Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

As someone whose digital music collection keeps growing (now filling, despite my previous pledge, all but 15 GB on a 270 GB drive), I am always alert for new ways of managing the mountain of music. One trick that has been productive has been putting track metadata, including lists of musicians, actual recording dates, and [...]

I’ve uploaded a bare bones AppleScript that I’ve found useful over the past few weeks. The script, Increment Playcount, does what it says: it bumps the playcount of a track in iTunes by 1 and sets the Last Played date to the current date and time. It’s been helpful to me because many of my [...]

After the carpal tunnel moment earlier today, I decided to look on the bright side of spam. I updated my hoary old ManilaHandler AppleScript to add support for the Manila.message.delete method (and at the same time bundled the support script SOAPXMLRPCHandler into the body of the script). And I wrote a simple AppleScript, massDeleteManila, that [...]

Philip Greenspun Weblog: How long is the average Internet discussion forum posting?. I’m less interested in Philip’s answer than I am in the methodology: simple SQL select statements that give you very important product design data. People talk about “data mining” and “business intelligence” as though they’re complicated, new skill sets, but really all you [...]

Mac OS X Hints: Map Address Book addresses via Google Maps. This is the sort of low tech URL-based hack that is perfect for AppleScript, and very easy to debug. An older Mac OS X Hints article discusses the plug-in capability and provides another sample script. From that, it looks like you capture the field [...]

First Panther note: some of my scripts don’t seem to work under Mac OS X 10.3. Specifically, Look Up Current Track in iTunes doesn’t work and iTunes2Manila fails because it can’t connect to the Internet. Wonder if Apple changed how SOAP calls work… Update: Changed or more precisely broke, it looks like, based on evidence [...]

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’m running an AppleScript once an hour to download data from Weblogs.com. For anyone who may be interested in seeing how it’s done, the code is below and is easily adaptable to other scripting languages, including DOS Batch (I know, I’ve done it). This is first pass code, not [...]

I noted that I had let a new high water mark go by last week; the weblogs.com data watch has been updated and you can download the new data set here. The new high water mark is amazing, too: out of nowhere, it jumped from under 3000 to above 4000 weblogs in a three-hour period. [...]

As I promised a few weeks ago, I’ve spent a little more time working on AmazonHandler. The biggest problems people have had with it are that it requires a supporting script which has to be loaded from a fixed location on your hard disk, and there wasn’t an example of how to parse the output. [...]

I’ve had no less than four people contact me within the last few weeks to tell me that AmazonHandler, my AppleScript glue to allow calling the Amazon Web Services API, isn’t working for them. The most common error is “Can’t make ‘http://soap.amazon.com/onca/soap’ into a record” but others have been reported as well, including problems with [...]

Dave continues to explore the joys of getting Userland’s flagship workgroup blogging solution, Manila, up and functional at Harvard. Today’s story captures him learning about a potential conflict between Frontier’s built-in web server and Microsoft IIS, if both are running on the same box. This is exactly the sort of thing that more software developers, [...]

… with being a part-time hobbyist developer. I’d love to implement trackback pinging in Manila Envelope, but I really, really don’t have the time right now.more…

All the scripts in the subject line have been updated for Jaguar capability. You can download them here. For details on what changed, read this.more…

…I got iTunes2Manila working again. The problems appear to be rooted in changes to Apple’s implementation of XML-RPC and SOAP in Jaguar: Passing HTML tags such as italics and anchor tags in text that is a parameter to an XML-RPC or SOAP call causes an error. You can deal with this by escaping the opening [...]

Sigh. Not yet. I just tried my modification of the iTunes2Manila script that encodes the HTML tags as entities. No joy…still posts an empty message body. Time for some serious debugging.