Schinckel.net

Whenever I listen to iTunes now, I have iTunesRater running, and attempt to rate tracks as I hear them. I have my Unrated playlist running through Party Shuffle, and have to rate each song before it ends. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to rate the previous song. I’ll try to code this into iTunesRater….

I just had a thought. It’s relatively well known that the Xbox 360 will be using a PowerPC chip, since the development units are all Macs. But Apple is moving it’s product range to Intel. Doesn’t it seem bizarre that Microsoft is moving to PowerPC, while at the same time Apple is moving to Intel. Unless the Macintoshes that were the development platform are actually already running on Intel chips. Oooohhh…

I have Osteitis Pubis, an inflammation of the pelvic joint, due to poor muscle tone in my abdominal area, and overuse from Touch. I haven’t played a game of Touch since February, and have been going to the Physio, doing my exercises (occasionally). Last night, I decided to have a light run in my Social team (Arab Steed Pornstars). But I am unable to run ’lightly’, and I wound up diving all over the place to score and make touches. So, I am a fair bit of discomfort this morning. I guess I was a little premature in my return to sport…

I’ve noticed a few abusive comments on various posts, and it struck me as interesting as to the general form of them:

• They are always anonymous, or pseudo-anonymous (kala@kala.com, god@heaven.net).
• They always include lots of swearing.
• They almost always lack proper capitalisation and punctuation.
• They don’t actually make a decent point.

I am actually happy to have posts critical of stuff I have written, as long as they actually provide useful feedback. I don’t really want to have to turn moderation of comments on, I’d rather just remove comments that are totally inappropriate (SPAM, not adding anything useful to the discussion, etc), but if I get too many abusive comments, I may just have to…

I found an error on Whereis.com, or rather, a couple of errors. The first one I’m happy to let slide - they only recently changed the northern end of Pondham Road, Hynam to be Schinckel Road. The other one I’m not so happy with: Check the travel time. It does not take 38 minutes to drive down the road that the Meatworks is on!

I can’t quite remember how I came up with the title of this blog, but I know it had something to do with “The World According to Garp”, which I remembered as “Life According To Garp”. I’m glad I got it wrong, because there is another site with the title The World According To Matt. I did a bit of a look, and he started it well before I started mine, so I’m going to do the honourable thing and come up with a new title. I might go by a Google Search referer I got today: Monkey Female Names According To Matt. Doesn’t quite have the ring I’m after… Here’s my top options:

• I don’t like your trousers
• Barely Respectable, Rarely Bespectacled
• Mistaken at the top of my voice
• hateful AND boring
• Paint the Tiger/Carve the Swan
• Afterisms (Inc)

Vote for which one you like most in the comments. Here are some more options:

• part of the precipitate
• vanilla won ton soup
• Chewing Gum For Your Eyes (thanks to Frank Lloyd Wright)
• Not An Actual Emergency
• At night, the ice weasels come
• I’ll have a pie, thanks!
• Segmentation Fault: Core Dumped taken
• Proto-Nasal-Philosophy (Inc)
• Not Company Policy
• The Global Dictator
• Still safe to eat, just
• A thousand measure of rice
• You can’t polish a turd
• Thinking of a Flannelette Shirt
• Like a fortune cookie, only without a witty fortune, or a cookie
• Footprints in my hair
• Counting Thoughts: 1…
• Old enough to conform
• Intolerable Bryl Cream
• Always Rely on Miracles
• Believe the Donkey, for he Brays
• Taste the Fat
• Impermanently Confused
• Love is no excuse
• Not Evil. Lively.
• Youth is a Curse
• They kill people for less than that
• Twatology
• Damn this Childproof Cupboard!
• Everyone Likes Berries
• Power, without responsibility
• Adequately Competent
• Whatever you do it ends up raining
• Ghandara, Indiana
• Are we there yet?
• Simultaneous Noise Production

I regularly check my Referers list in the WP backend - it’s interesting to see who has visited my site, or rather, where they came from. I really like a couple of features - especially how it points out Google referers. It struck me as a useful way to see how my site ranks in terms of Google searches. A couple of terms return a page from my site as the first hit. For example: [Google: probability of our existence][1] This in itself is interesting - and it’s accurate. The post in question is about the Probability of our Existence. But more interesting is what people have searched on, found my site and visited about, where the topic is not quite right. To increase user satisfaction, I could write posts about what they were searching for initially. For example:

• How to rate song with itunes
• Old postsecret posts
• Easiest way to resize pictures
• 1 itunes library for multiple users
• resizing the length of songs in itunes

The thing I think is most interesting is that most of my hits come from searches for sudoku - and I only ever wrote one post on it! (And it doesn’t really tell how to solve them…but details how I wrote a program to solve them.)

[1]: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=probability of our existence&spell=1

Jaq spent a bit of time this weekend (while I was at the Greenhill Road Touch Fields) emptying out the planter boxes on the front porch, sealing the post that supports the roof, and then we filled the gaps with concrete. Then, we planted some plants! A heap of Snake Plants (Sansevieria trifasciata)__, and a couple of Agave (Agave attenuata). They were all plants we had from the old house, and they look great.

This weekend was the SASSSA/TouchSA Touch trials. I coach the 15s Girls’ team, and we had a great turnout again. More than 40 girls, with most of those of an extremely high standard. We’ve selected a squad of 20 girls who I’ll train over the next month or so, before choosing my final team of 14 and shadows. I’m looking forward to the trip to Darwin in mid-September…

Christoph asked me for some advice on how to get notification on iTunes track changes in a comment, I said I would write a bit of a tutorial on how I got it to work. First thing was to create an AppleScript Studio program - you will need to have the Developer Tools installed for this. Now, open the main.m file. It should look something like the following:

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    #import <mach-o/dyld.h>
        
    extern int _NSApplicationMain_(int argc, const char *argv[]);
        
    int main(int argc, const char *argv[])
    {
        if (NSIsSymbolNameDefined("_ASKInitialize"))
        {
        NSSymbol *symbol = NSLookupAndBindSymbol("_ASKInitialize");
        if (symbol)
        {
        void (*initializeASKFunc)(void) = NSAddressOfSymbol(symbol);
            if (initializeASKFunc)
        {
        initializeASKFunc();
        }
        }
        }
        
    return _NSApplicationMain_(argc, argv);
    }

The file needs to have the following elements. At the start, the following imports are required:

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    #import <Foundation/NSDistributedNotificationCenter.h>
    #import <Foundation/NSString.h>
    #import <AppKit/NSAppleScriptExtensions.h>

This should be all of the imports that are required - although I also had stdio.h for a while for testing. After the declaration of the NSApplicationMain, I put the following in:

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    @interface iTunesConnection : NSObject
     - (id) init;
    @end
    
    @implementation iTunesConnection
     - (id) init {
        NSDistributedNotificationCenter *nc = [NSDistributedNotificationCenter defaultCenter];
        [nc addObserver:self
               selector:@selector(updateNow:)
                   name:@"com.apple.iTunes.playerInfo"
                 object:nil];
    
        return self;
    }
    
     - (void) updateNow:(NSNotification *)notification {
        NSString *updateScript = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"tell application \nend tell"];
        NSAppleScript *as = [[[NSAppleScript alloc] initWithSource:updateScript] autorelease];
        [as executeAndReturnError:nil];
    }    
    @end

Copy and paste the stuff above - there is some that goes over the line in my browser, but it’s all there if you drag out the selection. You may need to change a couple of things depending on what you want to do. For instance, the @"tell application \nend tell" section needs to be the applescript code that is run whenever a new iTunes track is started, or iTunes is paused. You could fit the entire application into this place, but what I did was have a hidden button that this script “presses”, triggering the update process. Finally, I added the following declaration just after the first brace in the main function declaration:

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    iTunesConnection *connection;
    connection = [[iTunesConnection **alloc**] init];

This gets everything running. I would suggest putting the following into the applescript string to test it and see that it works:

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    @"tell application \"Finder\"\ndisplay dialog \"iTunes Changed\"\nend tell"

You need to have \" whenever your script would have a ", and \n wherever it would have a newline.