raoli.com

If you’ve paid attention to my del.icio.us links recently, you might have noticed my fascination with PITCHf/x. I thought it would be fun to take a look at a few pitches from Buchholz‘ no-hitter last night. I checked Buchholz’ pitch log only to find that none of the advanced data was available for his pitches. A little more digging showed that the information was missing for a few games.

I emailed Dan Fox over at Baseball Prospectus to see if he’d run across this before. I was curious if this was a systemic problem, an issue specific to the Fenway installation, or just something that’s popped up in August. Unfortunately, this seems to happen fairly frequently. It appears that the system is occasionally turned off, causing certain pitches or whole games to be missed.

So, would whoever is unplugging the PITCHf/x system to charge their iPod please stop?

• NFL TV Distribution Maps
  Shows which games are being shown in which areas.
  (tags: football tv)

I’ve posted Mail Headline 1.0.1. It’s a fairly small upgrade, but if you’ve had any trouble mailing articles, you should grab this version.

If anybody has trouble with this version, let me know.

What’s New:

• Mail Headline should no longer refuse to convert HTML that contains non-ASCII Unicode characters.
• No longer prepend “Fwd: ” to email subject.
• Links are included after the respective paragraphs instead of the end of the article.

As always, you can download Mail Headline directly or get more information from my AppleScript page.

I went to a pair of Red Sox games while I was visiting my folks last weekend — the Friday afternoon and Saturday night games against the Angels. I thought the Friday game would be a decent opportunity to snap some photos, but my SLR locked up while I was shooting the pregame warmups. I pulled two interesting shots off my SD800 IS, but I think I had some decent ones of Clay Buchholz warming up on film before that camera spit the bit.

Here’s the main reason I brought my camera — Clay Buchholz big league debut. The Sox have been grooming him as their next stud pitcher and I was thrilled when I saw the schedule would line up so I’d get to see him.

This one just amused me. Justin Speier was entertaining fans and bullpen-mates with some mid game juggling. Afterwards, he tossed the balls out to a few fans, including a very excited young boy.

I didn’t bother with the camera for the nightcap, but my friend Dave brought his and posted a few pictures, including the old-timers gathered for Tony Conigliaro Night.

• Baseball Prospectus | Articles | Schrodinger’s Bat: Visualizing Pitches
  Cool analysis of pitch travel/speed over at Baseball Prospectus (Subscription Required) via the freely available PITCHf/x data.
  (tags: baseball pitchfx statistics graph sports analysis)
• MLB Extended Gameday Pitch Logs: A Tutorial
  Information for accessing PITCHf/x data.
  (tags: baseball pitchfx statistics sports analysis)
• SourceForge.net: Narrative — Cocoa Plotting Framework
  (tags: cocoa graph charting programming osx mac)
• SM2DGraphView Framework Site
  (tags: cocoa graph charting programming osx mac)
• Blog @ Oofn.net » GraphX Framework
  (tags: cocoa graph charting programming osx mac)

• www.photo.is • A $1600 Titanium PowerBook Hinge?
  How to repair a PowerBook hinge for $10. Now that is more along the lines of the type of money I’d put into a 5-year-old computer
  (tags: mac powerbook repair titanium aluminum hinge)

I’ve been a pretty heavy user of NetNewsWire for several years now and enjoy seeing what new features Brent Simmons adds with each new release. At some point (version 2.0, maybe?), he added the ability to email post contents. Unfortunately, this only worked with Mail. Since I primarily use Mailsmith, you might see how this could be a problem. Therefore, AppleScript to the rescue.

Mail Headline is a plain-text replacement for the Mail Contents of this News Item command that’s capable of supporting multiple email clients. The contents of the news item are processed with Aaron Swartz’ html2text and converted to Markdown-formatted text. The currently supported email clients include Mailsmith, Entourage, and Mail (if you prefer plain text over rich text for emails).

There are a few things you should know about this script.

• You need to configure it for you email client before it will run. You do this by opening the script and uncommenting the line indicating your email client.
• As written, it requires NetNewsWire 2.1.
• NetNewsWire will not run the script from its Script menu. I recommend using something like the system script menu or FastScripts
• html2text sometimes has refuses to translate pages. The two reasons I’ve seen for this are unencoded or unknown HTML entities. html2text can be updated to recognize the latter; I’m not sure what to do about the former.

You can visit the AppleScripts page for more information and to download the latest version

Update: Turns out Mail Headline supports 2.1, as well. Thanks for the info, Brent!

• toxic-public – Google Code
  Toxic Software’s public svn repository. Includes ToxicHTTP Framework.
  (tags: programming mac osx opensource)

See that piece sticking out the back of the hinge? That’s supposed to be connected to the screen casing. Yeah, not really happy with myself right now.

Chuq Van Rospach:

The more I think about it, the more I realize we have a great
real-world example that for all we talk about long tails and courting
the early adopters and the geek elite as a way to generate buzz and
figure out what the Next Big Thing is, we also need to be careful
about trusting the geeks TOO much, especially with consumer products.

Chuq’s post struck me as the flip side to my thoughts on MBAs and technology. Just like you can’t let the MBAs run amok designing products by feature checklists, you can’t let the geeks go crazy, either. To develop quality solutions, you need to focus on the user. This is something that both parties need to remember.