Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Survey of the day: Outboard Brains for Mac OS X, an old survey article from MacDevCenter.com

I was happy to discover that my Amazon problem is not all in my mind—they really do have extremely annoying Javascript focus code on their site that shifts focus to an Amazon page when I don’t want to look at it. For I while I just blocked Amazon completely using PithHelmet 0.7.2a for Safari, but that’s a brute force solution.

What I really needed was a Safari plug-in that would turn off only the offending javascript (since nobody these days can live without Javascript), or barring that, one that would turn Javascript off just for the offending websites. PithHelmet 2 is supposed to be able to do both.

Unfortunately, as has been reported by many users at VersionTracker, PithHelmet 2.0.1 is a buggy swamp. It has an obscure and counter-intuitive interface (both the annoying menu and the new preference panel), it slows down page loading, it doesn’t import rules from previous versions, and it forgets its own settings. It refused to load the included Python script designed to demoronize Amazon, though the promise of that sample script was my main reason for installing 2.0.1 despite the bad experiences reported in the VersionTracker comments. Maybe I needed some sort of Python compiler. That wasn’t mentioned in the documentation—but usability was clearly not the hallmark of this release. At least the option to turn off Javascript for Amazon.com did seem to work.

I saw all these problems in the few minutes I ran it before downgrading to 0.7.3. On the bright side, it did turn on the Safari Debug menu for me, and left it on after the downgrade. Since PithHelmet has gone from freeware to shareware, I hope Mike Solomon will start treating it like real mac software—that means providing real documentation and an intuitive interface. (Hide the regular expressions, at least!)

Since I canned the above entry, PithHelmet has gone up a subversion to 2.1. The changelog claims it’s faster and that some of the preference bugs have been fixed, so I’m giving it another try.

Someday, somehow, Amazon will be demoronized.

As the Apple Turns discusses the recent loss of “talkie with the big flying things” in LA:

According to Techworld (which in turn cites an LA Times story from a week ago), the Windows-based radio system for an air traffic control center in Southern California took a three-hour coffee break recently, leaving “800 planes in the air without contact to air traffic control.” But hey, how dangerous could that possibly be?

I heard about the failure, but not that it was Windows’ fault. I should have known. As the Apple Turns looks toward the Windows future:

…while we’d never wish a midair plane crash on anyone, part of us can’t help but suspect that if anything can get the Windoid lemmings to consider that “hey, maybe this operating system kindasorta sucks rocks out loud,” it would be a fiery hail of twisted, screaming metal and black and red body parts pummelling the tarmac at LAX. Will a near-miss or two be enough of a wake-up call? We sure hope so.

If that doesn’t do it, maybe the radioactive glass crater will do the job. Somehow I suspect even that won’t work unless by chance a Windows-guided missile takes out Redmond.

A mac-attack link dump:

• First the title link: NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite 2.0 are in public beta. I’m downloading now.
• Also from Ranchero Software: MarsEdit 1.0 Beta, a weblog editor. I’m downloading this one two too, though I doubt I’ll end up using it.
• For those of you still reading that other kind of news, MT-NewsWatcher has a manual. Who knew?
• From Apple Pro-Video, an article on Kerry Conran, director of “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
• Geekery of the day: MacDevCenter’s Mo’ Betta Indexes - making Apache-generated index pages pretty.
• Icons of the day: Mike Matas Icons
• Hint of the day: codepoetry on setting up multiple addresses per account in Apple Mail. This is especially handy for catchall email domains.

Speech of the day: Aragorn’s ever-popular not this day monologue

Warning: Geeking ahead!

Safari and most other Mac browsers will save individual links as a clickable .webloc file, recognizable by the little “HTTP” on the document icon. I’m always dragging links from Safari or Mail to the desktop for later reading, blogging, or filing away. When I’m off-line and I just want to click something later, a webloc is fine, but when I have a huge folder full of links, reopening each one in Safari can be a pain. Cutting and pasting links for a link dump blog entry is time-consuming. There ought to be a script for that, so I wrote one.

Webloc files are hard to work with because the URL is in the resource fork. Here are a few useful links that discuss getting the URLs out of the resource fork—incidentally, this link dump is an example of my new script in action:

• macosxhints - Create cross-platform URL shortcut files
• macosxhints - Easy conversion of multiple Safari to PC .url files
• Lazy Mac OS X- Weblog links sidebar

The case I really wanted to handle was my collection of reference links. Normal people would bookmark them but I keep them in folders sorted by topic, along with html and other files. I’ve tried wikis and blogs and xml DTDs for keeping information organized, but I’ve found that the best knowledge management software for me is the Apache webserver that came with my mac. Safari will display xml, text, html, pdf, and rtf, plus my local WordPress writing journal, so I keep all my writing info on my local website. I use a php script to index each directory and provide navigation. The system works perfectly, except that I can’t see the .webloc files or open them through Apache—they can only be opened by clicking on them in the Finder.

So I took a shell script from one of the macosxhints articles about converting Mac weblocs to the PC analogue, and hacked it until it took a bunch of weblocs and converted them to an html list, which can be easily cut and pasted into the blog. The output is actually a full html page (sent to stout) which I can use for my local web pages. The script can be edited easily to change the html. At some point I may make a version that outputs markdown-native links.

To use the script, download linkdumper.txt. Change the permissions so it’s executable (chmod 755 linkdumper.txt), rename it if you’d like, then run it in the Terminal. Typing ./linkdumper.txt *.webloc should work, if you don’t understand shell scripts. If you type just ./linkdumper.txt, you get a short help blurb. I keep my copy of the script in ~/Library/Scripts/, though I had to add that directory to my path. Please keep in mind that I know very little about shell scripting, and weird things may happen. Weird things happened during the hacking of this script, though I’ve been unable to reproduce them.

Pardon the extreme geeking.

P.S. I forgot to link Faviconic, a nice little program to add a site’s favicon to its webloc icon.

I’m an Emacs girl myself, but many mac users prefer BBEdit, now up to BBEdit 8.0. Daring Fireball explains the appeal of BBEdit.

Quicksilver is up to β29.

DivX is up to 5.2.

Bookpedia is up to version 1.1.3. If you’d rather not pay for software, there’s a free program that does the same thing (cataloging books), more or less: Books for MacOS X.

I heard about the new, faster DNS propagation at Slashdot, and I’m trying it out right now with another domain. (It applies to .com and .net, but not .org, apparently.) Just in the time I’ve been typing this entry, the new DNS info propagated far enough for me to see it at dnsreport, but it hasn’t reached my mac yet. I suspect my ISP is caching the DNS somewhere.

It’s not me caching, since I found this handy blog entry about flushing your DNS cache on OSX (lookupd -flushcache). Yet for the moment, I’m still using the DNS trick I blogged about a few weeks ago.

Ballot stuffer of the day: Diebold

Mac links, old and new:

• Did you know you can wall-mount that new G5 iMac? I’m still waiting for the rumored Tablet Mac, myself.
• Crazy Apple Rumors has a fun take on the Paris Expo.
• Skype has come to Mac OS X.
• Camino is up to version 0.8.1.

Codepoetry reveals the deep secrets of the Mac OSX color picker in The Colors! I’ve always wondered how to capture a pixel’s color (answer: with the magnifying glass) or get a color into the swatch list at the bottom of the color picker (answer: drag it from the swatch next to the magnifying glass). Note the link to HexColorPicker, exColor and Painter’s Picker.

Codepoetry also asks the eternal question: If I throw a cat out the car window, is it kitty litter? (one of the random quotes you get at the top of each page) and links to the cool tool LanOSD. I’m not sure what it does, but I’m sure it’s cool.

Crazy rumor of the day: Arlo Rose Working On Doomsday Widget

Here’s a link dump of the nifty and the novel in Mac software:

• ~stevenf describes CocoaBooklet, an app for printing booklets.
• Mac the Ripper, an all-in-one DVD ripping utility, is up to version 2.0.1.
• SafariSpeed will do that speeding-up-Safari hack for you.
• Bookpedia will catalog your books. (Well, you’ll catalog your books, unless you happen to have a bar code scanner handy.)
• Have you been waiting for the reincarnation of HyperCard? It’s no longer necessary to drink that poison Kool-Aid - HyperNext is here!
• iGetter is download manager for the Mac, for those of you who don’t use wget.
• Mike Matas has cool icons that come with a copy of his CatScan.

Weird link of the day: Innovation in India

I was waiting for a DNS entry to percolate down to my little mac, but then I thought, why wait? So I followed this macosxhint to get my mac to contact the one DNS server that already had a clue. It wasn’t really necessary, but it worked.

To check if a domain is having DNS troubles, try Quick Check. When Quick Check verified that the domain was one with the net again, I undid my DNS hack above. No harm done.

I love Quicksilver, but when it crashes, it drags the Finder down with it. Apparently I have it cataloguing too much; I followed the advice in this forum thread to turn off automatic rescanning of the catalog, and QS hasn’t crashed since.