I feel it’s worth writing a post about. Whether it’s worth reading a post about it I leave to the discretion of the reader.

Read More »

By Martin | Posted in Mental Hygiene, Personal | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)
30 Dec 2009

NSFW Rating System

BW6JK44BUVQH

It seems like people have a hair trigger when it comes to labeling their links “NSFW“. I’ve even seen warnings about NSFW language which seems like overdoing it a bit to me. Anyway, since using the label “NSFW” to refer to anything from cuss words in plain text to “Harry Potter / Tentacle Rape Slash Porn” seems pretty unhelpful, I’ve devised this easy to understand rating system.

Please rate your links accordingly from now on, so I can filter out the seriously freaky shit from some of the kindergarden stuff that seems to be NSF your W.

Nsfw Rating

By Martin | Posted in Opinionated, Pictures | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)
30 Dec 2009

Diplomacy

Actual conversation between me and Malin about the Norwegian movie “Pathfinder”.
Note: Lapps are the indegenous tribal folk of Scandinavia

  • Me: I saw it ages ago when I was just a kid. I was way too young to understand any of it.
  • Her: I guess you were only nine or eight at the time it was released.
  • Me: Yeah. I can only remember something about some Darth Vader-Lapps out to get the hero.
  • Her: Mmhmm? *Being busy with the baby*
  • Me: Hey! DARTH VADER-LAPPS!
  • Her: Oh, sorry. Let’s go again. I guess you were only eight or nine…
  • Me: Yeah. I only remember something about some Darth Vader-Lapps out to get the hero.
  • Her: Ahhhahaha! Darth Vader-Lapps. Good one!
  • Me: Thank you.
By Martin | Posted in No fit, Personal | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
20 Dec 2009

Crudmuffins

Update: Bug squashed. So buried deep in the archives there was a comment in which the author had innocently copy/pasted the characters “⌃ ⌥ ⌘” from my post. This was for some reason not sanitized in the SQL, which somehow borked the XMLRPC endpoint to the blog. This in turn meant that tools such as Marsedit, the WP iPhone app and pretty much anything that uses XMLRPC wouldn’t work.

Problematic as that may seem, the worst part is when shit like this fails silently. I pretty much cut the database into bitesize chunks, wiped the entire blog and restored each bit of data manually before I tracked down the perpetrator.

Things are pretty much back to normal now, except for a bit of maintenance work such as restoring categories and plugin settings.

Thanks for waiting.

Original post:
My site is currently experiencing something analogous to a heart-attack after 50 years on a steady McDonalds diet. It’s a crying shame, but with all the garbage that has been put into it it wasn’t really a huge surprise.
What I’m trying to say is that the site is slightly borked, that it’s my fault, and that I’m sorry; but it’s late and I’m too damn tired to fix it right now.

If you actually happen upon this blog in the couple of hours before I can get it repaired, expect a few “stnanks” here and there. I’ll update this post when the waters are safe agai

By Martin | Posted in Meta | Comments (0)
14 Dec 2009

Things Migrator 2

I noticed that my little app for migrating your data from Things to The Hit List still gets some hits. I haven’t really looked at it for ages, but I wasn’t terribly surprised to see that it’s broken under Snow Leopard.

I decided to fix it, expecting AppleScript projects in Xcode to work pretty much the same that they did before, and brother was I mistaken.

It seems that Apple decided AppleScript as a simple to grasp scripting language really has no place in Xcode anymore, and Cocoafied the bejeezus out of it. On the surface using the new Cocoa / AppleScript bridge feels like playing a nazi in most hollywood war movies. You’re still speaking English (Cocoa), just with a horrible German (AppleScript) accent.

The Migrator is just a little quick and dirty utility app, which AppleScript is perfect for, but rewriting this for 10.6 I felt I might as well have ported it to Cocoa (since I’m in the process of learning Objective C anyway). I didn’t though. I hacked my way through it using the Bridge, and I felt like Xcode was berating me the whole time.

I’m excited about Cocoa and Objective-C, but I loved AppleScript for what it was. I’m still going to be using AppleScript a lot, but unless I “See the light” of the Cocoa Bridge, I don’t think I’ll be making any GUI apps with it anymore. I also find it telling that there seems to be no documentation for the Cocoa / AppleScript Bridge except for the release notes that I can find.

Rant over.

Disclaimer:

  • This works fine for me. I make no guarantees that it’ll work for you. I think it will, and I’ll try to help you out if it doesn’t, but I’m not liable if your Mac explodes.
  • Caution: If you check the “Delete items from Things” option your items will be deleted from Things.
  • In order for this to work the app will empty your Things trash can regardless. If you really need the stuff in the Things trash can, perhaps it shouldn’t be in the trash.
  • I don’t have a Leopard machine handy, so I haven’t tested the Leopard version since I first posted it in May. It worked then, so it should work now.

Github
App – Leopard
Source Code – Leopard
App – Snow Leopard
Source Code – Snow Leopard

By Martin | Posted in Automation, Code, Downloads and Copy-Pasteables | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)