July 2008 Archives

I don't want to keep manually syncing my address book on Vodafone with that of my mac, so I use this script to pull out the phone numbers of people when I want to send them a text message using webtext (or my webtext script).
#!/bin/sh

search_for=name
return_val=phone

args=$(getopt s:r: $*)

set -- $args

while :; do
    case $1 in
        -s) search_for=$2; shift;;
        -r) return_val=$2; shift;;
        --) shift; break;;
    esac
    shift
done

if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
    echo 1>&2 "usage: $(basename $0) -s <search> -r <return> YOUR_SEARCH"
    exit 127
fi

search=
for i in $@; do
    if [[ -z $search ]]; then
        search="($search_for contains \"$i\")"
    else
        search="$search and ($search_for contains \"$i\")"
    fi
done

scriptcode="tell app \"Address Book\" to get (value of $return_val) of every person where $search"

osascript -s "s" -e "$scriptcode"

exit 0


You can get it Here.

It will make you go Zonino for it is such a god flick.

Because, apparently it's only available in the US. I'd love to buy the Dr. Horrible's Sing-along blog videos. Unfortunately I'm not in the US so I am denied. In fact when in Ireland there are a lot of things that stop being available to me. Like any of the TV shows. Drive me to other sources!
Thankfully Warner seem to have been sensible with most of their Blu-Ray dvds - they don't have zone locking so I can watch the ones I bought in the US in Ireland without violating anyone's TOS.

This morning, following the standard dog walking to get the Sunday papers I found a dead blackbird (female) at the front door of the house - her poor neck had been broken from an impact with the window. We've had this problem before, but it's generally from the low windows; the impact isn't fatal and usually the bird shrugs it off in a few minutes and gets going. Today, however it was, unfortunately dead.
I picked it up to leave it in the back garden and it still felt warm. As I walked back to the end of the garden that warmth kept flowing into me.
It was truly disturbing to think that if I hadn't been there all that heat would have just passed away without ever having had an impact on anything.

It tells me to trust it. After all, it's a certificate that's signed by a CA that isn't in the list of known certificate authorities.
I don't trust certificates. There is a list of certificate authorities a mile long stored on my computer of groups who are to be trusted when a certificate is presented. I don't know them from adam, and the certs from the Hong Kong post office are about as trusted as the ones from the Apple Root CA - get real people this is not security, this is just posturing. I trust them about as much as I trust the digital quicksand upon which they are based.
I've stopped caring anymore. The only thing that these certificates establish is a temporary private channel between me and the web server. The rest; it's just smoke and mirrors.

It looks like we have a bunch more sync options for the address book now. I don't believe it supported Exchange or Google prior to 10.5.4, now it does. Let the insanity of address book syncing continue.

Aargh, it's too bloody easy to rip off these tabs and there's no way to re-attach them from what I can tell. Something about the sensitivity pop-up menus and the tab drag thing has been tuned up. It's practically impossible to keep a pop-up menu open using a two-fingered click (touchpad).
Every time I rip-off a tab it makes me want to throw gnome out the window. the UI seems to have become more and more of a crayon interface without actually improving.
Tabs. A logical option for grouping works on different projects. Apparently, you're supposed to use multiple windows in a desktop.

The suggestion by Joel to not hide or disable menu items is a good one. There's only one issue. With the way it's worded you could end up with a swarm of dialogs. I would suggest some form of stackable notification item. The status bar isn't really suitable for this as there's no way to get stuff back from it historically.
The 'in frame' dialog that's becoming popular these days in such browsers as Firefox. This is a reasonable 'dialog', and you could remove them automatically after a period of time (say 30 seconds). as long as they are differentiated from the other items on the screen it would be reasonable.

Apparently, it needed to install a security update. I don't believe I'm using any flash applications that would keep the player in use, so why the pathetic dialog on the left after I installed it? This is one of those cases where pushing through the update makes more sense. As it is this only tells me that I need to reboot my computer to be safe from 'flash viruses'.
Is it that the flash component is so embedded in the operating system that updating it requires a reboot? If that's the case then why? it's only a little thing for displaying animations; not the end of the fricking world.