Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Apologies for not blogging sooner. Between slow network connectivity here and the generally fragile state of editthispage.com, I’ve been unable to get to my site all day.
I had some insights on the problems with my scripts on the flight back. By reviewing the Apple-published scripting list archives, I realized that others were having problems publishing [...]

Dave asks folks to try out a revised Radio aggregator that uses the guid attribute in RSS 2.0. Problem: After installing it, it actually re-lists every item in the person’s RSS file each time you scan, regardless of if you’ve already seen and deleted the item or not.more…

There are a ton of people writing iCal scripts. The coolest so far is this announcement on Studio Log: Have Quicktime Player Read Your Schedule for Today. I can’t look at the script on my work machine, but I would guess it grabs the text from iCal and runs it through text-to-speech and outputs it [...]

When I was a programmer we would have killed for something like this. There are a ton of business benefits too. It’s really hard to get all the stakeholders in a system design case to sit in the same room for three weeks to come up with the right structure for a data model. This [...]

I narrowed the problem with iTunes2Manila down last night. It’s got to be in the code that handles creating and posting the news item to Manila; the sister script (iTunes2TextEdit) works fine putting the same information into a TextEdit document, so the disappearance of the track information must be happening somewhere else.
I haven’t made much [...]

I was at an all day company meeting and couldn’t update the blog. Priority tonight: why doesn’t iTunes2Manila work???

I haven’t had nearly enough wacky programming ideas recently. Here’s one:

Apple is rolling out iCal, a free calendar application, for Mac OS X 10.2 (aka Jaguar)
All weblogs have calendars
What if iCal could be an interface to a weblog?

I don’t have Jaguar yet, but it might be interesting to play with this. Maybe an RSS [...]

The AmazonHandler script is an AppleScript glue script for the Amazon web services released this week. It uses the built in SOAP capabilities of AppleScript and requires Mac OS X 10.1 or higher to operate. It requires my SOAPXMLRPCHandler script library. Both scripts are available from my scripts page.
I’m working on a [...]

UserLand just released an implementation of the MetaWeblog API for Manila. This is pretty cool—this API is more robust than the Blogger API and is supported by both Manila and Radio.

Coincidentally, I’ve just been playing around with the API for some of my existing scripts. Updates as I go. It’s a faster learning path than [...]

Quick shout out to Craig, whom I added to my blogroll yesterday. He’s a former coworker from my first job out of college—a very gifted programmer and occasional Slashdot contributor. Still in the greater DC area, he’s now working at a Maryland startup. And he doesn’t blog as often as he should. more…

Jesse Shanks: More AppleScript and OmniOutliner: OmniOutliner as a Script Analysis and Management Tool. Jesse emailed me Friday to ask if he could use my OmniOutliner2OPML script as the basis of the script in this article. It’s a good thing I was checking email in Bar Harbor! Of course, the server apears to have fallen [...]

New version of my iTunes2Manila script out today. This little script, which posts the currently playing track in iTunes to your Manila weblog as a news item, now uses proper typography (curly quotes!) and includes an automatic wrapper for a Google search on the artist name.

Future to do: have a way to update a playlist [...]

In the spirit of full disclosure, faithful reader Oliver Wrede pointed out that he had problems using my script OmniOutliner2OPML with certain outlines. I don’t have a fix yet, and it may be a while, but I wanted to report what’s up for other users that may run into the same thing:

If a cell in [...]

Getting in late on Dave’s Google Outline Browser. I have a hell of a lot of respect for this—because it feels really familiar.

Before I left my former company, I wrote a new feature for our flagship application, a client server application that supported government procurement. The feature traced complex relationships between contracting documents—requirements, solicitations, contracts, [...]

The Muddy Charles, a dive bar at MIT formerly known for serving Budweiser and Smuttynose, is now selling Samuel Smith’s Taddy Porter in bottles. Color me much, much happier than I was about five minutes ago.more…