Axodys

My father passed away yesterday evening after a 16 month battle with colon cancer. I have a lot more that I want to write about him, but that will have to wait until I return from a short trip down to Phoenix. I love you Dad.

Just about everything I’ve read, seen, and heard about Utah coach Rick Majerus has led me to believe he’s one of the good guys in college basketball. I even met him and shook his hand last year while he was visiting practice to recruit Sean Mallon and he seemed like a genuinely nice guy. But everybody knows that sometimes bad things happen to good people and his latest recruiting misadventure sounds positively harrowing. I’m glad that he survived the ordeal.

The Mariners are still sailing along. Last night they beat the Yankees 7-5 thanks in part to a questionable home run late in the game.

I’ve made significant progress on my Axodys Blogger to Greymatter conversion project and my goal is to have everything completely switched over by May 1. The conversion itself is complete for all months prior to April 2001 thanks to some XML hacking on my part, but I’d like to have a new design in place before I make the final move. Thanks to MacOS X I can experiment and iron everything out locally before I move it over to my hosting provider.

Well, I survived an obnoxiously long meeting at work today. I’m not sure if I can handle another one of those any time soon, as I prefer to be productive during my lunch.

In cool work related news it looks like we’ve ordered a bunch of laptops for faculty to use when they travel to off campus locations. Mostly PC’s although we did manage to get a couple iBooks ordered as well. I’m betting that once the faculty get their hands on these I won’t be seeing them too often (computers or people : )).

So far BBEdit 6.1 seems like the best carbon conversion I’ve worked with yet. I’m glad they delayed the release until they felt it was ready.

This hint explains how to set up a small shell script for opening text files in BBEdit from the command line. For some reason the instructions didn’t work quite right for me as written, but I was able to directly create the script and get it to work. You can do the same by doing the following:

sudo vi /usr/local/bin/bbopen

Now that you’re in vi (or the editor of your choice) type the following two lines:

#!/bin/shopen -a '"/Applications/BBEdit/BBEdit 6.1 for OS X"' $*

Save and exit by hitting the esc key followed by:

:wq

Now set the file permissions on bbopen by typing:

sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/bbopen

Follow that up by typing “rehash” and hitting return. Assuming you have BBEdit installed in the Applications folder you can now open text files simply by typing

bbopen filename

The real reason we’re angry at A-Rod [via Sheila]

I’m just not particularly sleepy at the moment.

Excitingly enough, this domain seems to have transferred to the new host.
Okay, maybe I am getting sleepy after all.

The best news I’ve heard all day. BBEdit 6.1 for MacOS X is out!

I’m in the process of changing my hosting here. Hopefully that won’t cause any significant outages.

Time for a meeting.

I’ve been exploring Python’s lightweight xml DOM implementation and unfortunately it doesn’t seem quite up to snuff. CDATA[ ] nodes don’t seem to be fully implemented and I need them to convert my blogger xml archives. I think PyXML will do what I need, but getting it (4DOM) installed is not trivial under MacOS X at this point and I just don’t want to wrestle with it right now.

Meanwhile the XML Toolkit does exactly what I need it to do right now. Time to start whipping up my little conversion app.

Seattle Keeps Rolling beats Angels 3-2. On top of that Ichiro extended his hitting streak to 14 games.

Fun stuff is in the works. I’ve successfully converted all my pre-Blogger weblogging content into Greymatter’s standard file format. Now I have to do all the Blogger stuff. I’ve already converted my archive files into XML. I just have to figure out how to write a script in Python that will convert them into the appropriate files. I don’t imagine it will be too hard, but I could be wrong.

The Mariners maintained their winning ways against Texas tonight. I’m really going to enjoy this season I think. Ichiro continues to astound with his hitting and defense.

I found the latest Brill’s Content at at the local grocery store. I haven’t had the chance to read the web related articles yet.

Downloaded Python 2.1, now I need to install it. Probably won’t do that until after I get my conversion script functioning.

I think it’s time to sleep now.