Boing Boing: Torn posters of Sydney I like the graffiti that Jason talks about sometimes, in response to the “Bill Posters will be Prosecuted” notices that appeared on many Adelaide buildings in the 80s and 90s:
Bill Posters Is Innocent.
I came across an Adsense Ad for a new search engine: ipselon, and thought I might try it out. Typing Schinckel into the box brought up the usual results: interestingly my old blog, which has not been updated since April 9th, was the top hit, followed by this site, on Blogsome. Then a news story about Simon Schinckel (and his blubber pot. Ironic since the last time I saw Simon he was blubbering! - at our cousin Nick’s funeral.), and some other links, mainly mine. Then, I happened to notice the Sponsored Links section on the right. A whole lot of these were links to my Blogger blog. I think that means Google pays other Ad revenue sites to link to blogs on Blogger! Because I certainly don’t. And these links are through click.search123.com. And the irony of this is that the ipselon search engine is in breach of Google’s Terms Of Service. Actually, they might link to http://schinckel.net in some form, as clicking on some of them brought up this site. Bizarre.
I wrote a quick AdiumScript to rate the currently playing song in iTunes. Trivial. The only downside? Arguments to AdiumScripts need to be typed in using {} rather than (). I’m much faster at typing in () without looking at the keyboard than {}. I guess I’ll have to learn. There are also scripts for quick-rating a track as 0-5 stars: /rate3 will rate a track as ★★★. (That’s three stars if you don’t have Unicode!) /rate{44} will set a rating of two-and-a-bit stars. The AdiumScript bundle includes all of the scripts, and can be downloaded Adium Xtras: Rate Current iTunes Track.
I got some Spam today, starting with:
To Whom It May Concern, We have learned from the Internet thay you may be interested in tents…
I deleted it before actually reading any more. Perhaps I needed to reply (from a dead address, so I don’t get more Spam), and just inform them that this is not a good thing to do. I think maybe these are not “Internet People”, and maybe they don’t understand what they have done is wrong, and well, … Or, just let it be deleted by the Spam Filter…
From this page, a list of free classical albums for download.
VNC is cool. It allows you to view your desktop on another machine, and control it from that machine. Various takes on this include osx2x, which allows an OS X machine to just control the other machine (no screen data is sent back to the controlling box, but requires two monitors to be able to see what is going on). The other method of controlling an OS X box is to telnet or ssh in, and type in commands via a CLI. This is often much faster than VNC because of the lower bandwidth requirements for just text rather than full-screen images. One thing I had noticed (and hated) about OS X Panther was that if I was not the ‘active’ user on the machine, I could still connect, but was unable to run WindowServer applications, or interact with them. This seems to be fixed with Tiger. Newer versions of OSXvnc (1.5+) can be run as a User Process, and then a connection initiated from another source, which will allow interaction with the GUI environment. This makes VNC under OS X very much like X11, in that a user can completely control a machine, even if another user has logged in in the meantime. The only drawback I can see is that it requires the user to log in initially. Finally, a reason for me to upgrade to Tiger.
Since it’s my current fascination, I thought I’d create a new post on Adium. I might have to create a category for it! Anyway, I worked on improving a script I had downloaded that allowed typing %_nowplaying into Adium, and getting a nicely formatted string, including a musical symbol, sent as a message. I made it so that it used the keyword /itunes, and had a link to a google search for the artist’s name. I’d also like to be able to set it up so that the track was a link to download the file from the computer the user is on (would require a webserver to be running, and have read access to the iTunes library folder). And, my version also puts the rating as stars after the track name. I thought of a couple of other scripts:
Adium has great support for AppleScripts (or possibly other scripting languages), in that you define a string, and when this string is typed in as a message, the script is run, and the result is sent as the message instead. Thus, it’s possible to write scripts that allow you to type in: %_itunes And a nicely formatted string, with the current iTunes song is sent to the person you are chatting to. This string can even have hyperlinks embedded in it, so if you were serving your iTunes library up, the person could click on it and download/stream it. The same for %_safari/%_camino, this can be set up to send a hyperlink with the current page, including the title. What is not clear from the internet is how to create these. It’s really quite simple. The scripts must live inside a package: under MacOS X packages are just folders with particular extensions. For instance, Mail.app is a folder, and it appears to the system/user as an application, or a particular type of package. Double-clicking on it will not opent he folder, but (in this case) run the application. AdiumScripts packages (with the extension .AdiumScripts) will install into your Library when you double-click them. So, the format must be as follows:
PluginName.AdiumScripts/
Contents/
Info.plist
Resources/
Script1Name.scpt
Script2Name.scpt
The ScriptxName.scpt files must be valid AppleScripts, of the format:
on substitute(arg) –do stuff here return value end substitute
Where value is the value you want printed. You should format it with starting and closing html tags, and any html markup you want. If you want the user to be able to send an argument (%command{argument}), then include it as shown. Inside the Info.plist file, you need to have some important information.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key>
<string>English</string>
<key>CFBundleGetInfoString</key>
<string>Matt's Adium Scripts</string>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>net.schinckel.AppName.scripts</string>
<key>CFBundleInfoDictionaryVersion</key>
<string>1.0</string>
<key>CFBundleName</key>
<string>bundleName</string>
<key>CFBundlePackageType</key>
<string>AdIM</string>
<key>Scripts</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>File</key>
<string>Script1Name</string>
<key>Keyword</key>
<string>/script1</string>
<key>Title</key>
<string>Menu Item 1</string>
</dict>
<dict>
<key>File</key>
<string>Script2Name</string>
<key>Keyword</key>
<string>%_script2</string>
<key>Title</key>
<string>Menu Item 2</string>
</dict> </array>
<key>Set</key>
<string>Script Submenu</string>
</dict>
</plist>
There are some bits of data you’ll need to change: Matt's Adium Scripts should be a descriptive title for your Scripts. com.schinckel.AppName.scripts should be a unique identifier for your scripts. bundleName could be the name of your bundle. Realistically, these can be anything, although I suspect Adium will only allow one version of a script with a particular identifier, or bundle name. The next bits are the impart ones: Script1Name needs to be the name of a script, minus the .scpt extension. /script1 is the keyword that will trigger this script to be called. And Menu Item 1 is what will be written in the Scripts Sub Menu. It’s possible to have multiple calls to the same script, each one just requires a duplicate dictionary entry, with a different Keyword string. For instance, I use /camino and %_camino to mean the same function, without requiring seperate scripts to be called. Finally, the Script Submenu value needs to be replaced by which Script Sub Menu you want the item to be placed under. For instance, there is already one called System Statistics, and iTunes - Now Playing. Using a value that doesn’t appear already causes a new Sub Menu to be created. I’m not sure if there is a ‘rule’ against using /command, as most of the ones I’ve come across all use %_command. I find this too slow to type, and have adapted them accordingly. You will be able to do this also, now that you know how…
I’m a latecomer to Instant Messaging. I’ve only just discovered it, and part of that is because I don’t have many people to talk to over it. I have written one thing though, and that’s an improvement to megalogeek’s %_camino script. You can download it from Adium Xtras: Camino Current Page. Source follows after the jump!
on substitute()
tell application "Camino"
URL of window 1
set myURL to the result
set myTitle to name of window 1
end tell
return "<HTML><A HREF=\"" & myURL & "\">" & myTitle & "</A></HTML>"
end substitute