thinair

Boulder, Colorado

elevation 5400 feet

your guide: Eric Dobbs

Full content RSS feeds too

Monday 24 February 2003 at 22:06

Noticed a happy side-effect of fixing my RSS feeds by copying the templates from the RSS validator . The full entries are now in the feeds.

Hacking Safari Bookmarks

Monday 24 February 2003 at 21:35

Charles Miller asked Is there an AppleScripty way to manipulate Safari bookmarks? I'd like to be able to mirror my NetNewsWire subscriptions there.

Safari's AppleScript dictionary doesn't expose anything bookmark related. Maybe it will in a later beta release. In the meantime the bookmarks are stored as XML in ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist. I edited that file directly with the Property List Editor and successfully added bookmarks, though the editing would have been quicker in emacs. I basically copied other entries modifying values as appropriate. I made up the WebBookmarkUUID element (you'll have to look at the file to see what I'm talking about). I have no idea if the one I concocted will conflict with Safari's ID generation. Also, I had to quit and re-launch Safari for the bookmark to show up in the UI.

Urgent vs Important

Friday 21 February 2003 at 06:41

In the last year of my bachelor's degree, Ray McCall said something that's stuck with me: the trick in life is keeping what's urgent from taking priority over what's important. Bob's comments on Urgent and Important axes is a more refined picture:

I think the key to managing time effectively is finding the things that are both urgent and important and doing those. Defer the items that aren't urgent and important. I find I have the most mental stability when I accomplish things in the following priority order:
  1. Urgent and important
  2. Important
  3. Urgent
  4. Luxury

RSS feeds now validate

Friday 21 February 2003 at 04:11

Thanks Mark and Sam.

Grokking OO Perl

Saturday 01 February 2003 at 19:50

I've landed a contract programming gig. One of the guys I'm working with is fresh out of college with a CS degree. He seems to be a pretty good programmer, but inexperience and haste showed in the perl cgis he'd hacked together. On Thursday afternoon I gave him a quick explanation of how to do objects in Perl. He went home and spent four hours rewriting his CGIs into objects.

Three years ago at this time I couldn't figure out how to apply OO Perl to my own projects. Partly, my one-shot data munjings didn't really need objects. I knew how to use modules slurped from CPAN and I understood the syntax, and inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism and so on. I understood but I didn't grok.

Sometime between then and Thursday I grokked.

It tickles me to think that two years of Java and five months of occasional python hacking have helped me grok OO Perl. Maybe I shouldn't be publicly bragging about it. :-) It's also fun to have a paid perl gig.