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Paul's Time Sink

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Updated Post Trackback script

Paul Westbrook | 13 March, 2007 21:19

When I upgraded to the Mac Book Pro, the Post Trackback script, that is used to send trackbacks from within ecto, stopped working.  The mgrep scripting addition, was only compiled for PPC, so script fails to run on an Intel Mac.

I finally got around to removing the dependancy on this addition.  Now this script runs a perl script with the do shell script command, to to the parsing.

The new version of the script can be found here.

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Really Simple Discovery for LifeType

Paul Westbrook | 12 March, 2007 00:27

The Really Simple Discovery specification makes it very easy for xmlrpc client to discover the xmlrpc url as well as the xmlrpc APIs that blogging software supports.  If this is implemented, all a user needs to know is the blog url, and their user name and password.  They will not need to know what url needs to be used when using xmlrpc communication.

I decided to implement this as a plugin for LifeType 1.2, and it works very well.  Here is the wiki page for the plugin.  I will update the page to include the real link, once the 1.2 plugins are pushed to sourceforge.  In the mean time, the plugin can be downloaded though svn or in the latest snapshot.

[via Red Sweater Blog]

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Scheduled Launching/Quitting Applications

Paul Westbrook | 09 March, 2007 20:08

On our Mac mini, I wanted to schedule an application to launch in the morning, and quit at night.  I was able to pretty easily configure launchd and AppleScript to do this.

For example, if I wanted to launch TextEdit, I would create these AppleScripts, and saved them as applications.

tell application "TextEdit"
    activate
end tell

tell application "TextEdit"
    quit
end tell

 (More)

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Lingon

Paul Westbrook | 08 March, 2007 22:18

In this post, I mentioned Launchd Editor.  This was not the ideal tool for me, as once you created the plist file, you had to manually install it.  It looks like Lingon solves this problem.

Lingon gives you a graphical interface to create the launchd plist files, and will install them for you.  Another interesting feature is the wizard, which walks you through the steps to create the launchd files.  This is what Apple should have done when initially when they first shipped launchd.

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Proliferation of Google Accounts

Paul Westbrook | 08 March, 2007 12:35

The number of Google Accounts that I have is steadily increasing.  Now I have 3 4 accounts.

  1. One is my gmail.com account
  2. One is my paul@domain1 account with password X (Created in Google Apps for Your Domain)
  3. One is my paul@domain1 account with password Y (Created in Google Groups)
  4. One is my paul@domain2 account (Created in Google Adsense)

There is some inconsistancy with where and how these Accounts can be used.  For example, I can use the gmail.com account to log into most Google services. I can use the credentials that were created in Google Apps to log into Google Apps, but not the main Google services.

When I use Google Notifier or g4me, I can use either the gmail.com account or the Google Apps account, and I get the correct information, but I can't use my other account credentials..

 (More)

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Amazon Unbox on TiVo

Paul Westbrook | 07 March, 2007 20:54

It is always nice to be able to see something that you worked on actually being used.  While I worked at TiVo, I worked on the project to download video to the DVRs.

Now you can download Amazon Unbox videos directly to Series2 or Series3 TiVos.  I was curious about Amazon Unbox, but previously it was only available on Windows PCs.  Also, I never thought that watching video on a small computer screen was a compelling experience

 (More)

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Save website bandwidth

Paul Westbrook | 07 March, 2007 00:18

This post has some nice tips on how to save bandwidth for websites. I currently am using the gzip option, and I will look into some of the others if I start having high bandwidth usages.

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Daylight Saving Time bug in Google Calendar

Paul Westbrook | 05 March, 2007 13:15

I have noticed what appears to be a bug in how Google Calendar handles the Daylight Saving Time transition.  Appointements after  March 11th are appearing an hour later than they do before.

For example, I have a weekly meeting shceduled for 3pm PST on Mondays.  On the 12th, the meeting appears to be scheduled for 4pm on March 12th.

 (More)

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How FairPlay Works

Paul Westbrook | 02 March, 2007 22:59

This is an interesting article on how Apple's iTunes DRM works.

[via Slashdot]

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LifeType 1.2

Paul Westbrook | 02 March, 2007 22:37

I have just updated this blog to the latest beta version of LifeType 1.2.  (I had been running it on some other blogs.)  The upgrade was pretty seamless.  The wizard took care of upgrading the database, without any problems.

This page describes the new features in LifeType 1.2

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Speed Mail.app

Paul Westbrook | 01 March, 2007 21:26

This post on on Hawk Wings has a suggestion on how to speed up Mail.app.  Essentially this tip removes the fragmentation from the subjects table of Mail's sqlite database.  (VACUUM documentation page)

[via TUAW]

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Copy files with resource forks through ssh

Paul Westbrook | 01 March, 2007 21:15

This hint on macosxhints has a tip on how to preserve resource forks for file copies through ssh.  

scp -E user@host:path/filename path/

This will copy both the data and resource forks, if both machines are running Mac OS X 10.4.

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Vidalia

Paul Westbrook | 01 March, 2007 21:07

I am very interested in supporting projects and software that promote privacy and security.  I just discovered Vidalia, which is a cross-platform GUI for Tor and Privoxy.

Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allow network traffic to be sent securely and privately around the internet.  Privoxy is a web proxy that blocks cookies, and removes ads.

 (More)

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Traffic on Google Maps

Paul Westbrook | 01 March, 2007 13:20

Google Maps just added real-time traffic data to their maps.  With a quick glance, you can tell which roads are congested.  To view this information while looking at a map or at driving directions, all you need to do is click on the "Traffic" button.

There are a couple of features that I would love to see added:

  1. When the returned driving directions use roads that are showing slow traffic, there should be an option to regenerate directions to avoid those roads.
  2. When viewing driving directions, there should be a "Notify of Traffic Problems" button.  When you click this button, you would be able to enter your cell phone number.  Now, if any of the roads included in the driving directions experiences a slow down, a text message would be sent to your cell phone, with that warning.

[via Google Operating System]

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