Posts tagged ‘programming’
Sidebar affiliate links
May 6th, 2013 at 11:45 pm by Dr. Drang
If you’re reading this on the site rather than through an RSS reader, you’ll see that the sidebar over on the right has changed. Gone are the Flickr photos, which I hadn’t updated since the fall, and the tag cloud, which I doubt that anyone used. In their place are affiliate links to Amazon, the…
PCalc 2.8
May 1st, 2013 at 11:11 am by Dr. Drang
If you followed my advice back in December, you bought PCalc for the ridiculously low price of 99¢ during its 20th anniversary sale1 and have been using a first-class calculator for the past four months. With Version 2.8 just released, you’re going to see its value explode with two new features: user-defined conversions and user-defined…
RSS subscriber counting in a sane language
April 30th, 2013 at 10:57 pm by Dr. Drang
Recently, both Gabe Weatherhead and Marcelo Somers have tried to use this shell script to get subscriber counts for their RSS feeds. And it failed for both of them. The reason it failed (I think) is because of how it divides subscriptions into different types, counts each type, and then adds the types together. On…
Spreadsheet programming problems
April 17th, 2013 at 12:57 am by Dr. Drang
You may have heard today that a well-known paper in macroeconomics has, after three years of being cited as proof that national deficits must be held in check or ruin will result, finally had its underlying calculations scrutinized. The conclusions: the famous paper excluded some data, weighted other data in an unusual manner, and—our topic…
When and why I automate
April 13th, 2013 at 10:56 pm by Dr. Drang
Way back in February, there was a Back to Work episode in which Merlin talked about how easy it is to waste time on “productivity”—spending more time on automating a task than you’ll ever get back on the savings that automation gives you. I was going to write a little post on that topic but…
Deleting Safari cookies via AppleScript
March 18th, 2013 at 10:20 pm by Dr. Drang
Generally speaking, I don’t mind it when websites set cookies in my browser. They provide a degree of continuity that the otherwise stateless web wouldn’t have, and that’s convenient for many types of website. But sometimes cookies either get in the way or are an unnecessary intrusion. It’s relatively easy in Safari to delete the…
Invoice email generator redux
March 7th, 2013 at 10:46 pm by Dr. Drang
Here’s the reason I wanted to develop the Python applescript library I posted yesterday: a command-line script for automatically generating invoicing emails. The email includes The name and address of the client. A subject line that identifies the project and the invoice number. A body that includes the invoice number, the amount, and the due…
Combining Python and AppleScript
March 6th, 2013 at 10:34 pm by Dr. Drang
You may remember this post from last June, in which I had to rewrite a script that printed out the current iTunes track. The original script was written in Python and used Hamish Sanderson’s appscript library; the replacement was written in AppleScript. I had to do the rewrite because an update to iTunes had broken…
Capitalize script for BBEdit
March 4th, 2013 at 11:07 pm by Dr. Drang
I think most of us have a few typos that we just can’t shake. No matter how hard we try, our fingers just keep making the same mistakes over and over. The great classic is “teh,” a typo so common its ironic use is a talisman of internet hipsterism. I don’t type “teh” very often,…
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…
