July 2006

So I finally figured out how to write AppleScripts that hook directly into Quicksilver’s “text clipping” interface. For the longest time I’ve wanted to be able to set away messages from Quicksilver… and now I can:

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
    on process text ThisClipping

    tell application "Adium"
        set my status message to ThisClipping
        set my status type to away
    end tell

end process text

end using terms from It may not look like much, but I’m a happy boy. Put that into an AppleScript using Script Editor and save it to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions. Restart Quicksilver, and you’ll be able to set any text you type in Quicksilver after the “.” command as your Adium away message.

The on process text terms has lots of other uses too. I’m sure I’ll come up with more.

In case anybody noticed my extended absense, I was racing in Whidbey Island Race Week, an annual regatta on an island (Whidbey Island, in fact) in northwest Washington. I was racing on a Choate 27 I often crew for named Allegro Con Brio. By the skin of our mathematical teeth we managed to earn ourselves a third in our class.

I’m slowly adding photos to a photoset in my Flickr account

Maybe this will save somebody else some time, because I just spend about 3 hours banging my head against the wall on it.

If you’re getting a “550-Sender verify failed” error when Monit starts because its trying to send you an email via SMTP to let you know it’s started (or if you’re getting that error for just about any other reason), make sure that the email address that the message is being sent “from” actually exists.

If “monit@yourhostname.com” doesn’t exist, your SMTP server will likely reject the message and cause you all sorts of trouble.

Yeah, that hurt. Well, everything seems to be working again…

So a week or so ago I discovered lala. It may just be the simplest and best dotcom idea I’ve seen in a long time.

I have CDs. You have CDs. In all honesty, I’m sick of most of my CDs. And you probably are too. I might not have listened to my Nirvana “In Utero” CD in 8 years, but maybe you’ve recently suffered a bit of nostalgia and you want to listen to them again. So why don’t we trade?

Within a half hour or so of me having my beta account I loaded a bunch of the CD’s that I knew I had into my “I Have” section and I’d added a bunch of CD’s I wanted to my “I Want” section. About an hour or two later I discovered that I’d had my first match and that somebody wanted my copy of The Clash’s “London Calling” (an excellent CD by the way). And simultaneously somebody was shipping me Jurassic 5’s “Quality Control”. And I was only out $1.

Too cool.

Update: If anybody wants lala invites, add a comment below and leave the email address you want it sent to. I have a bunch.