Category: observations

Optimized Firefox builds:

Firefox [Trunk/OS X] optimized for PowerPC 7450 (newer G4):

These have gotten speedier in the past couple of days . . . and some other bugs seem to have gone away (form entry was problematic at times, for example).

Still no Cocoa support, though. *&*&*&$@@#

Tennis court laid out on a helipad:

Cory Doctorow:

The Dubai Duty Free Men’s Open match between Roger Federer and Andre Agassi will be conducted on a special tennis green that’s been laid out on the 7-star Burj Al Arab hotel’s helipad.

Link

(via We Make Money Not Art)

That should cut down on the crowd noise, but you wouldn’t want to chase a bad ball too aggressively . . .

Comments on 10678 | Ask MetaFilter:

My high school daughter has been assigned some odd books for her English class. Decent books, but not heavyweights. Thinking back it was the same when I was in high school: weird selections: Silas Marner, Invisible Man, Scarlet Letter. So I was wondering: what would be some great books to read in a high school English class?

Via Brad DeLong, we get the MeFi community’s take on good lit for high schoolers, both in list and discursive aside form. Worth bookmarking.

I just discovered an annoyance: a track I purchased from the iTunes Music Store has become truncated, and the backup is similarly impaired.

Is there a tool that can go through a stack of files and ensure that their metadata matches reality? Of course, this file is toast: I’ll need to either re-purchase it through iTMS or *koff* acquire it some other way, but it might be useful to be able to periodically check up on the status of your collection.

This also suggests my backup regime needs work . . . overwriting backups with bad files is not much help.

So in the course of publishing these sections of Flatland, I have found I needed to reformat and clean them up (sometimes for odd line breaks, other times for artifacts that textile would misinterpret). It boiled down to a few common operations, and after reading Gruber’s writeup on how AppleScript-ability makes for a world-beating OS X app, it struck me that I have rarely used Applescript in OS X. I found myself playing with some the scripts that come with ecto (Thanks, Adriaan.) and realized it was worth another look.

So this time, when I copied from ecto to TextWrangler to use the search and replace options there, I turned on the Recording option in the Scripts menu and let it log my movements. The result?

tell application “TextWrangler”

activate
replace ”


” using “•” searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {search mode:literal, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false}

replace ”

” using ” ” searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {search mode:literal, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false}

replace “•” using ”


” searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {search mode:literal, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false}

replace “–” using ” — ” searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {search mode:literal, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false}
replace ” ” using ” ” searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {search mode:literal, starting at top:true, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false}

end tell

And it works just fine. Faster than keystrokes, I can attest to that. I couldn’t have written this, based on what I know now, but I can now pick this apart and add or adjust some of the steps, with this as a template.

NB: if you try this — recording some steps you already perform — the results are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/${Application}/Scripts. You can then open your handiwork in the Script Editor (accessible through the Scripts menu) and see what you ended up with.

Now playing: Thanks For The Pepperonni by George Harrison from the album “All Things Must Pass [Disc 2]” | Get it (1)

Cory highlights the argument that

Sorry if I’m stating the obvious, but it’s television. Signals broadcast through the air. Sorry to burst the bubbles of the folks in Hollywood, but you can’t control the genie if you’re throwing it out of the bottle at the speed of light. Accept the fact that people have the right to record their television shows, and don’t complain when they trade them.

I think it helps to remember a key difference in how the TV markets are structured in US and the rest of the world. In the UK (and in Canada, at one time, perhaps even today), TV set owners were required to buy a TV license for their receivers. Those fees paid for commercial-free television of a quality unknown in the US market (Upstairs, Downstairs, Monty Python, the Hitchhiker’s Guide . . . ). While here in the US, advertisers pay for the programming and make a lot of the decisions about what get shown (ever wonder why the networks copy each other so aggressively? It’s not based on audience response alone. Does the name Jamie Kellner mean anything to you?). So yes, the signals are broadcast through the air, but in one market, people subscribe directly through their licenses, and in the other it’s an indirect relationship.

Guardian | Second sight:

Britain leads the world in piracy. We are responsible for 38.4% of TV downloads in the EU and 18.5% worldwide. Australia is second with 15.6% and the US a poor third on 7.3%. The reason is simple. The pirated programmes are mainly made in English by US companies and released earlier there than here. Top of the piracy charts is 24 (95,000 downloads an episode) followed by Star Trek: Enterprise (90,000).

This looks more like a business opportunity than a problem: if I was a cable operator or ISP, I would be trying to find a way to get that stuff into my network for resale, rather than have people jamming the network with duplicated outbound requests. I would be looking at what gets traded and trying make sure I have better quality versions on hand, as soon or sooner than the “pirates.” <aside>This is a big problem with the p2p nets: the quality is so variable, it’s not always worth bothering to look for stuff. If music files are so chaotic, how frustrating are video files?</aside>

This has always been a puzzle to me, how people assume that every market is structured identically. Ten years ago, I remember having to explain to people that free local phone calls were not the norm around the world. Imagine paying a per-minute charge for calls to a local access number for dial-up service, as well as the rates for the ISP service. And people wondered why internet usage was low outside the US.