Rand Wacker

Fixing the MT bookmarklet for Safari :: The Daily Journey :: JayAllen.org

Fixing the MT bookmarklet for Safari

Think Secret - Apple offering PowerBook G4 trade-in program

Apple confirmed that US-based owners of the original and “Gigabit Ethernet” G4 PowerBooks will be able to participate in the upgrade program through March 27, 2004. In communications with dealers, Apple described the trade-in as a “pilot program.”

Besides doing a (minor) re-design of this site’s visuals (I can put together a nice-looking website, but I’m not the most creative when it comes to graphic design), I have some technical features I want to add, so I thought I’d mention some here to see if anyone has any helpful ideas.

Better statistics - I use Analog right now for basic statistics, and it’s not very blog-aware. I would like a system which does a better job of breaking down popular entries, referrers, and giving me a little more detail (perhaps) on who is reading my site. I’m not adverse to using either locally installed software or an external service, but I don’t really want to pay anything (yet…see below).

“Popular Entries” Links - joy once had a great “Popular Entries (per Google searches)” sidebar that would show the most commonly read entries from Google searches (and maybe the search terms themselves?). I’d be interested in seeing how people are coming into the site both by external referrers and through specific Google searches.

Automated Blogroll - I’d like an easy way to dump my NetNewsWire subscriptions into a side-bar linking to what I’m reading on a regular basis. I think this could be done with a pretty simple XSL template and a server-side include.

Brain’s Future-Proofing - Brain has some great ideas on future-proofing Movable Type, and I want to see if I should integrate some of them into my site.

Gallery Re-skinning - Not strictly a blog function but I’d like to re-skin my gallery to look like a more integrated site with my blog. I’ve no idea how difficult this is going to be. On a related note, since I’m managing all my photo source it iPhoto now, I wouldn’t be adverse to a Gallery replacement, but it would need to be just as easy to use, look nice, provide the sub-foldering and print to Shutterfly (Ofoto even better), etc. Anything out there that integrates well with iPhoto (although iPhoto doesn’t support sub-folders)?

Picture of the Day - aaron had the cool idea to link to the National Geographic Photo of the Day. I’d like to designate a set of candidate folders in my Gallery that could provide a daily-changing piece of eye-candy for the site.

Summary Feed to Work Blog - I maintain a separate blog at work, with completely different content, but I would like to be able to display a list of “Recent Civilian Entries” over there. I figure this could be a simple matter of pulling down the RSS and running it through an XSL transform (all hail XML).

Of course, the other solution to many of these issues might just be to Use TypePad, but I’m not ready to pay for services which I can run locally for free right now.

After switching from Unix, there’s been something missing from my OSX environment, and I had an idea for a drag-n-drop utility that could make the OSX environment a little easier.

I love Mac OSX for my desktop environment, but I do a lot of work in Unix shells on remote servers. Specifically, every time I’m on the network I’ll have at least two terminals open to our co-op Unix server, each running a multi-headed screen looking at either my personal mail in Pine (yes, I know, I need to switch to Mutt) or logged into a very primitive communal chat machine (we all use a derivative of “wall”). Under Unix, a simple script could execute a couple of Xterms with specific -geometry arguments. Under OSX, doing the “new window/new window/position each/ssh twice” dance every time I opened up my computer was a pain in the butt. When whining about this online, some friends’ solution was simply “And Steve created AppleScript”.

Every OSX install should include the Script Editor. I believe there are much more advanced tools on the Developer’s CD, but I’m just doing some quick hacks right now. Here’s the script:

tell application "Terminal"
  do script with command "ssh radix"
  do script with command "ssh radix"
  tell window 3
    set custom title to "radix mail"
    set position to {1, 1}
  end tell
  tell window 2
    set custom title to "soda"
    set origin to {1, 1}
  end tell
end tell

I’m sure any old Unix geek will be able to figure out what bits to replace to do whatever you might want.

Now, thanks to LaunchBar, I can execute a very quick Cmd-Space, type “radix”, and hit Enter. Boom, done. I leave Terminal running all the time, even if I close all windows.

OK, now for the new idea. Since I want to transfer files to my account on radix pretty often (posting the the web or what not), I wanted to create an icon that I could just drop files on to and have then securely copied over. I’ve been thinking about setting up a personal WebDAV server on radix, but there are locking and compatibility issues with Apache’s mod_dav implementation (are there any DAV servers that are more compatible with other Unix services?), then I thought about using Fugu to connect via SFTP, but I didn’t see an easy way to create an automatic drag-n-drop icon.

My friend Mark reminded me a of tool that could turn a Unix script into a droplet on OSX, so I could just scp something over. Today, in my Mac OSX Hints RSS feed there was this hint. Basically, it describes an AppleScript app that you can drop items on to and it will execute a script. Here’s the code as I’m using it:

set filecount to 0

on open filelist
  repeat with i in filelist
    set filecount to 1
    tell application "Terminal"
      set filename to do shell script "perl -e \"print
          quotemeta ('" & POSIX path of i & "');\""
      do script "scp " & filename & " radix:drop/; exit"
    end tell
  end repeat
end open

(The “set filename” with the perl command should all be one line)

So I saved this as radix-drop.app and changes to icon to set it on my desktop. This is a bit of a kludge, as it pops up a Terminal window to show progress — it would be nice to find a real app that has a nice progress bar — but it’s fine for what I want.

Still looking for the ideal Unix-shell compatible network file sharing solution to the OSX desktop (and sure, Windows). Any ideas?

I’m looking for a way to share our large collection of music files on the home file server with our laptops on the wireless network. Basic requirements are as follows:

• As simple to use as possible, preferably no user intervention needed once it is set up.
• Secure; I don’t want anyone close to our house to be able to get at the music. So it needs to be password protected, but not necessarily encrypted on the wire. The password, however, should offer a modicum of security.

I thought that maybe WebDAV would offer a good solution, so I’ve been tinkering around with that tonight, serving from mod_dav + Apache on the FreeBSD server to my OSX 10.3 laptop. Random things I’ve noticed:

• mod_dav files are stored as regular files, so it’s theoretically possible to share with other access methods. The file locking issues are supposed to be a problem though. At least for sharing read-only data, it works out of the box.
• OSX’s built-in DAV client doesn’t support SSL encryption, but it does support Digest authentication, and contrary to popular rumor the password can be stored in the keychain for automatic remounting.
• iTunes can index files on a DAV volume just fine, and it will even automatically remount the needed volume to play a song. Even works with stored passwords.

So after some fiddling, I think this might be the solution I’m looking for. It’ll require maintenance of another password file, but it will work for now. Hopefully Apple will add SSL support to their WebDAVFS client soon.

One problem is going to be that if new files are added to the archive there’s no way to automatically add it to the remote iTunes Library. I wonder if the iTunes sharing options do this automatically (I’ll have to try it between laptops).

Tonight I sat down to try and tackle a small project (setting up a secure way to share my music archive with Alexis’s new iBook on the wireless network). As usually happens when playing with a Mac, I quickly went down a couple of new tangents. Tonight I found something so cool and useful that I had to share it: Apple Speakable Items. I actually found this looking for the text-to-speech options to try and have the computer read to me in the car…don’t ask.

I’ve always thought the idea of talking to your computer was a little, well, lame. I usually have things organized such that its quicker to execute something with a few keystrokes than to navigate a number of audio prompts. The first thing that popped up in the Speech Commands Window were commands for the Address Book. I’ve always wondered what the “Show Large Text” option from the address book cards would be useful for. Well, hit the magic key (or speak the magic word) and then say “Home Phone for Aaron Smith”, boom, popped up on your screen so you can punch it in to your phone. Say “Thanks” and it goes away (so polite). There’s a whole host of other options, and some amount of speech control is useful when say, wrapping presents. Wow, impressive.

I thought things have been a little quiet lately. Turns out that I accidentally disabled comments with an errant wildcard entry in the IP banning section blocking out the entire net. Christine was the only person to point this out (even though I know some of you have tried track-backing…). Well, things are back to normal, sorry for that!

This item is sold, all hail Craigslist!

I’m selling my Xbox, accessories, and games because, well, I just don’t play it much. It’s in great shape and fully outfitted for some hard core high res surround sound gaming. Full package includes:

• Xbox Console w/ type S Controller and Regular A/V Cables
• Original Box
• Additional type S Controller (2 total)
• 2 Controller Extension Cords
• Advanced A/V Pack (S-Video and Digital Optical Audio, for 5.1 Surround Sound)

And the following games:

• Halo
• Medal of Honor Frontline
• Hitman 2
• Mech Assault
• Sega GT 2002/Jet Set Radio Future

$230, deliverable today to anywhere in the Bay Area. This whole set is $460 retail, $330 online. Mail me if interested.

Now available on Craigslist