Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

As much as I like to bitch and moan about AppleScript, AppleScriptStudio isn’t too bad for creating simple applications. In a couple of hours, I just wrote a simple stand-alone application that monitors the current song playing in iTunes, and allows rating to occur, independent of the iTunes window. It also allows for a larger range of values as the rating, rather than the iTunes 0-5 stars. The tick marks are on the slider so you can see what the current rating will be in terms of the iTunes display.

Features:

• Automatically updates display from iTunes when song changes
• Automatically updates iTunes rating whenever it’s changed
• Allows for more flexible rating than basic iTunes, and most other programs capable of changing ratings.
• Unobtrusive, can sit in the corner of the screen while working.

Limitations:

• Ugly icon

I take no responsibility if this toasts your iTunes library - I use it with mine, but your mileage may vary.

Here’s a little screenshot, and the archive is iTunes Rater.
(Only Version 0.2 is still available!)

The AppleScript code is IMHO interesting:

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This March is the 100 year anniversary of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

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I just started reading “Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life” (Steven Johnson) today, and then find a link to his blog tonight. Synchronicity! After reading through most of the stuff there, and subscribing to his RSS feed so I don’t miss anything, I finally found a link to a review he wrote of the Jim Carrey movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I’ve just read, in creating the links that it was a Kaufman film (ie. Being John Malkovitch / Adaptation).

I may have to rent it and have a watch.

So, here’s SBJ’s article: The Science of Eternal Sunshine - You can’t erase your boyfriend from your brain, but the movie gets the rest of it right. By Steven Johnson: http://slate.msn.com/id/2097502/

iTunes: Your Disco Needs You from the album “Light Years” by Kylie Minogue

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Typing Naracoorte into CityBrowser provides some interesting things to chuckle about:

Citybrowser reveals everything about a town!

Naracoorte is located on the Keith to Mount Gambier Road, 350 km. Naracoorte was like over 200,000 years ago. Naracoorte in the heart of the south-east of South Australia and provides visitors the opportunity to purchase direct from. Naracoorte will host. Naracoorte is situated in the south east of South Australia, wine lovers have become to know this popular area as the Limestone Coast region. Naracoorte was founded by Scotsman William MacIntosh in 1845. Naracoorte in the heart of the Limestone Coast. Naracoorte will lead you through to the next wine zone, Wrattonbully, a new wine district.

The one I like best is the one in red above: I thought someone might have been blogging about Naracoorte, and read it as “Naracoorte was, like, over 200,000 years ago”. But a quick Google produced a couple of pages about the Wonambi caves, and “…what Naracoorte was like over 200,000 years ago…”

And apparently Naracoorte hosts the biggest tractor and engine rally in March. Might have to go home then…

iTunes: Betterman from the album “Triple J Hottest 100 - Volume 9″ by John Butler Trio

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We spent the first part of the first day back at school watching a short video about a Chicago Fishmonger where they throw the fish around, and have heaps of fun.

We had to relate that back to our own employment within a school. I’m not sure some of the members of my group took it completely seriously.

The best thing we came up with was Curriculum is a Fish.

Make of that what you will.

iTunes: Take The Long Way Home from the album “Sunday 8pm” by Faithless

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I know how fantastic QE (the original, US version) is. I even watch it sometimes. And we are all waiting for the Australian version. Waiting to see just how many episodes they play before they pull the plug.

For those Naracoortians watching who don’t get real TV, or aren’t aware, Ty Henschke, the fashion one, is an ex-Naracoorte boy.

And I think we all knew he was gay back in high school, didn’t we…

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Boing Boing: LA train wreck: the copycat effect:

Coleman describes the “copycat effect” as “what happens when the media makes an event into a ‘hot death story’ and then via behavior contagion, more deaths, suicides, murders, and more occur in a regularly predictive cycle.”

South Australia actually has a pretty nice ‘code of conduct’ where media outlets (by-and-large) do not report on suicides in general, and youth suicides in particular, since there is a definite copycat effect. And then the Advertiser went and put front page images of when a student at a particular high school killed himself, at school.

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New Scientist Breaking News - Spherical robot provides rolling security cover:
A spherical roving robot designed to detect and report intruders…

Does it unfurl and stand up like those cool robots in the newer star wars movies?

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Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms:
…male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey’s bottoms…

Isn’t science great!

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I really like the way Apple decided to ‘package’ applications, plugins and the like with MacOS X. It actually makes it easy to see how stuff works. Take basic applications, and most of them are just an executable, but it’s easy to add modularity, and replace GUI elements and so forth.

I’ve grown tired of Toast: it seems to fail more than half of the time when burning DVDs, and I know the media is good, because Disk Utility has no problems burning! I intended to make an AppleScript that burned the selected disk image to a DVD/CD, but found that Disk Utility was not scriptable. But there exists a CLI command called hdiutil that can do most of the stuff Disk Utility can (at least with disk images).

The command to burn an image to a Recordable Drive is:

hdiutil burn <imagename>

All I need to be able to do is get this to happen as a contextual menu. As far as I can tell, it should be possible to do this from AppleScript, or python, or bash. Even better, I should be able to automatically create the <Name>.plugin/* directory structure, and what the contents need to look like, as soon as I can find out exactly what needs to be where!

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