-
one for MAKE magazine?
Month: October 2006
definitions
optimism, n, the quality possessed by someone sensitizing paper for sun prints in Seattle during October, especially if rainfall is audible.
Now playing: Everybody’s Jumpin’ by The Dave Brubeck Quartet from the album “Time Out” | Get it
camera building experience et al
My 6×17 cm pinhole panorama camera is coming along. The film guides and internal baffles are glued and setting up. Cutting a circle on the drill press was hairier than I expected but a learning experience all the same. The chuck on these low-end Harbor Freight drill presses is their weak point, and it becomes very evident when using a circle cutter. I think I did get a circle out of it, nothing I can’t fix with some sanding. No pictures of the process, sorry. If I build another, I’ll document it.
Not sure why I chose this as my first building project but I’m committed now.
My recent foray into cyanotype printing is getting some good feedback at Flickr. So perhaps there is some more fun to be had with that. Gum-bichromate prints look really nice as well.
more multitrack experiments
this is a great way to clear out self-imposed earworms. I need never play this again now.
links for 2006-10-13
-
now if only i could draw
AppleStore selfportrait
My iBook is off for repair so I took a lustful look at the new hardware on display. A refurbished MacBook can be had for what I paid for the iBook three years ago.
<*boggle*>
and the 2x3GHz DualCore Pro doesn’t bear looking at.
links for 2006-10-12
-
brutal efficiency or incompetence? the invasion killed twice as many Iraqis in 3 years as Saddam did in 20: a 14-fold increase per year.
-
if Foley the pederast were a Democrat, you think the story would have languished like this one did?
-
[A] family of four with an income of $46,500 or less would qualify.The UW costs an undergraduate $5,985 a year.
flicker, flicker
Anyone else have a problem with their iBook screen flickering? Looks like AppleCare will be invoked one last time (mine runs out in 4 weeks). But this seems to be a well-documented problem.
primitive photography
I have been experimenting with cyanotypes.
The cyanotype process predates photography and is a kind of sun print, using simple chemistry to sensitize paper and the sun’s UV radiation to expose the image. The prints are made as contact prints.
This took 2+ hours to expose in my kitchen windowbox, propped at a 45° angle: light in October at the 47th parallel not so strong.
Rube Goldberg, please pick up the white courtesy phone
Welcome, Daring Fireballers!
What I find interesting is that we can even have multiple ways to accomplish things like this. Not sure how the Leading Brand affords it users this kind of power . . . .
Daring Fireball: How to Determine if a Certain App Is Running Using AppleScript and Perl:
But so how do you test if an application is currently running?
There’s More Than One Way to Do It: Gruber suggests this method.
white:~ paul$ time osascript -e ‘tell app “System Events” to count processes whose name is “Finder”’
1real 0m5.296s
user 0m0.524s
sys 0m0.380s
But it takes anywhere from 1 to 5 seconds: spinning up AppleScript to call an application is expensive.
This method takes a little less time:
white:~ paul$ time ps auxwww | grep -v grep | grep -c Finder
1real 0m0.217s
user 0m0.022s
sys 0m0.075s
And it could be even more concise if you didn’t care about the count: Gruber’s initial question is “is an application running?” but he is actually doing more than that by returning a count. That could be a limitation/feature of AppleScript.
If you were married to AppleScript or somehow need this to be a double-clickable item, you could make a script file that wraps the icky terminal commands:
on run
set theCommand to “ps auxwww | grep -v grep | grep -c Finder”
do shell script theCommand
end run
It’s a nice compromise: slower than the command line but faster than a pure AppleScript solution.
white:~ paul$ time osascript test.scpt
1real 0m0.717s
user 0m0.310s
sys 0m0.226s