Take the following youtube URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw1s3yXZLYc

If we add: #t=2m51s to the end of the url

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw1s3yXZLYc#t=2m51s

It directs us to the video and starts playing at 2 minutes(2m) and 51 seconds(51s).  Suppose the video is over one hour.  We can do the following:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo#t=1h2m30s

This tell us to start at 1 hour(1h) 2 minutes(2m) and 30 seconds(30s)

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571

Alan Turing is considered to be the father of modern computer science.  Turing is also partly responsible for designing the “bombe,” a machine used to crack the German Enigma machine yielding invaluable German military Intelligence to the Allied forces.

Unfortunately, instead of being revered by his government for his services rendered, he was criminally prosecuted for being a homosexual because homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain in 1952.  Having seen the end of his career and having undergone the subsequent drug treatment administered by the government to cure his homosexuality, he committed suicide via a cyanide induced apple.

Since then, the scientific community has embraced his achievements and ignored his lifestyle decision (as they should).  With great pleasure, I have stumbled upon an online petition urging the British PM to apologize to Alan Turing.  It is shame that only British citizens can sign it.  This petition can be found:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing/

For more information about Alan Turing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

Lastly, what would this be without a plug for gay rights in today’s society:

http://www.aclu.org/lgbt/index.html

http://www.websiteoutlook.com/

It is no surprise that the most popular pages are adult websites.

Click here

Rails will add some new features and enhancements by merging with MERB.  Should be interesting.

I Installed Leopard without any problems…until I tried to login.  For some odd reason, Leopard decided it could not recognize or repair my damaged FileVault protected home folder.  FileVault encrypts my home directory.  You can turn on FileVault under System Preferences -> Security.  Of course it was not damaged before I tried installing Leopard.  Leopard either has some compatibility issues with Tiger’s FileVault, or it damaged some of my files.  Whatever the reason, I can’t login.

So the only solutions are to:

• Login as another user, impossible for me considering I don’t have any other user accounts.  Of course google produces terminal commands to make new users.
• Clean install and use a backup.  Nice, but only good if you create frequent backups (and you should!)
• Use another Mac or HD to copy your files.

So obviously, I recommend creating a backup before installing Leopard and turning off FileVault, if you can.  The only problem with doing that is the space requirement.  FileVault requires a large chunk of HD space to unload.  At the time, I probably couldn’t have because we all know how large the Macbook HDs are

What a shock this is.  For a company that preaches about superior software, I am surprised it doesn’t always work.  According to Apple, because they create both the OS and the machine, everything just works.  Is that not a lie?  False advertisement?  Of course this isn’t the first time Leopard installs have caused fits.  The first day it was released, many users reported their machines hanging.

Don’t get me wrong, I still like Apple computers, and some of their products, but I would say the honeymoon is over.  Any shot of me becoming a fanboy, which is impossible since I still like Windows, is now impossible.

Spoke to a Mac guy about the situation and he says not to use FileVault unless one works for the CIA.  Sensationalizing, sure, but I would add, don’t use it because it causes problems.

I did fix this problem.  I used the third method with an external HD.  Put the Leopard CD into your Mac.  Plugin your external HD.  Install Leopard on your external HD.  You may have to format the HD into a special format, GUID.  Click HERE to learn how to do that.  Install Leopard, and let it restart.  It reboots to the new install on the external HD.

Login into your new OS install, and you should be able to see your old HD mounted.  Click on it, and browse to Users/Your_account and you should see a Yourname.sparseimage.  Drag that to your external HD.  Click on it, and it should ask you for a password.  Enter your account password and ignore the warnings.  Now you should be able to recover your files.  Just be sure you locate any and all important program files HERE for a link that has information about how to track down application files.  It’s about uninstalling applications but it yields information about how application data is stored on your machine by OS X.

The best way to learn these concepts is to open up one.  That is just what I did.  I found a script that formatted iTunes data.  I was not satisfied with all of its features so I modified it.  I left credit to the original authors in the modified script.

First, we need to create a file structure.  Create a folder called name.AdiumScripts.  name can be anything you like, just make sure you don’t forget it.  Then right click(CTLR+click), and click ’show package contents.’  Create a folder called Contents.  Inside Contents, create a folder called Resources.  The result:

->name.AdiumScripts
–>Contents
—->Resources

Enter the contents folder. Click HERE for the info.plist file that will direct Adium where to get your script.  Place it in the contents folder.

The following is how the file looks:

name corresponds to the name of your project from earlier.  Under <key>File</key>, we specify the name of the script file that will be called each time %_name is called.  Of course, you can change any of these.  It is also possible to create more callable scripts by copying and pasting.

Now enter the Resources folder.  Create a file called name, or whatever you may have changed name to, with the file extension .scpt. You can either use your favorite text editor or the Script Editor.  This is where we will create our actual script that displays the data.

The following script has the following sample output:

Reading and listening to You Are The Pan
By John Williams
From Hook (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack).

The first line is shows my default action combined with the current song name.  The next lines are the artist, and the album.  If iTunes is not active, whether it is paused or not open, the default action will appear.  In the above example, the default action is Reading.  The modified script can be found by clicking HERE.

The code is pretty simple to follow so I won’t go into details here.  It is very simple to add more formatting.  It is just a matter of copying and pasting.  The column names found in iTunes are pretty much the same as they are in AppleScript e.g. to access the genre of a track, just use the variable genre.  Adding more substitutions, that is adding more features like %_name, is as simple as expanding the XML tree and placing the new script files in the same directory.

Like always, if you plan on creating a published add-on, be sure to adhere to any current standards. And that’s it. Just click on name.AdiumScripts to install.

Your files will be installed in Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Scripts

One of my favorite applications on my Mac is iTunes, so its no surprise this is the first application I turned to for testing. To start, import the proper library:

Afterward, we can create a handle to iTunes and tell it to play:

Running the above lines will open up the application called iTunes and execute the action play.  It will play the current track and specific tracks can be passed as an argument. The action .stop() will stop iTunes. Of course, we can do so much more with appscript. For instance, we can create a playlist that only plays a specific album.  I wrote a script that does just that.

The script can be found HERE in a zipped file.

It is documented and should be easy to follow.  One more thing, it is also possible to assign values to each track as if they were normal data objects.