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	<title>Tom Gidden &#187; osx</title>
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	<link>http://gidden.net/tom</link>
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		<title>Space Honker v.0.1 for Mac</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2011/01/17/space-honker/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2011/01/17/space-honker/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Jan 2011 21:46:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Programming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cocoa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[honk]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[osx]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[punctuation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/?p=157</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[On Thursday, Farhad Manjoo of Slate vented his spleen about those of us who use two spaces after their full stops, a.k.a. "periods". This seems to have triggered a minor kerfuffle, though not for the first time. While I disagree with a few of his points, the premise is sound. Unfortunately I, like many others, have double-spacing ingrained.  This app might help.

Manjoo's argument seems to ramble a bit. It's allegedly a holdover from monospaced typewriters, but the width of two spaces in a monospaced font is much more significant than under in a proportionally-spaced font.  Eh?
He also claims that "Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s" and "we've all switched to modern fonts" [my emphasis]. Well, sorry, but we haven't all switched to modern fonts, as I think many programmers, screenplay writers and lawyers will attest. I use monospaced fonts every day, and I read and write all email in the wonderful Monaco typeface that comes with every single Mac.
His argument has been picked up by others, both pro- and con-. I will let them argue it.
Enough of a rant from me, though. As I said, I do agree with the overall premise, but how to switch? Habits are hard to break. Rigging up some sort of taser seems excessive, but an obnoxious noise should do the trick.
The result is Space Honker, version 0.1 (build 0002). This is a small app for Mac OS X which sits in your menu bar and watches what you type. As soon as you type a dot (or an exclamation mark, or a question mark, or a colon, or a semicolon, or a comma) followed by two spaces, it should make an irritating noise. Just to rub it in a bit more, it'll update a counter to tell you how many grievous sins against typography you've made.
It will only trigger if you hit the keys in order, so if you type the full stop and then mess about somewhere else in the sentence and then return and type the spaces, it will not trigger.
It's the product of about two hours' work, so by no means the best piece of code I've ever written (to the point that I'm not releasing the source publicly for fear of embarrassment) but it might work.
Feel free to download it and try it, but at your own risk: I haven't put anything that I know to be nasty or malicious in it, but you never know. Oh, and if it fails to pick up a sentence and you get marked down for bad punctuation, that's also Not My Problem.
Please let me know how you get on with it. Next up: something to cure me of my unhealthy dependence on the ellipsis…
The Methodology
If you're a programmer, you might want to check the method I'm using:  it uses NSEvent's addGlobalMonitorForEventsMatchingMask:handler: to listen to all keyDown events in the system. On keyDown, it checks to see if it has a known unichar for the incoming keyCode, stored in two unichar[65536] arrays: one for shifted, one for unshifted. If not, it uses [event characters] to get the unichar for the key, and if it's reasonable, it'll store the result. Otherwise, it'll mark that array entry as -1, ie. no match. By caching values, it reduces the amount of NSString lookups that would otherwise occur on every single keypress.
If it finds a chain of one of the specific punctuation marks, followed by two spaces, it'll honk.
Anyway, if you're a competent Cocoa programmer and you want to take the code off my hands and clear it up, buzz me. Otherwise, best of luck.
The sound effect is by Stickinthemud, and came via Freesound, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License. Thanks!
Incidentally, Space Honker triggered 16 times in the process of writing this post. Heh.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Extracting pages from PDFs on OS X</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2009/01/27/extract-pdf-pages/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2009/01/27/extract-pdf-pages/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:54:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Programming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apple]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mac-OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[osx]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pdf]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[xcode]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/?p=66</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I need to slice and dice a lot of images from a number of multi-page PDF files, but I don't happen to have the right bit of ImageMagick installed on my MacBook Pro.  Instead, I took the slightly longer route of writing a utility to do it.

Mac OS X comes with a neat little utility called "sips" which can be used to transcode images and PDFs.  However, I haven't found any way of telling it to choose a particular page of a PDF file.  I've googled a bit on the subject, and couldn't find anything.
Of course, I could manually extract the pages using "Preview" but there's no fun in that.
ImageMagick would also usually do the trick, but I haven't installed GhostScript as part of ImageMagick, so PDF file support is fairly broken.
Anyway, extracting pages should be a fairly simple thing to do, considering OS X's drawing layer is very closely related to PDF.
I've put the code in my Subversion repository here, so you can extract the XCode project by running:
svn co http://gidden.net/svn/ExtractPagesFromPDF/
at the command-line.
The code is very basic, and doesn't handle encrypted PDFs or anything special, so treat it as "sample code".  Also, I'm no XCode/Objective-C/CoreGraphics expert by any means, so this may not be the best way of doing it!  No warranties, blah blah blah.  Use at will and at your own risk.
How to use:

Build the project in XCode
Get the executable file, "ExtractPagesFromPDF" and put it somewhere in your $PATH
ExtractPagesFromPDF myBigDocument.pdf
The subpages should be created in the current directory, with the format %04d.pdf (ie. 0001.pdf, 0002.pdf, ...).  If you have files with those names already, move them out of the way!

Now that's written, I can now use "sips", "ImageMagick", etc. to continue the processing I need to do for the project.]]></description>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Mac Flight Tracker widget timezone bug</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/10/mac-flight-tracker-timezones/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/10/mac-flight-tracker-timezones/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:54:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apple]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bdt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bst]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bug]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dashboard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flight-tracker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flighttracker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[javascript]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mac-OS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mac-OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MacOS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nsdate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[osx]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[os_x]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tiger]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[timezone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[widget]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/10/mac-flight-tracker-timezones/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Flight Tracker dashboard widget that comes with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) seems to have a fairly major bug.  However, this bug seems to be the result of something quite obscure to do with timezones, and it only seems to manifest itself in the UK during the summer.

I've noticed this problem a few times:  specifically whenever any one of my close friends or family members flies anywhere.  This time, my mother is on her way back from San Diego to Bristol via Newark.  Thanks to the incredibly annoying terrorist attack attempt today, my dad and I were understandably concerned about flight delays, so I pulled up the Flight Tracker.  Unfortunately, the information seems completely wrong.
Turns out, the minutes are right but the hours don't relate to any of the relevant timezones.
Anyway, a little background.  Here in the UK, we have two main time scenarios:  firstly GMT, which is for all intents and purposes, UTC.  We also use BST:  "British Summer Time" which is UTC+1h, and kicks in for archaic agrarian reasons and the "Think of the children!" brigade who are convinced it'll stop traffic accidents.
While the rest of OS X seems okay and correctly uses BST, Apple's Mail.app has always strangely listed incoming mail as being sent relative to "BDT", which comes out as "British Daylight Time", which is fairly meaningless as there's no such thing.  The times are correct, but they just have the wrong abbreviation afterwards.  On researching it, this seems to be the result of bad data from the Unicode people which might have made its way into NSDate.  Anyway, it's usually just a cosmetic thing, and of little or no consequence.
I believe, however, that it's the cause of the Flight Tracker widget's problems.  To test this, I altered the widget to display the timezone, by replacing the bit in FlightTracker.js, in function formatDateForDisplay() that says
var timeStr = date.toLocaleTimeString("short");
with
var timeStr = date.toLocaleTimeString("long");
This reveals that the times are supposedly in "BDT".  I believe this might be the problem.  I think something is reinterpreting this as "Brazilian Daylight Time", which would explain the weird offsets.  I think JavascriptCore or something is referring to the same bad data as Mail.app, probably via NSDate.  I'm not a Safari hacker, and I haven't really investigated that far, so I'm not sure where the problem is.
Looking a bit deeper into FlightTracker.js, I'm not really surprised there's a problem.  The timezone calculation code is fairly messy, with comments such as:
// We're going to be stupid and hard coded about parsing the server provided date strings for now
// ??? for some reason parseInt returns 0 on this but parsefloat works ???
and
// here we do proper handling of the timezone offsets.
// We enter everything in pretending it's UTC time
// and then we convert it to miliseconds since 1970,
// add the timezone offset in miliseconds to it
// and then set this as the new UTC time
There seems to be some string hacking going on at several places to decode the data sent from FlyteComm.  The original data is reasonably well structured, with the timezone offsets being given correctly as -0700 and +0100, which presumably indicate that the times are given as local times of the departure/arrival locations, as per normal for the airline industry.
I'm not completely sure what's going on, as I'm not really set up to debug someone else's widget, especially one with weird custom controls, and barely any code comments.  It's obvious to me that the widget isn't particularly well written, and is one of those things that "just works".  It was probably hacked up for fun by a Dashboard developer, and then fasttracked to the nearest Steve Jobs keynote rehearsal.  As Steve Jobs's Dashboard demos tend to be done at MWSF and WWDC, I doubt this problem has ever really been seen at Apple.  I bet if it was a problem with Pacific Daylight Time being misinterpreted, it'd be fixed immediately!  I've done a little bit of googling, and it looks like the BDT bug has already been submitted to Apple (several times), and it's still there.
When I get a chance, I may try to debug this one further, and perhaps rewrite FlightTracker's timezone code properly using the correct offsets rather than performing nasty magic using getLocaleTimeString().
What I would prefer is that the timezone of each time is given next to the time.  Ideally, they should toggle-on-click or slowly fade between local times (to the flight) and local times to the machine, and possibly relative times ("1 hour ago", "in 53 minutes", etc.)  That would make the tool a lot more intuitive anyway.  I'd rather not reinvent the whole widget, as in all other ways, the widget's really not too bad.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>18</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>X11 Colors list for Mac OS X</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/04/x11-color-list-for-macosx/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/04/x11-color-list-for-macosx/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Aug 2006 21:29:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[clr]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colours]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mac-OS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mac-OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MacOS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NSColorList]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[osx]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palette]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PerlObjCBridge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rgb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[x11]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[x11-colors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[x11-colours]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/04/x11-color-list-for-macosx/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A friend of mine is a recent newbie Mac user, after finally succumbing to the shiny white lure of the MacBook.  As an expert Unix user, he was missing the old X11 colours list, because he can't have his terminal set up with a horrible shade of puce without having to work out the RGB values for it.

Christopher Holland has already created an OS X color list for the Resene color list which is allegedly used on many X11 windowing systems, but to be honest, I haven't encountered it before.  I last used an SGI in about 1997, and I must confess I never looked at the color selector.  It also didn't seem to include the specific wretched tincture my friend wanted.
So, rather than taking the easy route and just picking the closest match from the Apple crayons, we had to grep /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt instead.
To eliminate the possibility of this nightmare operation having to be done again when he finally comes to his senses and picks a normal color, I hacked together a quick bit of code to create a .clr file.
Just use the "Open..." doodah in any colour selector in Mac OS X.  It should automatically copy the file into your user's Library/Colors.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>loginwindow.plist Is My Enemy</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/07/13/loginwindow-plist-is-my-enemy/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/07/13/loginwindow-plist-is-my-enemy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Jul 2006 12:40:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[annoying]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[daemon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[launchd]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[loginwindow]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[osx]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[os_x]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[preferences]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[stupid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tiger]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2006/07/13/loginwindow-plist-is-my-enemy/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I've been trying to track down a few annoying apps that start up on my iBook and can't be found in any of the usual places.  I checked the normal places:  the Login Items for my user, LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons, and a few other places... I forgot to check loginwindow.plist.

The specific program in question is /Library/CFMSupport/CNQL2410_ButtonManager.app, which is a little daemon that monitors the buttons of my father's scanner that I rarely borrow.  Also, the Version Cue stuff in Adobe CS2 can sit there rather unhelpfully... even though I uninstalled CS2 since leaving my last workplace.  (My rant against Installer VISE is a separate issue)
So, the solution is to trash /Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist.  If you ask me, this is a particularly stupid place for startup items to live.  I understand that there has to be a place for startup items that aren't dependent on a user logging in, but it damn well shouldn't be a Preferences file.  Of course, the solution to this is probably launchd, but the problem is with this idioty little apps that are written by people who obviously haven't read any of Apple's development guidelines.
Incidentally, has anyone ever found a scanner or printer that has decent, HID-compliant driver software for Mac?  I don't think such a thing exists.  They're all so idiosyncratic and lame, and they completely fail to interface with the OS's built-in facilities.]]></description>
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