njr 3.0

…I wish it would, for a second, so I could catch up. I don’t understand how people with busy schedules ever have any time to blog. The last week was a bit of a blur—skiing and computer fixing and reorganization in New Hampshire and Boston, visiting family, my PowerBook display dying again (dropped off at the Computer Loft last Tuesday, haven’t heard back yet), staying with friends in Virginia (who were incredibly nice and hospitable in putting me up for five days), going to PyCon and meeting lots of people for the first time (though not taking the best advantage of the opportunities I had), wandering around DC, eating a lot of good food (the pie at PyCon was excellent, and we went out to a series of great restaurants for dinner; Yijia and I cooked dinner one night, too, which was quite tasty), seeing the first movie I’ve seen in a theater in months (Hotel Rwanda, a bit depressing but well done), watching the end of the Illinois-Arizona game last night (not that I normally watch basketball or TV in general, but that was incredible), and celebrating my birthday (thanks Brent!). I just got home a few hours ago, barely missing Steve, who flew out to California to interview. My checked bag (containing clothing and some miscellaneous stuff like my camera’s AC adapter) made it to Chicago but not to Bloomington.

I had a bit of a sore throat on the IAD–ORD flight, and have had a runny nose for a few days; hope it’s just allergies and I’m not getting sick again. At the architecture seminar, on Friday, my advisor is reprising his CGO presentation and I’m presenting our recent work; got a lot of work to do to prepare. It’s supposed to be warmer this week, and assuming I’m not sick tomorrow, I’ll start back at Kuk Sool although my left knee isn’t entirely recovered. Getting back on my bike is probably out, though.

For the moment, the preceding few run-on sentences will have to do; I have so much I would love to write about (and code on, and experiment with), but I’m tired and have given up hope that United will be delivering my bag tonight. Good night.

8:16 PM | PyCS
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Last week I expressed my wish it were easier to post screenshots in Flickr with 1001. Today, I saw Bill Bumgarner’s pdf2png script which did a big chunk of what I needed, and did something about finishing the rest.

Download 1001Screenshot 1.0 (sorry, no fancy icon). Open the application; you’re now in the window-selection mode as if you hit command-shift-4, space. Click a window, or hit the space bar and drag over a region. In a few seconds, you should see a “Screenshot 1” PNG file on your desktop and 1001 will open with the image added to the upload window.

Needless to say, I’ll be posting more screenshots in the future now it’s so easy to do so.

The script’s a bit ugly; more of it could have been written in Python if I had wrapped some bits of Carbon/CF that weren’t wrapped (FNNotify and LSOpenFrom*Spec); instead, I just use osascript to talk to the Finder and an embedded copy of launch to open 1001. Thanks as usual to py2app for making packaging Python apps trivial on the Mac; no thanks to the appscript installer for breaking permissions everywhere it touched.

Update: Sorry for the broken link. Fixed. I’m usually better at verify such things, but there was a really bizarre SSH forwarding issue I ran into that made this post quite a nightmare…

3:45 PM | PyCS
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I’ve moved my one-off photos and screenshots to Flickr. So far, it’s been working pretty well; I’m emailing photos directly from my hiptop where appropriate, and using 1001 as a Mac client. I wish 1001 had better support for posting screenshots: I’d love to be able to just paste an image into the upload window and have it get converted to PNG automatically, rather than having to go through Preview exporting first.

2:45 PM | PyCS
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I’m going to PyCon DC 2005. I’m using Python an increasing amount in my research, not to mention using it for much of the development I did at my last job, so I’m interested to get a better sense of what’s going on in the Python community.

2:43 PM | PyCS
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Exorcise converted RAWs (view as HTML, download AppleScript) is a script for iView MediaPro which deletes all the RAW files for which converted JPEG versions exist and label 0 isn’t applied (in my case, that label is named “Keep as RAW”, for those photos where I’m not satisfied with the conversion yet). Pretty trivial to write, a bit more difficult to optimize by not sending lots and lots of Apple Events to iView MediaPro. Dump it in ~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Scripts/.

Of course, I spent all the time I planned to use last weekend processing photos writing the above script; but at least I’ll be set for this weekend.

2:33 PM | PyCS
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