Control Option Command

I can’t quite remember who coined the term “Echoes” to describe those odd, sometimes puzzling or even spooky coincidences we sometimes experience.

You know what I mean. You meet a random person at a party who turns out to be your second cousin. You and your new romance discover that you were both following the same band on tour the same year.

—apparent non sequitur change of subject—

I’ve told you about my girlfriend Kaja. She’s an artist. Traditional; She paints pictures.

Me. I’m no artist. I used to do some illustration work though. I was never any good at finishing stuff unless it was paid work, but I did try to express some feelings now and then. Usually with crude and crass symbolism.

—another apparent non sequitur that actually reveals the punchline—

2005 wasn’t a real good year for Kaja. She was going through some pretty ugly personal problems and was troubled with anxiety and depression.

It was a pretty crappy year for me too. In fact, it marked a personal low for me. Never before, and thankfully; Never after have I felt so depressed.

So Kaja, visual girl, painted a painting that represented her feelings.

It’s pretty telling. A girl (the artist) crouched over in defeat with spikes driven into her back. “What is more noble…” She is trapped between light and dark. Roadkill between two states of being.

When I saw this in her portfolio, some 6 years later, I immediately started going through my old archived folders. Turns out that in that same year, before depression turned me completely incapacitated I made this (obviously unfinished) illustration:

That is all…

It was not my intention to turn this blog into some mock re-enactment of the bipolar curve, but…

shit…

It’s on me again.

Read the rest of this article »

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

Just a quick one to say that although I still think it makes more sense, I retract my original proposal of making the 10th of December “Ada Lovelace day” out of respect for the efforts over at Finding Ada.

We had a short exchange on Twitter and I was assured that something was being planned for next year as well, and add that to the fact that I really don’t have it in me to organize a piss-up in a brewery and the course becomes clear.

Also; I rediscovered this delightful comic which apparently came as a result of the 24th of March initiative:

That is all?

If you managed to visit this blog in the 10 minutes or so before this post goes live you might have been slightly befuddled by the fact that your address bar doesn’t say parallaxdenigrate.net as you might have expected, but rather ctrloptcmd.com.

So I’ve finally moved the blog to a new domain, and let me tell you; It wasn’t easy. Oh, exporting and importing the MySQL tables was a breeze and implementing the 301 redirect wasn’t too complicated. No, the challenge was in deciding on a domain name that wasn’t already taken. In the process I probably bought about 15 domains just to get one I liked enough to use.

Now, gentle reader, you might ask yourself “What the fuck is supposed to be the point of all this?“, to which I might reply; “Well, even if parallaxdenigrate.net was a amusing domain name to the likes of me who are blessed with an odd sense of humor, it’s not exactly what you’d call memorable. Try to tell someone to type in ‘parallaxdenigrate.net’ into their browser and you’ll see what I mean.” You, in turn may exclaim something along the lines of “Are you retarded? How the blazing hell is ‘ctrloptcmd.com’ easier to remember than your previous parrylaxy thingie? You suck. I’m not gonna read your blog anymore.” at which juncture in our fascinating exchange I might counter with “Aha! But if you just remember controloptioncommand.com, which naturally redirects to this, abbreviated form of the same sequence, I think you’ll find it immensely easier to keep lodged in your cerebrum the unified resource locator corresponding to this, my humble blog.” at which point you’ve probably left so I’d be talking to myself.

Regardless! Here it is, the new and not at all improved version 1.000001 of parallaxdenigrate controloptioncommand.

Although I’ll be keeping parallaxdenigrate.net online for a while just to make sure nobody gets lost, I’d strongly encourage you to update your bookmarks and feeds.