AstronomyPictureOfTheDay 3.0

I finally fixed one of the lingering "issues" I've had since migrating from Tiger to Leopard last month. Something in the Automator actions or other behavior changed in my AstronomyPictureOfTheDay app and every morning I have been greeted with 2 Safari windows. One is the usual window showing the description of the image downloaded that night, and the other is the local copy of the image. I don't need to see the latter, and it seemed a little sloppy so I wanted to fix it.

After some fiddling around with "View Results" actions I determined that the local filename was being added to the output chain by "Set the Desktop Picture". So where before I had a chain of actions that only sent the remote URL to the final "Show Web page" action, now I needed to filter the data. Throwing a variable into the mix did not solve the problem. I'm not sure how the variable is supposed to work -- it seems like it should replace the output instead of extending it. So I took the brute force option and inserted a shell script to filter the URLs before opening them.

So if you've been running an earlier version of AstronomyPictureOfTheDay under Leopard, grab the new one and give it a try. As usual, email me with any problems.

AstronomyPictureOfTheDay 2.0

There is a new release of AstronomyPictureOfTheDay available this morning. Version 2.0 is a substantial rewrite of the 1.1 version, but retains essentially the same functionality. The primary difference is that you no longer have to run a script to "personalize" it during installation. Now that it is distributed as an Application instead of an Automator workflow, you can just drag it to your Applications folder.

The source is still created with Automator, but some of the Finder actions for working with directories have been replaced by Shell Script actions to perform the same operations. The Finder actions are hard-coded to specific folder names, selected in the Automator UI when the action is configured. With a Shell Script action, I can use environment variables such as "$HOME" to make the action more flexible. Using variables also avoids the problem of having everything in the workflow tied to my own home directory, so that the paths needed to be modified before the workflow was usable by anyone else.

I could, of course, have written the entire program as a shell script, Python program, or whatever. But the point of building it with Automator in the first place was that it was easy. I suppose I am stretching the boundaries of where Automator is the easiest tool for this particular job, but at least now the hack is hidden inside the app instead of hanging out where everyone can see it in the installation instructions.

Converting podcasts to regular tracks in iTunes

I have spent the better part of the morning trying to work out how to convert podcasts to "regular" tracks in iTunes, so they would show up in shuffle, etc. Mostly this was for my collection of Jonathan Coulton "Thing a Week" episodes, but it would be useful for anything you wanted to move out of your podcast list into the main audio portion of the library. I suppose the reason it took so long to find the solution is I started by searching for it on Google instead of just looking through the iTunes menu options, though as you will see the solution wasn't immediately obvious even once I had found it.

I knew that iTunes would let me change settings like "Remember playback position" and "Skip when shuffling" from the info dialog (Cmd-I), so I started there. The only setting that even mentioned podcast was the genre, and I already knew that was not what I needed to change. Some of the tracks already had "real" genres and only some were set to "Podcast".

I also knew there is a separate podcast flag available for queries in Smart Lists and AppleScript, since I used it to create my "Active Queue" podcast playlist with selections of episodes from various podcast series (it's like creating your own mix tape, but for talk radio). I tried to write a simple AppleScript to change the podcast flag of selected tracks to true. It turns out the flag is a read-only attribute. No amount of searching uncovered any way to change the setting using AppleScript.

The first useful looking suggestions I ran into were to convert the ID3 tag format to an older version, then convert it back. Doing that erased most of the comments and other meta-data associated with the tracks, though, so I didn't like the results.

Next I found a few forum and blog posts that talked about an ITUNESPODCAST setting in the extended ID3 tags. They all mentioned a Windows program for removing or changing the flag, though. I examined a few of the files with Ned Batchelder's python module id3reader, but didn't see anything that looked like "ITUNESPODCAST" in the output.

Going back to Google, I finally found a reference to converting the files to AAC using an option in the Advanced menu. That seemed like overkill, but at this point I was becoming fed up and just wanted to be done with the whole thing. I could always re-encode as MP3, after all. Well, iTunes didn't have a menu option to "Encode as AAC". It did have "Convert selection to MP3", which didn't make much sense to me. As far as I knew, the tracks were already MP3 files. But lo and behold, selecting that menu option did enable them in the iTunes Music Library. It made copies of all of the tracks as it converted them, so I could even delete the podcast subscription.

So, if you want to add podcast episodes you have already downloaded to your music library and turn off the podcast flag, select the track and choose Advanced->Convert selection to MP3.

Dialing down email distractions

I have been experimenting with various productivity hacks lately. I feel like I'm already fairly productive, based on tracking the amount of work I accomplish week-to-week. So instead of trying to do more, I'm trying to maintain the same level of output with less effort (and hopefully time).

One of the top tips I have seen repeatedly is to reduce the amount of time spent checking email, and only check it a couple of times per day. I'm not sure I'm ready go go that hard-core, yet. Our team is spread out and relies heavily on email for communication. Most of the messages are important, and there aren't too many that I feel like I have trouble keeping up. The biggest issue is that they can be very time-sensitive. Our code-review process is triggered via email messages generated when a ticket is given a specific status in trac. If one of us does not notice the change, the author of the change might be blocked for some period of time from doing dependent work, until the code review can be completed. Since we want to encourage code reviews, we don't want those blockages to last too long. So, I can't turn email off entirely. But I can dial it down fairly far.

Besides cutting down on email during the week, I also want to break myself of the habit of checking work email over the weekend. Working for a startup, it is too easy (for me) to get sucked into giving up weekend after weekend. This is draining, so I'm not as fresh during the week as I would be if I avoided the work mail. But, I don't want to give up my personal email at the same time.

So, the question is, how do I strike that balance?
The first step was to decide what my new mail schedule would be. I tend to get up fairly early in the mornings, and enjoy breakfast on the patio when the weather is nice enough (it rained last night, finally). This is relaxing time, but not especially conducive to the long stretches of deep thought needed for development or debugging. So, mornings are a good time to do a lot of email, instant messaging with the rest of the team, review code or documentation, and the other sorts of tasks that don't take hours at a stretch to complete. Afternoons are too warm to sit outside and think anyway, so I move inside to work on coding projects then. That gives me a schedule: I am willing to have more interactions (and interruptions) in the morning than the afternoon and I want to "reclaim" weekends. The next step is to tell Mail the news.

I use the same email client (OS X's Mail.app) to access all of my mail accounts. Even though I use IMAP, this lets me read and search old messages when I don't have access to the network. The brute-force way would be to manually change the preference "Check for new mail" to the appropriate schedule. I hate doing things like this manually, though.

I've done some work with AppleScript and Mail in the past. This week (I'm not sure why it took me so long to figure out this approach) I realized I could use AppleScript to control how often Mail checks for new messages, and which accounts are checked.

Now that I have a general schedule identified, I can configure some events in iCal using AppleScripts to control Mail. I began by composing a few AppleScripts in Script Editor.

To check mail frequently in the morning:


To check mail infrequently, for the afternoons:



To turn of automatic checking entirely in the evening:


To disable my work account for the weekend:


To enable my work account on Monday mornings:


With the scripts in place, I configured events in iCal to run the scripts to adjust my settings at appropriate times.

Every week day morning, I turn up the frequence to every 5 minutes. This ensures that by the time I am up and ready to look at email, the mailbox is up to date.

















Around lunch time, I turn the frequency back down to once per hour. I find I don't even notice the change, and when I come back from lunch I am ready to settle in and concentrate. I don't make it through the afternoon without checking email, but stretching out the time between checks does help.
















And in the evenings, I turn email off entirely. Note that this script only runs Monday-Thursday. On Friday, I leave Mail set to check messages once per hour, since I do receive personal messages over the weekend and I want to see those.
















To avoid being sucked back into work, I disable that account entirely. Of course, on Monday morning, I have a similar job scheduled to run the MailCheckWorkEnable script to re-enable the account for the week.

Disabling the account entirely seemed like a drastic step, but is very effective. When Monday comes around, I am refreshed and ready to work again. I do not miss any personal mail, and have not been tempted to "just look at this one thing" from my work messages.

Technorati Tags:
lifehack, email, AppleScript

Things to Do

In no particular order:

1. Cull my Google Reader subscriptions. 364 is too many.
2. Finish reading Dreaming in Code.
3. Add tagging support to codehosting.
4. Verify all of the domains under my control with Google Web Master tools.
5. Create a Trac plugin for code reviews based on the process we use at work.
6. Change the monitor feeds on CastSampler.com so they do not include items without enclosures.
7. Enhance BlogBackup to save enclosures and images linked from blog posts.
8. Write a tool to convert an m3u file to an RSS/Atom feed for Patrick so he will set up a podcast of his demo recordings.
9. Improve AppleScript support in Adium.
10. Add support to Adium for notifications when a screen name appears in a chat message.
    

Archiving mail on IMAP server

Version 1.4 of MailArchiveByDate now supports archiving to IMAP folders.

It works exactly as expected for me, but some users have reported problems with the script not creating new mailboxes. If the mailbox exists, the messages are moved. I have not been able to reproduce the problem myself using dovecot on Fedora Core 4 or Scalix (which is supposed to look like an Exchange server).

Hawk Wings and Mail Archiving

I'm a little behind on my reading, so I just noticed that Tim over at Hawk Wings is linking to MailArchiveByDate. I guess that explains the email I've received in the past few days asking for help. :-)

Tim comments that my update notes for the 1.2 release don't convey much meaning. I looked, and sure enough, they aren't end-user-ready release notes. I'll try again. The original version of the script asked Mail for the current selection. That meant, if you triggered the action, then changed the selection by clicking on the next message, the wrong message might be archived. The new version uses the selection information passed to the script as an argument, so it is more reliable.

That's still not very interesting, unless you are writing your own AppleScripts. Suffice to say, if you are planning to giving it a try, download the most recent version posted.

Adium 1.0

My ChatMonitor script does not work with Adium 1.0. It looks like the "chat" object no longer contains "content" objects. I haven't yet figured out how to get the content from a chat window. Oh, well. I guess it's time to order those OS X programming books!

Adium ChatMonitor

We recently set up our own Jabber server at work. For a short time we had been using an IRC server, but decided for a variety of non-technical reasons to switch to Jabber. The benefit is now I only have to run one chat client (Adium). The downside, is I miss the feature of Colloquy which had a special notification event for when I was mentioned by name.

I searched for a while, but didn't find any way to add such a notification to Adium. I finally hacked something together using an AppleScript triggered for every incoming message. I'm sure there must be a better way to achieve the same results, but this works. Eventually I should learn more about how to develop true OS X apps using Objective C, and then I can create a real plugin to do the same thing.

Email Archives, redux

Now that I have the site in order, I have posted a copy of my mail archive script in an easier-to-use format.

Email Archives

Speaking of email, I've been working on an AppleScript to organize my email boxes.

I use Mail.app under OS X, so searching is easy and quick. I can use smart mailboxes as needed for subject-based organization, so I wanted to move away from my existing subject-based organization scheme (a folder for each person, job, client, etc.). But since I have about 7 years of email on my machine, I still wanted to do better than one big mailbox. Grouping the messages based on the date sent seemed to give me manageable chunks, but I didn't want to have to do that manually. So, I came up with this script:

on archiveByDate(parentMailboxName)
tell application "Mail"
 set archiveMessages to the selection

 repeat with currentMessage in archiveMessages
  set receivedon to (date received of currentMessage)
  set archiveYear to (year of receivedon as string)
  if ((month of receivedon as number) 

This automatically maintains a folder hierarchy like:

• parentMailboxName
• 2006
• 01
• 02
• ...

I use that script as a library, and have another script which I run via a MailActOn action to file selected messages. The reason for having a separate script is so I can separate personal messages from work messages in the archive. For example,

set scriptDirectory to ((path to
 scripts folder as string) & "Mail Scripts")
set scriptPath to (scriptDirectory & ":MailArchiveByDate.scpt")
set theScript to (load script alias scriptPath)

tell theScript to archiveByDate("Personal")

saves my personal messages to a folder called "Personal", while

set scriptDirectory to ((path to
 scripts folder as string) & "Mail Scripts")
set scriptPath to (scriptDirectory & ":MailArchiveByDate.scpt")
set theScript to (load script alias scriptPath)

tell theScript to archiveByDate("Work")

saves work messages to a separate set of folders.