Opinions expressed here are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer.
Contact me at firstname.lastname at gmail
or at twitter: @mikemccracken
MarsEdit: Powerful Blog Authoring Made Simple
BibDesk: The Free BibTeX-based reference manager and PDF library for the Mac intosh
Hey, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference is in San Diego next week. I live in San Diego – but I can’t even afford the deeply discounted student admissions. I’d go to see the microformats session, since I’m interested in seeing a good citation microformat develop.
If anyone I know or should know is in town for the conference and wants to hang out, I know a few good places to go – email me or something.
I take notes at meetings in VoodooPad, and as such I write a lot of to-do items in MeetingNotes pages. They tend to get buried in those pages unless I do something about it fast. Sometimes I put them somewhere more useful, like on my “TodoToday” page, but that page is getting more like a “TodoSomeday” page, and isn’t fit for serious action items. Today I realized that I wanted a script to take line-items from VoodooPad pages and make them into Todo items in iCal, so I can track them easier.
I already have a Quicksilver plugin for creating new todos, so I repurposed it as a python plugin for VoodooPad to add a big list all at once. Check out Gus’ post on python plugins for the enabler, and then check this sucker out:
VPScriptSuperMenuTitle = "Notes" VPScriptMenuTitle = 'Create Todos in iCal'
import os
def main(windowController, *args, **kwargs): tv = windowController.textView() s = tv.string() ranges = tv.selectedRanges()
scriptString = ""
for r in ranges:
rs = s.substringWithRange_(r.rangeValue())
lines = rs.split("\n")
for line in lines:
if len(line) < 1: continue
scriptString += "tell application \"iCal\"\n\
set theCal to (first calendar whose title is \"Work\")\n\
make todo at end of todos of theCal with properties\
{priority:0, summary:\"%s\"}\n\
end tell\n" % line
f = os.popen("/usr/bin/osascript", 'w')
f.write(scriptString)
f.close()
Want to add to it? These and many things are easily imaginable:
Now that we’ve got Google Maps, I’d like to see my calendar program (iCal) extended to pay more attention to the location of events. Show me how long it’ll take to get to events I’ve scheduled, based on where they are. Traffic estimates would make this really killer (at least here in So-Cal)
It might sound like you would need to tell the app where you will be at every point of the day for this to work, but you could avoid that by storing a ‘coming from’ location for each event – it could be the previous event, but you could also just pick it from a list of default places, like ‘Home’, ‘Work’, and ‘Hockey Rink’.
In my dream world, they’d look like error bars on a plot, they’d even have data about variability of the traffic estimates, and they’d be in the next version of iCal.
Here’s a quick visual, in case I didn’t describe it well enough:
Assume home is south of the office and the basketball court is north. Traffic is bad going north around 6. What it’s telling you now is you can go home fast, and have 30 minutes there before you have to leave again, go straight to the court, taking 45 minutes in traffic and getting there 45 minutes early, or have about an hour at the office, wait out traffic, and get to the court on time in about 25 minutes.
Update: I changed the example to be a little clearer – I added an option to show traffic choices, showed the times by the routes, and made one event appear selected, since you probably only want this extra info for the selected event.
I also made it a basketball game because everyone knows you’d need to go home to get your gear if you were going to the rink anyway. Seriously.
As a Mac user, I don’t have Google Desktop, but this email from UCSD’s Vice Chancellor was still interesting:
SUBJECT: Google Desktop Security Exposure
Google Desktop V.3 contains certain features that raise serious security and privacy concerns. Specifically, the “share across computers” feature that introduces the ability to search content from desktop to desktop greatly increases the risk to users’ privacy. If Google Desktop V.3 is set to allow “Search Across Computers” files on an indexed computer are copied to Google’s servers. We recommend that individuals seriously consider the potential for information stored on their computers to be accessed by others if they enable this feature of Google Desktop V. 3 on their computers.
Employees of the University (whether student, regular staff or faculty) who have confidential data on their work or home computers should not enable this feature. There are both privacy laws and university policies that could be violated through the installation of this feature, specifically, SB 1386, HIPPA, FERPA and GLBA.
While some of the features of Google Desktop V.3 are enticing to faculty, students, and staff, it is important to understand how information is collected, stored, and shared through this application, and the potential privacy risk to individuals.
Please review and share this information widely.
Helpful References:
UCSD Policies about Protecting Data
For a good summary of the privacy concerns related to Google Desktop V.3, see:
Electronic Frontier Foundation press release
Technical Paper from University of Michigan’s IT Security group
I’ve just put up the website for my current project (to be part of my Ph.D. dissertation work): LENS, a framework for program information manipulation that presents a uniform interface to selective user and automated queries about many types of program metrics, including success and diagnostic information about compiler optimizations and code generation.
I’m not sure how many readers of my weblog will be interested, but there’s a link to a technical report on there if you want the gory details.
Feedback and questions are very welcome – the more opportunities I get to explain what I’m doing, the better I get at it.
This car has some serious character. The painting looks like it belongs on the car, and it reminds me a bit of explodingdog.com. If I find out whose car it is, I’ll explain more here.
I replaced my stock powerbook battery recently with a NewerTech 53.3 Watt-Hour Battery, which is higher-capacity than the Apple originals, which are 46 Watt-Hour batteries.
My old battery was so spent by the time I finally gave in that it would give about 20 minutes on a full charge before forcing sleep. The battery warning would show up after about three minutes. So I can’t compare the extended capacity directly to a fresh Apple battery, but the new one has been doing fine so far. I saw at least three hours from a charge yesterday, and it’s letting me work at a coffee shop without worrying about finding a plug, and that’s a nice change.
Just went to see Jorge Cham’s talk “The Power of Procrastination” about grad school. There were plenty of good grad-school jokes and a general feeling of relief that comes with being in a big room full of people who laugh at the same old chestnuts about how nobody ever really feels like they fit in and always feel guilty about whatever it is you spend your free time doing – you know, when you should be doing research!
If you get a chance to see his talk, go for it, even if you’ve read all the comics, it’ll make you feel better. And if you haven’t seen the comics, go read them all first, then see the talk. Now I’m going to get back to work.
I just discovered something curious. I accidentally pasted when I meant to undo in Apple Mail, and it took the text on the clipboard and created a new mail message with the clipboard text as its contents. Not a new message ready to send, like if I had dragged the text to Mail’s icon, but a new unread message in my mailbox that had the text as its body and no headers.
“That’s strange,” I thought, so I pasted again, into TextEdit, to see if I’d somehow copied a mail message or something – no, just text. I then added a Subject: and From: header line, copied and pasted again. The same thing, only this time with those headers. It only seems to work with plain text pasteboard contents, and I couldn’t get it to work reliably in every kind of mail folder, but a local mailbox seems to work most consistently.
I feel like I’ve found Mail’s vestigial tail – this is mostly harmless behavior, but a little confusing, and I can’t really think of any use for it. I’m curious how it got in there.
Today, a group of graduating PhD students in our department met up to brief each other on what’s new and hot in their respective fields, to remind each other of what’s going on outside their respective specialties. The idea is that when interviewing for jobs, you have to hold up your end of a conversation with professors outside your specialty, and it helps to know a bit about their field.
To quote one professor in our department, “…there is a special circle of hell reserved for grad students interviewing for jobs who are unable to answer questions of the form, ‘Oh, you’re from UCSD. What’s Professor so-and-so up to these days?’.”
It took about six hours to get through talks from students working on Architecture, Bioinformatics, Systems, Graphics, Vision, Databases, Security, VLSI and more, and I’m not going to try to repeat any of the details, because frankly I’m numb. I will say that it was a great idea, and if you’re a grad student and your department doesn’t do something like this, you should start a tradition.
I will mention one thing: automatic detection and adaptation to network attacks is so hot right now.
