That quote, my friends, is why you should really think more about what you type, and how it may be interpreted.
October 2007
Monthly Archive
Fri 19th Oct 2007
Address Book: Family Relationships
Posted early in the morning, filed under AppleScript.I have a fairly large address book.488 contacts, who are shared between my various hobbies and pastimes. Including a large number of people who are related to one another. In some of these cases, I have populated the Related Names field, often where I just need to know a child’s parents names, but also in other cases where the related person is also in my address book.
I have several groups of people who are siblings, and I could go through each sibling and add in ‘father, mother, sister, brother’ items for each sibling, but it would be great if this could be done automatically.
The father/mother bit should be relatively straightforward, since the fields are the same:
Bob and Alice have two children, Carol and David. If I have put father:Bob and mother:Alice in for Carol, and I put brother:David in, then the system should be able to easily put father:Bob and mother:Alice in for David.
The tricky bit is with gender related to siblings. There is no default field for gender in Address Book, so how does the system know if David should have sister:Carol or brother:Carol? Especially since I don’t want to have to hand-code a list of names and which gender they are. I have many people with unusual names, and some with non-gender-specific names.
A short-term solution might be to (a) see if there are other sibling relationships (ie, if there is also brother:Eric, and Eric has sister:Carol, then clearly Carol is a female, and David should also have sister:Carol); or (b) have a temporary sibling:Carol field, which can be changed by the user.
You could then have a Smart Address Book Group which has all people with a sibling: field, which would make finding those people easier.
Conceivably, this should be possible with AppleScript. I have, however, butted heads with Address Book’s scripting in the past. It doesn’t always seem to be that easy to get data from this application.
Perhaps this type of feature, as well as my other hope for Address Book (notice if two contacts have the same number, including just the last X digits (for +614 vs 04 numbers in Australia, which are the same), and allow manipulation of this data, might appear in Leopard.
One of my students today had a Rubik’s cube in class, and I had a bit of a fiddle with it. He told me what needed to be done for the first step, and I think I managed to do this.
I then went down to the shop and bought a cube. Almost immediately I figured out how to do the first step, which is to get the top face, and the top layer done. I also managed to get a fair way into the second layer. Then I got a little stuck.
A couple of hours later I decided to find a website with some directions:
The first time, these instructions worked. The second time, not quite.
I know I was doing them right, but at one point they are in fact not always sufficient to complete the task.
Step 5 is the problematic one. If you have two correct, it will not always work. You in fact may need to set it up so there is only one correct side, and have that at FR.
From there, it seems to work.
I’ve started to use MarcoPolo slightly differently. Instead of having it monitor which Airport networks are nearby, which causes OS X to no longer automatically join networks other than the first one, I’ve turned off AirPort monitoring. Instead, I choose location based upon the IP address range that gets given to me.
This works because the three networks I connect to all use different numbering ranges. Which is lucky.
It’s not quite a nice a solution (It has to wait until I connect to the network before changing locations) but in some ways works better. For instance, it no longer tries to change SMTP server before the network is ready. And the change in proxy servers only happens when the network is actually connected.
I was having some issues with it not picking up the changed IP address, and I may have to tweak it a little, but I’ll see how it goes. It’s certainly better than having to manually connect to airport networks.
I use eBay a bit, so I found this pretty funny:
From xkcd.com - if you don’t subscribe to his RSS feed, you really should.
I’m reinstalling OSx86, and these are notes so I don’t have to learn it all again if I ever have to do it again.
- Install from DVD. Installation will fail. Perhaps try to notice which bits haven’t been installed yet. Restart.
- (Possibly not required). Boot from DVD again, but don’t install. Get to a Terminal/shell prompt. Type in:
bless -folder '/Volumes/volume-name-here/System/Library/CoreServices' -setOF - Using Pacifist, extract the following files from the DVD, and copy them to iPod (on another Mac, and do it in this order, this is important.):
-
- 10.4.8.intel.pkg
- 10.4.4.loginwindow.pkg
- Boot from the DVD, and get to a shell. Quickest method is to go to safe mode. You might have to do some work to mount all of the required volumes, but it is much faster than waiting for the installer to load, and then getting a Terminal.
- Copy the files over from the iPod to the boot disk.
- Reboot.
- Installers required for AppleIntel8255x.kext and NVidia GeForce FX 5200.