Santos L. Barbara

alternateorg on August 16, 2003

So, my recent trip to California went well. I got the contract and the work should last for quite a while. Everyone say yay. Got to see the place where Tai’s eCafe used to reside (named, coincidentally, The eCafe). Everything in Santa Barbara went as planned. LA on the other hand was another story. To quote Deathcab For Cutie:


the vessel keeps pumping us through this entropic place
in the belly of the beast that is californ-i-a,

i drank from a faucet and i kept my receipts

for when they weigh me on my way out

(here nothing is free).

and i can’t see why you’d want to live here.



I don’t normally see California this way, but damn is LA un-fucking-standable. The San- cities are much nicer (San Diego, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, San Francisco).

Grab URL Script Redeux

alternateorg on July 22, 2003

John Gruber has posted a “Grab URL” script for BBEdit, handy when working in BBEdit and you’d like to grab an existing page’s code. His script, however, requires you to enter in your own URL by hand or by copy/paste. I thought it’d be neat if it auto-magically grabbed Safari’s top-most URL instead. This could easily be written for Camino, I’m sure. Anyhoo, if you want it, get it here and drop it in your /Applications/BBEdit/BBEdit Support/Scripts folder. It’ll show up in the “Scripts” menu un BBEdit, strangely enough.

Now, this does a little bit of checking to see if Safari is actually running. If it’s not running, it just gives you the empty text field as before. This will only work correctly if Safari is somewhere (anywhere) within your /Applications directory. It was the quickest way I could think of to do it. I gotta say, I like AppleScript’s string search capability much more than the traditional Regular Expression baloney you have to wade through in PHP or JavaScript, even when you’re just doing a simple search.

The UPDATED source is below:

-- originally written by John Gruber
-- at daringfireball.net to just be an
-- empty text field
-- edited by kevin conboy at alternate.org
--to automatically take the top-most URL in safari
-- DOES NOT WORK WITH SAFARI'S TABS
-- I'm sure someone can get it to work with
-- GUI Scripting beta, though

tell application "System Events"
	set proclist to creator type of every process
	if proclist contains "sfri" then
		tell application "Safari"
			set safari_url to URL of document 1
		end tell
	else
		set safari_url to ""
	end if
end tell


tell application "BBEdit"
	set my_result to display dialog ¬
		"URL:" default answer safari_url ¬
		buttons {"Cancel", "With Headers", "Grab Source"}¬
default button 3
	set my_url to the text returned of my_result

	if button returned of my_result is "With Headers" then
		set my_text to do shell script ("curl -i " & my_url)
	else
		set my_text to do shell script ("curl " & my_url)
	end if

	make new text window with properties {contents:my_text,¬
name:my_url}
	select insertion point before character 1 of text window 1
end tell

Mix-A-Lot on Bush

alternateorg on July 18, 2003

Sir Mix-A-Lot on GW:

I didn’t like when George W. Bush got on TV and said “Axis Of Evil.” I knew that was going to create problems, that kind of arrogant shit. What I was trying to say with “National Anthem” was that before we go and brag and say “God Bless America”—I hate that term, because it insinuates that God blesses no place else but us—before we say that, let’s get our own house in order. That’s always been a problem with America. I didn’t realize until I went to Europe how people perceive us as bullies. They look at us as someone who’s always up in somebody else’s business. The more you look at it, the more you realize it’s true.