Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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JavaScript and UTF-8 in Eclipse
For some reason the usually excellent Eclipse IDE sets the default encoding of JavaScript files to ISO-8859-1, which is pretty much wrong and can be problematic. The correct path to configuring things so that they are right is rather non-obvious; Google failed me in the quest to fix things this time. It’s a small but irritating problem, and apparently I’m not alone in seeking an answer, so I’m posting my solution up here for future reference and for any other frustrated Eclipse JavaScripters that might be out there. (more…)
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Applescript String Manipulation
Because I am the sort of person who alphabetises his collections of things for fun, I’ve been using Applescript to help tidy up my iTunes library recently. It’s actually an efficient tool for the job, and not too horrible to work with either once you get used to the syntax; for someone used to C-based languages, a typical statement seems at first glance to have a load of extraneous words and far too little punctuation, but you soon get the hang of it. Thanks to the integration provided by the iTunes dictionary you can assign genres by artist name, split compilation album track names into correct artist and title settings, sort video files as TV shows, and so on, all with a single click (and a few hours reading the docs and writing the code, of course). It’s one of those gratifyingly useless, boring pastimes that dorks like me prefer to the crucially important, fascinating things that normal people do, like playing golf and watching telly and talking about cars and shopping. A normal person would probably just put up with having all their songs in some sort of soul-revolting, multiple-artist-spelling, TV-shows-in-the-movies-section multiple metadata pile-up, but I am not normal, and I will not tolerate such carnage on my own computers. Nor am I willing to spend days typing all that stuff in manually: I’m a geek, not a lunatic. (more…)
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Wordpress Dynamic Site URL Plugin
Behold! I just created my first Wordpress plugin: Dynamic Site URL.
Actually, strictly speaking, I didn’t write it, I just lifted it from this thread on wordpress.org and added one extra line to make it work on all parts of a Wordpress install. Hooray for this mysterious chap, who created the five lines of code that do the real work.
It’s useful if you want to run one blog under two domain names and have your links based on the currently active URL. (more…)