Applescript What Property?

My apple script (applescript) just made a massive leap forward or at least my unerstanding of how people go about figuring it out. I never could work out how people new what all those scriptable properties where called until now.

Open Script Editor (/Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app) may be open a script you have been writting / downloaded.

The really clever bit:
from Script editor File-> Open Dictionary
Now choose the application you are scripting and you will get a browsable searchable list of properties that the script can get and set!

Desktop Background

A nice background to help organise your icons:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gr/182329376/in/set-72157594188036656

Amazon Store

Just got my amazon associate store setup, not quite complete yet.
http://astore.amazon.co.uk/morgue-21

Amazon.co.uk lists

Amazon seem to hide the link to create lists for list mania so here it is:
UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/richpub/listmania/createpipeline
US :http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/createpipeline

Body Of Secrets

Body of Secrsts
ISBN:0099427745
About £9

Very interesting book on the history of the NSA and GCHQ.

Disable jqs.exe on Windows

In my windows task manager I noticed a process called jqs.exe which had over 5,000,000,000 I/O Read Bytes the most out of any process on my computer by a factor of 4.

It is a java quick launch application which constantly brings a small part of java back in to main moemory. Sine I do not run java applications that often I do not mind a little bit of lag and followed the instructions here [1] to diable it

[1] http://jsbi.blogspot.com/2009/05/what-is-process-jqsexe-and-how-to.html

Ruby Parsing Command Line Options

Ruby has built in methods for dealing with parsing command line options, it is called optparse.

optparse rdocs
some optparse examples

A Small example (cut down from the above) showing most common requirments.
Also on github.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby 

  require 'optparse'
  require 'optparse/time'
  require 'ostruct'
  require 'pp'

  class OptparseExample


    #
    # Return a structure describing the options.
    #
    def self.parse(args)
      # The options specified on the command line will be collected in *options*.
      # We set default values here.
      options = OpenStruct.new

      options.verbose   = false
      options.time      = 0
      options.delay     = 0
      options.leftovers = nil
       

      opts = OptionParser.new do |opts|
        opts.banner = "Usage: example.rb [options]"
        opts.separator ""
        opts.separator "Specific options:"

        # Boolean switch.
        opts.on("-v", "--[no-]verbose", "Run verbosely") do |v|
          options.verbose = v
        end
        
        # Cast 'time' argument to an integer.
        opts.on("-t", "--time [TIME]", Integer, "Begin execution at given time") do |time|
          options.time = time
        end

        # Cast 'delay' argument to a Float.
        opts.on("--delay N", Float, "Delay N seconds before executing") do |n|
          options.delay = n
        end

         # List of arguments.
        opts.on("--list x,y,z", Array, "Example 'list' of arguments") do |list|
          options.list = list
        end

        opts.separator ""
        opts.separator "Common options:"

        # No argument, shows at tail.  This will print an options summary.
        opts.on_tail("-h", "--help", "Show this message") do
          puts opts
          exit
        end

        # Another typical switch to print the version.
        opts.on_tail("--version", "Show version") do
          #puts OptionParser::Version.join('.')
          puts "Version 0.1.0"
          exit
        end
      end
      
      options.leftovers = opts.parse!(args)
      options
    end  # parse()

  end  # class OptparseExample

  options = OptparseExample.parse(ARGV)
  pp options
  puts ""
  puts ""
  puts options.leftovers