Posts tagged ‘programming’
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…
Cleaning the Address Book with AppleScript
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:18 am by Dr. Drang
I’m weeding out my client address book, dropping contacts who have moved to other companies (unless I can find where they’ve gone) or retired, and fixing out-of-date and incomplete information. It’s a painful process, and one that, for the most part, doesn’t seem amenable to automation. I have been able to automate one part of…
Two PyCon videos
March 19th, 2012 at 9:21 pm by Dr. Drang
The other day, I followed a link from Pinboard’s popular page to this video. It’s a recording of a talk by Jack Diederich at PyCon US 2012, entitled “Stop Writing Classes.” The gist of the talk is something I’ve noticed when reading other people’s code: there’s an awful lot of object-oriented programming being done when…
TiVo’d tweets
February 29th, 2012 at 11:07 pm by Dr. Drang
OK, I realize that posts about Dr. Twoot aren’t especially useful or interesting to anyone other than me, but I need to finish off what I started two nights ago: a TiVo-like system for viewing my Twitter stream with a time delay. My motivation is straightforward. I often record live TV shows like the Oscars…
Viewing tweets on delay
February 27th, 2012 at 11:07 pm by Dr. Drang
Last night, during that brief period after I started watching the Oscars and before I fell asleep, I had an idea: Twitter clients need a “TiVo mode,” in which incoming tweets are delayed by an adjustable period to match how far behind real time you are. — Dr. Drang (@drdrang) Sun Feb 26 2012 Brilliant, right?…
Return on investment
February 23rd, 2012 at 11:39 pm by Dr. Drang
Keyboard Maestro has been on my mind recently. Several bloggers I follow use it, and Gabe Weatherhead in particular has done such a good job explaining how and why he uses it—on both his blog and with David and Katie on an episode of the Mac Power Users podcast—that it seemed inevitable that I’d give…
Snapflickr update
February 20th, 2012 at 9:08 pm by Dr. Drang
I’ve been having trouble recently with the screenshots I take for these blog posts. I use snapflickr, a little script I wrote last year1 that takes a snapshot of a window or area of the screen and uploads it to my Flickr account. What I’ve been finding is that often the window I take a…
One-button Twitter spam reporting
February 19th, 2012 at 10:24 pm by Dr. Drang
Last year, I added some elementary spam detection and reporting to Dr. Twoot, my homemade Twitter client. It worked well enough at the time, but Twitter spammers have changed the format of their tweets and the detection algorithm just isn’t catching the bulk of the spam I get anymore. So I’ve updated Dr. Twoot by…
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…
