Last week, DssW launched a new preview of Power Manager 4. This preview introduced AppleScript support. To celebrate we made chocolate and walnut muffins.
Homemade chocolate muffins
AppleScript is never easy to implement. I have been planning our AppleScript implementation for more than a year. That planning paid off and the work involved was pleasantly stress free. As ever, a few esoteric aspects of AppleScript’s requirements caused moments of wonder but nothing requiring a change of course.
…will no longer back up files to your iDisk because it has more than 60 backups. Create a new plan or convert to a scheduled plan.
I am using Mac OS X 10.6.3, aka Snow Leopard, with Backup v3.2 (v417).
Apple's Backup limited to 60 manual back ups
Why is Backup’s manual task limited to 60 back ups? I have plenty of iDisk space; gigabytes of unused space in Apple’s data centres, just waiting for my files to be backed up to.
Melbourne’s city festival season has begun. This weekend saw the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival overlap with the Thai Culture Festival. Next weekend the Greek Festival begins, the Formula 1 crowds descend on the city, and the Jazz Festival coming soon. With all these events going on, it is difficult to resist a walk around the city centre with camera in hand.
Monk reflected in Federation Square's BMW Centre building
The Thai Culture Festival drew in the crowds today. The weather was ideal for investigating all that was on offer.
Thai Kick Boxing at Federation Square
Crowds, Thai Culture Festival
On Melbourne’s Southbank were the slightly calmer and less trafficked Melbourne Food and Wine stalls.
Twenty-four hours after the hail storm, Melbourne appears mostly unaffected by yesterday’s spectacular weather. The signs of yesterday’s flash flooding in the city centre are minimal.
Flood damage in a Melbourne shop.
Walking through the central business district this afternoon, I noticed the stairs near Elizabeth Street/Bourke Street still sheltered hail storm ice hidden from the sun.
Leaves caught in railings.
Stairs leading down below yesterdays flooded street.
During the last few weekends, I have needed to brush up on my web site parsing skills. The tools available have moved on nicely since my last dip into this topic.
I am currently keeping an eye on properties in Lyon, France. The process has been tedious and called out for some automation. Megan and I plan to return to France in the future and this little project should ease the burden of finding an apartment or house.
Croix-Paquet, Lyon
This morning I discovered the perl module Web::Scraper. It is a port of a Ruby based tool called scrAPI. The approach taken avoids regular expression matching and opts for XPath and DOM tree selector matching; both more resilient methods of addressing specific sections of a web page.
Apartments, Lyon
I found one stumbling block that took a while to overcome. After a little trial and error, I discovered the FireFox browser returned misleading XPaths for objects embedded in tables.
The XPaths provided by FireBug and XPather, included browser-inserted tbody tags. These tags did not appear in my source web pages. Thus the browser’s XPath did not match the structure used by Web::Scraper, and caused Web::Scraper to miss the desired content.
The solution was easy; strip out the tbody tags and Web::Scraper returns to working as advertised.
With this problem overcome, the project is already looking helpful.
Today saw the Chinese New Year celebrated in Melbourne. Megan and I found ourselves in the crowds watching the performers and doing our best to keep out of the exploding fire cracker debris.
Once again the film was shot with our point and shoot Canon and edited in iMovie. This film is longer than any of my previous films. I wanted to keep in as much of the performance as feasible to give an idea of the build up to the fire crackers.
26th January is Australia Day; Australia’s national day. Megan and I spent the day out and about exploring various events around the city. We stumbled upon entertainers and entertainment in most of the city parks we visited.
Many dressed up and were decked with Australian flags and national pride.
All dressed up for Australia Day
Government House, Victoria, was open for part of the day. The queues to get in were long and slow moving. It is a shame this property is not open more often.
Queues waiting outside Government House, Victoria
The Australia Day People’s Parade floats ranged from marching bands to exhibits of the surreal.
Megan and I ventured out to Docklands, Melbourne, Australia, for the New Year’s Eve fireworks.
The day’s temperatures reached 37°C and moments before the family session of fireworks started, the predicted storm rolled in. The lightning, rain, and wind put on a show to complement the fireworks.
Storms clouds gathering over Melbourne
I managed another couple of film experiments over New Year’s Eve. Both films where taken on our little point and shoot Canon. My goal with these edits was to publish as quickly as possible. Both films took less than one hour from importing into iMovie to publishing on YouTube; a fun challenge that turned out well.
Melbourne’s fireworks are divided into two. The first session, at 9:15 pm, is for families.
We made gingerbread snowflakes this afternoon. Quick, easy, and fun. Making gingerbread biscuits in the shape of snowflakes is set to become a family Christmas tradition.
Embedded below is a film showing a little of Charlie and Rebecca’s wedding celebration. Charlie’s family is Lebanese, and the celebrations followed Lebanese traditions.
The music and dancing was loud, fun, and fast. Early in the evening it quickly became apparent that still photographs could not capture the moment.
During the celebrations and entertainment, I switched between filming and experimenting with various still settings on our point and shoot camera.
I came away with approximately 14 minutes of HD film footage, weighing in at 2.64 GB. The quality is acceptable given the lighting. The sound is terrible, but that should be expected; the camera’s microphone is mono.
Editing an HD film in iMovie on Mac OS X
The film was edited using iMovie. Films like this benefit from being short, closely cut, affairs. I had fun cutting and trimming footage. The process gave me a little insight into just how challenging a professional editor’s role can be.
Canon PowerShot SX200 IS
The camera is a Canon PowerShot SX200 IS. I can highly recommend this camera. It is small enough to carry around, not too expensive, and is capable of taking great shots.
