I've been determined to pick up learning how to program this year and today I finally started, not bad, only half the year is over :)
My project was to create a drag and drop system to create an rss feed of bittorrentenclosures.
In short, I wanted a faster way to publish my favourite torrents. The solution calls to drag and drop a torrent file onto a folder or icon and then be promted for a description. The torrent is the uploaded to my server and added to an rss feed as an enclosure.
I remembered applescript does xml-rpc so I diddled about until I was able to make a post from applescript to the metaWeblogAPI in Radio UserLand. Took me a while to figure out the correct syntax of a struct, a little test script that implemented getPost helped enormously as it returns a struct for the given postId.
Next I worked on the interface for getting all relevant information about the torrent file into the blog post. I started by using the
selection
statement.
Once I had all of this tied to gether it worked as advertised! Just select a torrent, run the script, enter a description and the rest happens automagically.
Haven't been able to figure out the folder actions yet to get it to work, still digging...
I've uploaded a copy of the script here if you're interested. You'll have to change your blog info and path to the folder the torrent needs to be upstreamed from.
C|NET: "Imagine a world in which individual phone services refused to let their customers talk with anyone outside the network. That pretty much describes the current IM landscape."
Peter McWilliams: "In reality, serendipity accounts for one percent of the blessings we receive in life, work and love. The other 99 percent is due to our efforts."
I haven't spoken to the other board members about this yet, but I presume they will want to continue, as do I. We're getting very close to some big breakthroughs in aggregator land that I find quite exciting.
Last night England and Portugal duked it out infront of 56k soccer football fans in the quarter finals of the european championship. A 2-2 score in double overtime led to penalty kicks to decide who will battle in the semi finals. Tonite it's Greece vs France and tomorrow the dutch national team meets the swedes.
The action has been fantastic and quite upsetting to former champs like the UK and Italy, both now eliminated from the competition. I think the dutch actually have a shot now at winning this thing!
Back to Iraq 3.0: "Yesterday's attacks may or may not have been the start of a larger uprising. I'm hearing -- from several sources -- that the next five to seven days will be the most dangerous."
No postings yesterday 'cause I left the morning radio show an hour early for a special invitation to take the latest pride and joy of the dutch marines for a test drive.
In Den Helder the radio crew and I, who did the week long live radio broadcast from Irak in february were welcomed on board of Her Majesty's ship De Ruyter.
We had force 10-12 winds but still took her out to the North Sea for a hands on feel what this ship is capable of. They really pulled out all the stops for us, including a fly-by of an Orion and a surface visit from the 'Walrus' submarine. A collection of pictures is here.
Weaponry was quite impressive, the rear mounted 'Goal Keeper is capable of swiveling by radar control to any position needed in miliseconds and fires 4200 rounds of 30mm shells per minute.
The of course there's the rockets, none on board while we were there, but these are pretty nasty bastards. The entire system is pretty much version 2.0 of the Patriot missle system. They can pluck anything travelling at or under Mach 5 out of the air.
The coolest part of the tour was central command. An airconditioned room full of screens that acts as the war room. The radar system blew me away. We were able to track everything from commercial airliners to subs to piper cubs flying anyhewere in ALL of Europe. I was told the system can track the space shuttle with the same ease.
All of the systems were running a custom application on 'off the shelf' Sun Workstations under the Solaris operating system. Although I wasn't allowed to take picture in the command center, I was tickled pink to see that I was able to launch Sun's version of Solitaire right on top of this sophisticated weaponry control.
I hope with all my heart none of this stuuf ever has to be used, but it is nice to know it's there if needed.
Dowbrigade: "Unfortunately, his trajectory took him directly through the power cable for the iBook, which was yanked off the table top, spinnning wildly in the air like a white frisbee, only to land flat on the cobblestone floor. For a moment we stared in stunned silence."
I've been subscribed to the Mars Rover Blog for a while and enjoy the analysis of the hundreds of picture the rover is sending back to earth on a daily basis. Normally I don't go for the blog's little green men theories, but this one is pretty convincing. At a minimum I'd like to hear from someone [@ NASA?] explain the black dots.
Europe has been enthralled with the european soccer championships, which is as much a sporting event as it is a political one. It's kinda like the superbowl of europe, except all countries duke it out over a two week period. Gert-Jan has posted a chart of several country's football soccer psyche.
Michael Moore was on Letterman promoting his movie Farenheit 9/11. Here's a BitTorrent of the segment. (also added as an enclosure for outfitted aggregators)
The 
