One problem down – search and replace

Shortly after I posted my last cry of despair over random crashing, I downloaded a new example AppleScript Studio project that contained a Cocoa string replacement method, rather than the one I had been using before which toggled AppleScript’s text delimiters back and forth. Making the switch cost me nothing in execution time and appears to have eliminated the crashing bug. I had to alter the Cocoa method so that it wasn’t doing case insensitive searching, but otherwise easy as pie. Next one… crashing when updating the department list.

Well, darn.

On a tip from a mailing list, I tried a change to Manila Envelope this morning to see whether I could stop an intermittent crashing bug. The change may have stopped the crashes, but unfortunately it also screwed up the text being posted quite badly. Apologies to all who were confused by posts on the page (or in the RSS) that said something like: “tMcWrldTky,pplennuncedBluetthsupprtfrtheMc”.

For the record, if your script is designed to convert accented characters to HTML entities, it’s a bad idea to convert them to Unicode first. It apparently converts them down to regular unaccented characters rather than their proper Unicode entities. When you search and replace on a regular vowel, this is what you get…

NY Times on Radio

The latest from Userland… full New York Times headlines in Radio UserLand. Having previously subscribed to Times feeds from NewsIsFree, I can only guess at the technical differences. Dave has been talking for days now about new drivers to allow Radio’s news page to pick up non-RSS XML-based news sources. My guess is Dave made an agreement with the Times to allow Userland to syndicate an existing XML format there and gave Radio the ability to read it. I think (but am not sure) that this is different from the way NewsIsFree works.

From a qualitative perspective? NewsIsFree’s feeds don’t include bylines; their opinion feed doesn’t include letters to the editor. Their feeds appear to be more selective and differently formatted.

Is Dave competing with NewsIsFree? Not in the professional market; their response to my story about syndication makes that pretty clear. But what is he doing? Userland’s not about content, it’s about providing pipes for content. The New York Times feeds appear to be the demo for this new Radio capability.

Moving slowly

Spring break is here. I’m taking the advice of one of my professors; in a group meeting yesterday, she told us, “You all look really tired. Go home and get some sleep.” Yes ma’am. Well, some sleep and some EV Nova

OmniOutliner2OPML v. 1.0.2

The new version of OmniOutliner2OPML, v. 1.0.2, has been released. It now produces something that looks like conformant XML–attributes of an <outline> element are now within the base tag, and outline elements without children are closed inline with an “/&gt”. If you have an OPML compatible application, I’d appreciate hearing if you can parse output from my script.
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A real mind bomb: Free RCS

The Radio Community Server, which hosts communities of Radio UserLand users behind the firewall, is now available at no charge. What does this mean? Radio is great knowledge management software–you blog about stuff going on (in your life or your industry or your project) and it automatically flows out to other people who have subscribed to your newsfeed. They get it downloaded to their desktops when they’re not looking.

Free? I wasn’t expecting this business move, Dave, but it’s smart. It’s easier for people to understand the benefits of Radio than of the RCS, but once they start playing with the RCS and realize the implications they’ll expand use of Radio inside their organization. Razor and blades, razor and blades… πŸ™‚
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Love is in the air…

Congratulations to my (distant) cousin Scott who, rumors have it, got engaged over the weekend. Scott was a little bit like a big brother that we only saw once a year when I was growing up. Best wishes to Scott and Karen–you’re about to start a really good journey.

Escape Velocity: Nova…

…is out. The latest installment of Ambrosia’s space opera game clocks in at 75 MB, explaining why Ambrosia’s site is essentially unreachable. Looks like I now have something to do with that short break between my last class this week and our flight to New Jersey on Friday. πŸ™‚

I was seriously addicted to the previous installment in the series, Escape Velocity Overdrive, a few years back. This should be really good.

Good morning

Snow falling on Boston streets this morning. Quite a kiss-off from winter.

I’ll be working on two last assignments due tomorrow (the last day before our spring break starts Wednesday). Between that and a raspy throat I need to get checked by the doctor I’ll be away from blogging today. Talk amongst yourselves.

One last thought–as I was trying to think last night about ways to improve OmniOutliner2OPML, I realized that what’s really needed is a translation the other way, from OPML into OmniOutliner. I may start looking at that, though I doubt I’ll have it out before we leave for Italy.

BTW, is anyone else doing anything with OPML? One reader wrote in to say he was curious about my script but since he only had one app (Radio UserLand) that supported OPML, he really couldn’t do much with it…

Next, the Emmys!

Popping on quickly to share some family news: Tim’s and my father, Gus, auditioned for a walk-on spot on a TV pilot yesterday. Andie MacDowell is starting something up in the Asheville area. At this point I think I can legitimately say: our Dad is cooler than your Dad.
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Getting ready for Italy

One reason for the urgency in getting the DV camera: we’re finally taking Lisa’s parents to Italy. Lisa was to take them back in the fall. In fact they were supposed to fly out September 13. Needless to say, the flight was cancelled and they had travel credits to spend. The credits were enough to add me to the flight plans, so the decision was made to postpone the trip until my spring break. Which, thank heaven, starts Wednesday. We fly out next Sunday. I’m looking forward to getting over there again. It’s been too long.

Our itinerary: a day in Rome, then south to Campania. We’ll spend two days in the family’s ancestral home town of Calitri, then a few days in Positano and Amalfi, with a day trip to Capri, wrapping up with Easter weekend in Rome. Should be a lot of fun. Hopefully I won’t gain too much weight from all the incredible food.

Completing our personal “digital hub”

Lisa decided we needed a DV camcorder a while back–we’ll be moving to the other side of the country from our families, and we could send back video greetings with it. Then her bonus came in…

Yesterday we brought home a new Sony DCR-PC9 DV camcorder. It’s compact, lightweight, and takes both still photos and video. We tested the integration with the Mac this morning–it just works. Using iMovie, you can control the playback of the camera from the computer over its FireWire (aka IEEE 1394, aka iLink) interface. I didn’t have much hard disk space free, so I was alarmed to notice that importing 5 minutes of video took up about 1.5 GB, but I was able to trim it down after importing it and free up some of the space again.

And when I connected the camera via USB, it started up iPhoto and downloaded the photos on the camera’s Memory Stick automatically. I may get some photos on this site yet…
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OmniOutliner2OPML 1.0.1

Version 1.0.1 of my OmniOutliner2OPML script is now available for download. I couldn’t get through to my iDisk, so I posted it here instead. This version fixes a stupid bug that was introduced at the last minute.

The 1.0.1 release does not address some more fundamental issues with the script:

  • At present, there seems to be no way to get the type of a column in an OmniOutliner file via AppleScript–at least it’s not published in OO’s dictionary.
  • I can’t find documentation for the “type” element in the outline element of OPML. I know that “link,” “file,” and RSS are valid types, but what do those mean in the context of data in an OmniOutliner file? And what are the other valid types?

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