raoli.com

EagleFiler 1.2.6 has been released and it incorporates the work I’ve did on the MarsEdit capture script.¹

Michael added support for setting the source URL to the post’s permalink. Among other things, this activates the Open Source URL command in the Record menu.

If you’ve got my capture script installed in EagleFiler’s Application Support folder, you won’t see this new functionality — EagleFilers gives precedence to user-installed scripts over its own bundled scripts. If you’re just using the capture script as I originally posted it, you can delete my script. You’ll gain the source URL functionality without losing anything.

If you’ve customize the capture script to better suit your workflow, you can apply Michael’s change to add support for setting the source URL. Just replace this line:

return {{|path|:tempPath, |title|:theTitle, tags:theTags, |deleteWhenDone|:true, |note|:theNote}}

with the following (sorry about the long lines):

if thePermalink is not "" then
    return {{|path|:tempPath, |title|:theTitle, tags:theTags, |deleteWhenDone|:true, |note|:theNote, |sourceURL|:thePermalink}}
else
    return {{|path|:tempPath, |title|:theTitle, tags:theTags, |deleteWhenDone|:true, |note|:theNote}}
end if

While checking out the change notes for the updated EagleFiler, I noticed the following line:

You can now modify capture scripts while EagleFiler is open without having to relaunch for it to notice the changes.

Thank you. Thank You! ThanksYouThankYouThankYouThankYou!

(Can you tell I hit this issue while writing the original capture script?)

Oh, did I say thank you?

I’ve been playing around with an updated capture script on my own system, but I’ve been hesitant to post it because it relies on components that are part of a stock Tiger installation. I want to check out whether the situation is any different when running Leopard. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to upgrading, though.

1. The new raoli.com: all capture scripts, all the time.↩

If you’ve tried using using my EagleFiler Capture Script with MarsEdit 1.x, you’ve probably noticed that it doesn’t work — EagleFiler claims it doesn’t support capturing from MarsEdit.

The solution is to rename the capture script from com.red-sweater.marsedit.applescript to com.ranchero.MarsEdit.applescript. Once you do this, EagleFiler will recognize the older version of MarsEdit.

You’ll also need to comment out or delete the two lines in the script that begin with if theVersion ≥ 2. As the line implies, the functionality is only present in the newer version of MarsEdit. I had assumed that including the conditional statement would allow the script to run with older versions of MarsEdit, but it would appear that I was wrong.

Walt Mossberg:

A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.

Nice article by Walt Mossberg concerning the state of the U.S. mobile phone industry. A little over a week ago, I was having this same discussion with several of my friends. We were trying to decide just how far back the U.S. mobile market has been set by the cellular providers. I think the consensus was at least 5 years. Even if we hadn’t all considered the iPhone an innovative device, we agreed it was good to see a phone manufacturer dictate terms to one of the cellular providers.

Like so many others¹, I ventured down to Tampa for the weekend to take see the Red Sox play at Tropicana Field. One of my old friends moved to the Tampa area a few months back and figured an end-of-year series was a good excuse to bring a bunch of friends down to Florida for a few days.

Game-wise, the trip went pretty well. We got to see the Sox victories on Friday and Saturday. Josh Beckett pitched well and Daisuke Matsuzaka seemed to pitch better than he has in the recent past. Were Javier Lopez actually an effective LOOGY, Daisuke would’ve come away with the victory. Of course, Lopez’ failure (giving up a 3-run homer to Carlos Pena) set up the Sox dramatic ninth-inning victory with homers from Jason Varitek and Julio Lugo.

Those homers, combined with the Royals knocking off the Tigers, clinched a playoff berth for Sox, making them the first team to clinch a spot. To be completely honest, I want the Sox to take the division. To be in first place since April and lose it in the last weekend of the season would basically suck. That said, winning the World Series is the main goal. I get why the Sox have been giving injured players extra time and I get why they’ve been trying to straighten out Eric Gagne, but it doesn’t make it any more bearable when they were dropping game to the Blue Jays last week. That said, winning the World Series is the most important thing. Just as winning the World Series as the wild card would wipe out any of the disappointment of losing the division, watching the Yankees win the World Series as the wild card would wipe out any appreciation of winning the division.

Tropicana Field… Hmm… I’d watch another Red Sox game there. We’ll probably repeat this trip next September, or whenever the Sox make their final trip of the year to Tampa. I guess the best way to describe my impressions of watching a game there is this — I wouldn’t trade seats at Fenway to see the Sox play in Tampa, but I’d certainly go in addition to having seats at Fenway.

It’s not a great place to watch a ball game, but there’s other stuff to check out. I’m not usually the type of person to do these things during a ball game (I’d rather watch the game), but the whole Tampa experience has enough of a minor league feel that I somehow took the whole experience less seriously than I took the games I saw at Fenway and Camden Yards this year.

When I say “minor league,” I’m talking more about the stadium atmosphere than the actual Devil Rays. Many of the between-inning and concourse-level activities seemed more like something I’d see at a Sea Dogs game than at a Sox game.

Of all the ideas, College Nights on Friday didn’t work so well. $1 beer in the Party Deck might seem like a good idea when the stadium’s half-full, but it doesn’t work so well when the stadium’s near capacity. The guys sitting in the back of our section clearly had no interest in baseball and were only at the game to drink lots of cheap beer and try to start something with any Red Sox fan they could find. They must’ve mouthed off to every Sox fan within 5 rows of their seats. It wasn’t until the 8th inning that we saw the first sign of stadium security.

Guys, I know you don’t have a lot to do most nights, but you know you’re going to have near sell-outs for the 16-18 games when the Sox and Yankees are in town. A little show of force for those nights (particularly in the $1 beer section) might be a good idea.

Games aside, the highlight of the trip might’ve been meeting Mike Greenwell and Sam Horn at Ferg’s on Saturday. Horn’s probably better known at this point, between the name connection with Sons of Sam Horn and his appearances on NESN, but meeting Greenwell was the big thing for our group of 20-something guys.

When you meet somebody you grew up watching, there’s always a possibility of a let-down. That definitely wasn’t the case with Greenwell. He hung around our table for about 10 minutes, had a drink, talked with fans, and signed autographs. He was a very down-to-earth guy. He surprised us, though, when he said that Saturday would be the first time he would see the Sox play in person since he retired after the 1996 season. He told us that Horn finally convinced him to make the 2 hour trip to Tampa to catch a game.

Later, we were discussing amongst ourselves where Greenwell was sitting. We figured he and Horn were probably in a luxury box or in high end seats. However, we could easily see Greenwell sitting out in the bleachers and talking NASCAR with anybody in the vicinity. He just seems like that kind of guy.

Grr… When I first posted this, I forgot to mention the one thing every Red Sox fan should make sure to check out while at Tropicana — the Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame. When the Williams museum wasn’t able to sustain itself as a stand-alone entity, the Devil Rays made room for the museum within Tropicana Field. The museum features a huge collection of Williams memorabilia and displays for each of the hall’s inductees. I’ve always felt like this belonged at Fenway when the stand-alone museum was forced to close, but I appreciate the fact that the Devil Rays were willing to host the exhibits. Anybody who is a fan of baseball and baseball’s history should make the trip.

If you’ve made it this far, some photos from the trip are up at Flickr.

1. Seriously, I think think this article is just a template; ie, insert home team name here, insert disgruntled player name here. I saw the same article when the Sox were in Baltimore.↩

• Airport Wireless Internet Access Guide
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Update (11/24/07): EagleFiler 1.2.6 now includes built-in support for capturing from MarsEdit that expands on this capture script. That capture script is located inside the EagleFiler application, in the Contents/Resources/Capture Scripts/ folder. More information is available here.

With MarsEdit 2.0’s release, I’ve decided to re-evaluate my post management scheme. Previously, I created my posts in BBEdit, then moved them over MarsEdit via an AppleScript. I did this because I wanted to have copies of my posts archived on my hard drive and not lost whenever I refreshed my weblog in MarsEdit. A downside to this approach is that I end up underusing MarsEdit’s Draft’s functionality — I’d either keep the BBEdit window open the whole time I was working on a post or I’d save the post to my Posting directory and have to remember finish editing it at a later date.

My app tool-chain has shifted a bit over the last 3 years, so I now have a few more options at my disposal. One of those is EagleFiler. My new workflow is to compose and post in MarsEdit, then move the completed post of to Eagle Filer. To facilitate this, I’ve written an EagleFiler capture script for MarsEdit — to archive my post, I simply need to hit F1.

The script’s a bit long to include here, so I’m just going to post it for download.

Download MarsEdit Capture Script

To use this script, save it to ~/Library/Application Support/EagleFiler/Capture Scripts/, creating the last folder if necessary.

There are a few notes about what information is available for capture. First, you can’t capture a draft from the main MarsEdit window, only from the individual post window. Second, drafts which you have saved locally will have a value for date published. I believe this is the date the draft was first saved. Third, posts captured from the post window will not have a permalink value. Hopefully, future updates to MarsEdit will allow me to rectify at least a few of these.

There’s certainly room for some individualization in this script. Though I’ve stripped out the modification for public usage, my personal copy of this script adds some custom tags to each posting and sets BBEdit as the file creator. Another modification I’ve seen is adding the category information to the text of the posting. Additionally, you could add support for creating EagleFiler tags out of post keywords in addition/in place of post categories. Since Wordpress doesn’t support keywords, I didn’t implement this.

If you do edit the capture script after installing it, you’ll need to restart EagleFiler so the application will see the changes.

I wrote and tested this script for use with Wordpress blog. As far as other blogging packages are concerned, the script appears not to fail, though I can’t guarantee it’ll actually work.

As part of today’s exercise in time-killing, I visited the Apple Store to and checked out the new offerings and get my first close-up look at the iPhone. While I was taking a look at the various toys, I heard several people ask about the availability of the 4GB iPhone.

Guess that clearance pricing makes the low-end model even more popular.

Chris Turner:

anyone else starting to feel like there are too many versions of the
iPod?

I was slightly disappointed to see that there are now 4 entries in the iPod family. With the iPod touch, your iPod-buying decision is no longer simply a question of size/storage trade-off. Without a doubt, the iPod touch is a very interesting piece of hardware, but from an iPod standpoint, it has the same shortfall as an iPhone — limited storage. I’ve always been an iPod classic kind of guy because I wanted the hard drive space. I also enjoyed having access to all of the iPod features that the nano and mini lacked (thought the refurbished Nano’s have been tempting, if only to use with a Nike+). Now, among the screened iPods, the Classic appears to offer the the most storage space while offering fewest features. You obviously miss out on all the Touch’es iPhone-esque features while also missing the Nano’s Nike+ support (you do gain Search functionality, though, which I forgot about until visiting the new iPod classic’s features page).

Looking at the new offerings, I get the feeling that the iPod classic is not a long term product. Much like the Mac Classic marked the beginning of the end for the original Mac styling, I suspect the iPod classic represents the beginning of the end for the original iPod design. I think it’s just a matter of Apple not wanting to cede the high-capacity market while not compromising on the design of the Touch.

In addition to paying homage to a piece of Apple history, the iPod classic name rolls off the tongue better than the originally proposed name — iPod discontinued when flash prices drop.

I didn’t read anything one way or another, but it looks like the changes to the iPod OS are more than just cosmetic — according to the iPod Games section of the iTunes Store, games need to be updated to work with the iPod nano (video) and the iPod classic. Right now, Tetris, Ms. Pac-Man, and Sudoku are in-line for updates. Does this mean that the new models have made the jump to OS X? If it were simply a matter of updating the games to recognize the new iPods, I’d imagine all the games would be updated.

(Klondike, Vortex, and iQuiz have already been upgraded and come bundled with the Nano and Classic).

Follow-up thought — will Apple offer updates to anybody who already bought these games?

Mari Silbey:

Engadget is already calling the Starbucks feature weak, but I think I
disagree. (How’s that for a strong statement?) Impulse music buying is
still largely untapped. Sure you can bookmark songs with some services
in order to buy them later, but we haven’t really seen an effective
on-the-go version of this feature before.

I agree with Silbey’s assessment that the Starbucks features isn’t weak. Although I’m not the lounge-in-a-Starbucks type, plenty of people are. Starbucks has clearly found that it can make money by selling music, both in-store and via iTunes. I have to assume that Apple has found the existing iTunes-Starbucks partnership rewarding. The infrastructure costs for supporting the new integration can’t be that high. Given the number of people you already see in Starbucks with laptops and the number of iPhones and iPod touches you can expect to see, I think it’s reasonable to expect both sides to profit from this expansion to the Apple-Starbucks relationship.

• Cubs f/x: Data Loader
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  (tags: baseball pitchfx statistics sports analysis xml perl database)

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  Information on automating the process of getting PITCHf/x files. Beats the hell out of downloading the XML files by hand.
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  Collection of links to articles about PITCHf/x data.
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