Month: November 2001

It’s a good morning

And I have a lot to do. I’m trying not to let it get to me today, though. Doing some writing for my marketing professor, meeting with some folks on e-MIT things. Still working on getting my financial aid in order too. When I have a chance I’ll write more about that today. And E-52s rehearsal tonight. As Dave used to say, Dig we must!

Now playing

Currently playing song: “Creep” by Richard Cheese on Lounge Against The Machine. This is an alarming little big band lounge Radiohead cover that almost made me hurt myself laughing. “You know, folks, I was talking with my honey the other day, my Pablo Honey, and I said to her, I said, I said, you go to my head, my Radiohead. OK Computer! When you were here before, couldn’t look you in the eye…” There’s an interview with the perpetrator here.

DVD + TV + 10.1 = …

Success, if you follow the directions in this thread on the Apple Discussions board. I don’t know whether the URL works for sure, but if it doesn’t, try discussions.info.apple.com and go to the board Mac OS X –> DVD Player and look for the thread “Powerbook DVD Playback WORKS!!!!”

Or try this: Shut your Powerbook down. Connect the TV to the video out port (preferably S-Video). Restart and before the screen comes on, close the lid of the Powerbook. The Powerbook should start up and only use the TV as the monitor. After it displays the boot panel, you should be able to open the laptop and use the keyboard and trackpad again. You should be able to play back the DVD now on the TV.

As for why the PowerBook won’t play back the DVD normally with a TV connected, I don’t know and Apple isn’t telling. But my money’s on the MPAA. I don’t know of any other organization that goes so far to make sure that you can’t enjoy its products. Oh yeah, there’s the RIAA too…
more…

Scripting Manila and iTunes

New scripts today. First, a version of the iTunes script I wrote a few days ago that posts the currently playing item directly to a Manila website as a news item. Second, some modules that contain functions for making SOAP calls and calling Manila RPC interfaces.

As a programmer, I was big into reuse of code through object orientation. It bugged me for a long time that I couldn’t figure out how to make that work in AppleScript. Today I’ve got one version working. It’s not very clean, because it requires a lot of drag and drop installation, but it’s getting there. The other good thing is that it will cut down on the amount of pain in writing and deploying these scripts because it separates a lot of the Manila “glue” code from the parts of the scripts that actually do things.

All the scripts can be downloaded from my scripts page.

One note about iTunes2Manila–if your site is hosted on editthispage.com like mine is, you may get some timeout messages. I’m still playing with avoiding these, but (as you can tell from my home page), just because you get a timeout doesn’t mean that the news item didn’t get posted.