Author: Tim Jarrett

As you can probably tell…

…I got iTunes2Manila working again. The problems appear to be rooted in changes to Apple’s implementation of XML-RPC and SOAP in Jaguar:

  1. Passing HTML tags such as italics and anchor tags in text that is a parameter to an XML-RPC or SOAP call causes an error. You can deal with this by escaping the opening bracket as &lt and a semicolon…
  2. AppleScript now passes all text parameters as Unicode by default. This might be a good thing in most places, but Manila’s RPC handler wants plain text and posts a message with an empty body if it’s passed Unicode. The fix is to coerce the text variable to plain text: set s to (s as record)'s «class ktxt»

I am testing my other scripts with these fixes (which reach into the supporting library scripts ManilaHandler and SOAPXMLRPCHandler) and will post fixes soon.

Pärt and me

I sang Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum for the first time in rehearsal last night. It’s the first time I’ve sung a work of that scale by Pärt, but I’ve been singing his music since college.

I was talking with Shel over the weekend about music that we discovered in college. For me, I said, it was the Pixies and Tom Waits. And jazz. But I neglected to mention that I discovered choral music in college as well. Our Glee Club director, John Liepold, introduced us to a broad swath of music from the Renaissance through contemporary works by Pärt (“De Profundis”) and Tavener. I was fascinated by the way Pärt took a simple melodic plan of ascending minor melodies and constructed an achingly beautiful and powerful work.

Later I sang a few Pärt works in the Cheeselords, including “De Profundis” and “…And One of the Pharisees”, and in the Cathedral Choral Society, including “Solfeggio”, “Cantate Domine”, and the haunting “Magnificat”. Each demanded utter concentration and repaid it richly in transcendence. But the Te Deum dwarfs all these. Pivoting between D major and D minor, the work (in seventeen sections) builds throughout from an opening men’s chant through interactions between three different choirs, over orchestral obbligatos of increasing complexity, to a thundering affirmation of God. It then tapers to close with a simple “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus”: Holy, holy, holy.

I had listened to the premiere recording many times since college and knew what was coming. But as we ran through the piece, stopping and starting occasionally, I couldn’t help but get goosebumps. The Cascadian Chorale, with which I’m singing now, has the ability to perform this piece transcendentally. I’m looking forward to it.
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Better dinner at Wild Ginger; day with Shel

On a friend’s recommendation, we went back to Wild Ginger for our anniversary last night. This was a complete 180 from our last visit. We were seated promptly, the service was attentive and knowledgable, the wine steward was brilliant, and the food was exceptional.

Today our friend Shel is visiting. We’re about to go to the public market for ingredients for a vegetarian feast, after eating bread, cheese, and a salad made with greens from our garden (arugula, dandelion greens, frisée, etc.). Shel is the sort of friend who can make a drizzly Northwest day a lot of fun.
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Good news for my scripts

Apologies for not blogging sooner. Between slow network connectivity here and the generally fragile state of editthispage.com, I’ve been unable to get to my site all day.

I had some insights on the problems with my scripts on the flight back. By reviewing the Apple-published scripting list archives, I realized that others were having problems publishing via XML-RPC (and probably SOAP) any text that contained unescaped HTML tags (e.g. < instead of &lt). This explains why my iTunes2Manila script was publishing with an empty body and should be easy to fix. There were also suggestions that processing the arguments to an XML-RPC or SOAP call to use plaintext instead of Unicode (or vice versa) would result in successful RPC calls. I may have some head down time on that shortly and hope to be able to bring my scripts up to Jaguar compatibility soon.
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Back

I got in a few hours ago. It was a decent flight, except that one of the bottles of wine (red, of course) that I purchased for Lisa broke in my suitcase, staining my clothes and my hardback copy of The Secret History. Quite jetlagged. I think I’ll be going home…

Change

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Cambridge writing this. (Thank God for enlightened hotels with broadband.) I just left one of two company presentations that I’m involved with today at MIT Sloan. Got a chance to see a very high energy evangelist from my company talk about where we’re going in the mobility market. Talked to a few grad students about my experiences so far. Even though I’m operating on about three hours of sleep, it felt really good. In fact, I felt “at home” in a way that I have rarely felt since I started this job in July.

I wonder about that. More than most other people I know (or maybe they do a better job of hiding it) I really go into a shell when I go into a new experience. I could be on top of the world one day, as I sometimes felt at Sloan (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) and go into a new situation the next and totally withdraw. There have been times over the last month where I’ve just shaken with frustration over my inability to engage, to act, to do anything. It’s like a crippling fear of leaving my office.

Today all that was gone. I think there’s something about just being in the old environment where I was on top that makes it easier even to admit to myself what I just wrote. I wonder if this is something everyone goes through. I know I felt it to an extent when I started at Sloan until I got my feet under me.