Posts tagged ‘perl’
Renaming files
March 1st, 2013 at 10:04 pm by Dr. Drang
There’s been a lot of talk about Name Mangler today, both because a new version just came out (at a temporarily reduced price) and because some guy has been comically threatening1 Many Tricks with legal action. Name Mangler is a file renaming application. and it looks both powerful and easy to use, but I think…
Column to list
June 23rd, 2012 at 12:07 am by Dr. Drang
In last night’s post, I mentioned that often need to get a column of values out of a spreadsheet and turn them into a Python list. I’ve been doing that through a combination of copy-and-paste and regex find-and-replace in TextMate. Today I made a bundle with a couple of commands that do all the work…
More Address Book scripting
March 26th, 2012 at 11:59 pm by Dr. Drang
I’m still cleaning up my Address Book in preparation for a large mailing to my company’s clients. Today I wrote a couple of scripts, one in AppleScript and the other in Perl, to make address labels. I already had a script for printing address labels, but it’s meant for Avery 5164 labels, the big ones…
Dissociated clipboard
February 18th, 2012 at 8:38 pm by Dr. Drang
When I read Michael Bérubé’s analysis of a silly young right-winger’s article on feminism, my first thought was that he’d used some version of Dissociated Press to produce it. Then I thought maybe that was how the original article had been written. Either way, I had make a TextExpander snippet for generating that kind of…
Why I left Perl
February 12th, 2012 at 4:17 pm by Dr. Drang
OK, I suppose I really haven’t left Perl; I have many scripts written in it that I still tweak when I find a bug or, more often, want to add a feature. And I’ll even write a new script in Perl if it has a distinctly better library for the task. But it hasn’t been…
Mechanics lipsum
December 14th, 2011 at 11:11 pm by Dr. Drang
In yesterday’s Back to Work, during the commercial for Smile Software and TextExpander, Merlin Mann talked about a snippet he uses that inserts a specially-crafted lorem ipsum that’s exactly 500 characters and 100 words long. Most people use lorem ipsums (or lipsums) as placeholder text when designing the layout of a publication or web site.…
Why Python?
October 2nd, 2011 at 11:44 pm by Dr. Drang
A reader1 asks: It seems like everywhere I look people are pushing the Ruby programming language… What reasons are you using Python? Is it because of certain characteristics of the language itself or because you are more familiar with it (due to coming from a Perl background)? A fair question, and I’m going to pretend…
Renaming with Larry Wall
September 14th, 2011 at 11:52 pm by Dr. Drang
When Eddie Smith of Practically Efficient tweeted this the other day, I don’t use it often, but when I do it saves me so much time: A Better Finder Rename publicspace.net/ABetterFinderR…8:15 PM Tue Sep 13, 2011@eddie_smith Eddie Smith I followed the link to A Better Finder Rename (known as just Better Rename in the Mac…
Filing beats tagging and searching
August 30th, 2011 at 9:25 am by Dr. Drang
I confess I don’t get the enthusiasm for programs like Evernote and Yojimbo. Giving my documents descriptive names and putting them in descriptively named folders seems far better to me than trying to develop and stick with a consistent taxonomy for all my stuff. I suppose my preference for using the hierarchical file system comes…
Addresses, labels, and scripts
August 29th, 2011 at 8:52 am by Dr. Drang
A few days ago I added a new script to my plabels repository at GitHub. This is the repository that contains my scripts for printing on Avery address labels, although the previous two scripts in the repository weren’t for printing addresses. This one is. The script is called palabels, and it’s set up to print…
