Jason Says

The whole idea of Diplomacy is about kissing the right arses. Whether you suck poo out is another matter.

Curried Cauliflower Soup

2 Chopped Onions, Garlic, Ginger Cook in oil for 5 min. Add 1 tspn curry paste. Add 1 cauliflower, cover with chicken stock. Cook. Mash. Add 2 cups full cream milk. Serve. Eat. Warning! Untested!

512Mb SD Card

I just went shopping for SD cards, expecting to have to pay around $90 for a 256Mb one. My Zire 31 has an SD slot, and I thought I might need more than the measley 16Mb internal RAM it comes with. Anyway, after spending an hour or so searching through every shop in Rundle Mall, I went into Diamond’s, on Rundle Street. The girl behind the camera said “Oh, about $105 for the 512, and about $70 for the 256”. That put the price as 74 less than a 256 from DJs, for a card with twice the memory. So, I went out, checked out Ted’s ($119) and returned. The guy who served me said the computer showed $130ish, but she had quoted me at $105. Since he’d kept me waiting for about 10 min while he dealt with a customer on the phone, he knocked it down to a round $100. Woo-hoo!

How he's changed!

Well, I went down to Robe & saw the folks, and Baby Jack.

I kinda like the juxtaposition of these two photos together.

DSC00255
Jack_300704

Updated Blog with ecto.scpt

I went through a couple of revisions of Blog with ecto the other night. I’ve now added the following feature:

  • Allows posting to multiple blogs, where the closest match to the folder name is used as the blog name.

There is a small issue - the date I set (using set entry_date to date date_stamp) doesn’t seem to be respected by ecto when it posts. I’ll do a bit more testing, and possibly issue a bug report. Anyway, the link for it is Blog with ecto.scpt.

Imagine...64

I’m still toying with the idea of writing a “What If?” novel about John Lennon, but I’m stuck for ideas about what would have changed. One idea is to write a “Butterfly Effect’’ story resulting in Chapman’s suicide, therefore Lennon’s survival.

Old Scholar

I am wearing my Adelaide High School “Non Scholae Sed Vitae” lanyard, and a woman just wanted to know if she could buy one, as she is an Old Scholar.

txt2pml.py

I found a heap of Palm TEXt REAd documents, but I don’t like the way they appear as (Doc) in PalmReader. So I wrote a script to convert them to PML, the format used by DropBook to make PNRd PPrs documents.

Basically, I found that on OS X the translation of txt2pdbdoc -d (decode back into text) wasn’t so good; a heap of characters needed to be changed.

I did have them all listed here, but if I edit them, ecto fucks up the encoding!

I also changed the === to an 80% horizontal line.

The [[[ - ]]] blocks were indented, and a footer line [* <Text>] is indented also.

I assumed the only use of a / was for italics, and _ for underlining.

I also assume the first non-empty, non === line is the Title, and the Author line starts with By. I use this info to create a ‘Title Page’.

The tricky bit was getting the Chapter Heading sorted, I needed to break the text into a list of strings to do this, and scan through. This slows the script down a lot, but it still works okay. I might profile it a bit and see where the slowdown is.

Anyway, here’s the latest version I’ve uploaded: txt2pml.py

I plan to make a version to process Project Gutenberg texts, but that’s on the back burner.

If I Made 64...

John Lennon would have turned 64 Yesterday, (all my troubles…), if he hadn’t been gunned down in 1980 by Mark Chapman. An article linked to made a mention of Chapman attempting suicide at some stage - and it made me think about what might have changed in the world had this one man, who changed history, not had his chance? I was looking for a topic for my NaNoWriMo novel, perhaps this could be it…

Blog with ecto.scpt

Yesterday I talked about blogging from my Palm Zire 21.

Here is the complete AppleScript for Blog with ecto.scpt. Copy this, paste it into Script Editor, and save it to ~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/Blog with ecto.scpt

Then right-click on the folder you want monitored - I use ~/Documents/Palm/Matthew Schinckel/NoteTaker/Blog and away you go. For best results, use with MacNoteTaker. Obviously, ecto is required.

All code is ©2004 Matthew Schinckel, but may be freely used with attribution.

Note: the formatting is removed, because ecto wasn’t quite doing it right, but Script Editor will figure it out.

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
 Set this to true to automatically post the item(s)
 Leave as false so you can check the data.
set autopost to false
repeat with each_file in added_items
tell application Finder
set filename to (name of each_file) as text
open for access each_file
set entry_body to (read each_file)
close access each_file
end tell
try
set entry_title to filename
set date_stamp to word 3 of filename & / & word 2 of filename ¬
& / & word 1 of filename &   & word 4 of filename
set entry_date to false
set entry_date to date date_stamp
set entry_title to first paragraph of entry_body
set entry_body to text ((count characters of entry_title) + 2) ¬
thru end of entry_body
end try
–—— You WILL need to change the next line!
set my_blog to Life According to Matt
tell application ecto
set my_doc to make new document at front with properties ¬
{entry title:entry_title, current blog:my_blog, ¬
body text:entry_body}
if false is not entry_date then
set entry date of my_doc to entry_date
end if
if true is autopost then
do post my_doc
end if
end tell
end repeat
end adding folder items to