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Thursday, November 6, 2003 |
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According to this article in Wired, Microsoft will be using an IBM PowerPC as the main processor in a future release of their Xbox. That is pretty interesting, but I found the mention that Microsoft would be using the Virtual PC technology acquired from Connectix to allow this future Xbox to run software written for the current, Intel-based Xbox to be interesting news, as well. Since the chip should be very similar to the 970 used in the G5 Macs, it seems Microsoft will have a compelling reason to make Virtual PC run well on that architecture. comment [] trackback [] 10:04:58 PM 
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I haven't used these, yet, but given that everything is XML these days, they should be useful: This looks interesting, too: The open in Open Scripting Architecture doesn't get a lot of coverage, but it is pretty cool. I like AppleScript, but I think I might be more comfortable with more "traditional" languages. This JavaScript OSA is one option. MacPython's OSA integration provides another. comment [] trackback [] 9:42:58 PM
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Despite the incident mentioned below, AppleScript really is a force for good. It has allowed me to do useful stuff like remove duplicates from my Address Book (that worked much better than the e-mail bit), fix e-mail addresses imported from Outlook, synchronize Exchange and iCal via Entourage, send URLs from NetNewsWire, etc. I don't know of an analog in the Windows world, and I don't think it is promoted nearly enough by Apple. Panther seems to have made a number of improvements to AppleScript. The ones I'm most fond of so far are Script Editor 2.0 and an improved Script Menu. What I like about the latter is the new "Hide Library Scripts" option, which makes it much cleaner looking, IMO. comment [] trackback [] 5:59:48 PM
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I've been meaning to extol the virtues of AppleScript for some time here, and I just haven't gotten around to it. This post it going to be a bit more of a warning than an extolling, but it does relate to AppleScript, nevertheless.
After I installed Panther, I switched from using Entourage to access my Exchange server at work to using Mail. That was going pretty well. (I mentioned a while ago the issue of not receiving meeting invitations. I thought that would be resolved by removing my OWA server information from the account, but that doesn't seem to have done good.)
Anyway, everything was going relatively smoothly until I noticed yesterday that I had a bunch of duplicated e-mails in my inbox. I opened the duplicates and confirmed that they had the same content, etc. (Looking back now, I can't recall whether I saw the same thing when I looked at my inbox via Outlook under Windows or Entourage on the Mac. If I didn't, that should have been a warning of what was to come.) I deleted a few of the duplicates by hand and confirmed that the original was still there. There were a lot of duplicates so continuing by hand would be a hassle. Using the power of AppleScript, I whipped up a little script to loop over my mailbox and delete all duplicates. The script ran for a while, but it seemed to work like a charm. When it was done, all the duplicates were gone, but the originals were still there.
Well, as you may have guessed by now, I was a bit too clever for my own good. I went to search for an e-mail today, and I couldn't find it, and I was pretty sure I hadn't intentionally deleted it. It appears that the duplicates weren't really duplicates, and I deleted a bunch of e-mail. That which wasn't more than a month old was still in my trash to be laboriously restored, but there is a gap between September 17th and October 7th that I think is gone forever.
Now, in truth it probably isn't that big a loss. E-mail piles up, and most of it really should just go to the trash. Reviewing what was left in the trash from my little scripting incident sort of confirmed that. I would like to understand better what really happened, though. If it happens again, I'm digging deeper. |
Last update: 11/2/04; 6:14:46 PM .
