⏳ Waiting for the APIs in the Cloud for what's going on right now ...
New job, new desk, therefore new hardware. When my day job took place at FormScape my desk was somewhat cluttered; a case of more is more.
Since then I've moved on and my working hours are now occupied by a division of Yahoo! and we're definitely in the less is more category where desks are concerned..
I got some new shoes recently to coincide with starting a new job. Ben also got some new shoes; his first proper pair. There's a slight difference in size ...
Various quotes, mostly UNIX related, which I've accrued over the years from various sources.
Well my terminal's locked up and I ain't got any Mail And I can't recall the last time that my program didn't fail I've got stacks in my structs, I've got arrays in my queues I've got those: Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.
While I was playing with AppleScript earlier this week I wanted to run a shell script I'd written from within Finder rather than from a shell prompt in Terminal.app.
On Windows I tend to write scripts to run under Cygwin and then write a wrapper batch file to run the script under the control of Cygwin's bash executable.
Turns out the AppleScript solution is identical in principal and is as simple as
do shell script "/full/path/to/shell/script"
You may need to adjust the path to the script dependent upon whether the directory where your script resides is in your $PATH or not.
One of my standard lunchtime reading web sites started me off on this; The Unofficial Apple Weblog got me reading an article on PC Magazine's site about Argh! moments. That sort of moment when you try to do something really simple on OS X but find it isn't. In this case, Robyn Peterson's struggle to mount a network volume on login struck a chord. I'd gone down a similar route and come up with an alias to a network volume in my login items, a solution which seems to be well documented after a quick Google search.
After working on a Mac full time for almost a year, I've come to realise that OS X provides you with a lot of nice visual cues which greatly enhance the usability of the system. Here's a nice example I came across the other day; take a loook at this screen grab of a TextEdit.app window.
I had some hardware delivery to the office this morning; nothing too spectacular, just some disks and some memory. The delivery was taken and signed for by a colleague who works in our IS department and they'd checked that the consignment contained exactly what we'd ordered and paid for.
In order to do that, they'd had to open the box which, judging by the ripped, torn and otherwise mangled top of the box was quite a challenge.
As fast as an anti-spam mechanism appears on the net, the spammers try to find a way to circumvent it; recently I wrote about the attempt of spammers to try and create realistic sounding names in an attempt to bypass spam filters with unintentionally amusing results.
The latest weapon in the spammers arsenal seems to be inserting passages from works of popular fiction into mails in an attempt to defeat natural language heuristic checks, with passages from Tolkein's The Hobbit seeming to be a firm favourite, judging by the contents of my Junk Mail folder.
On Windows, if you use this command line to start a Terminal Services session
I used to have a home made anti-stress ball, consisting of a flour filled balloon; it was made for me by one of the French students currently on industrial placement at work. I say used to as one of my colleagues managed to break it, which at least proved it really was a balloon filled with flour. Which is a shame as I was rather fond of it.
