With all this talk about the iPhone SDK being released, I’m getting a little interested in learning how to program Objective-C with Cocoa. I haven’t really done any application programming except for what I’ve had to do in my classes a few years ago, and I can’t really think of anything in particular I’d like to make off the top of my head… I just am interested in learning it for kicks. The iFund has nothing to do with it. Ok, maybe a little something to do with it. But like I said, I’ve got no ideas off the top of my head.
At the very least it’s not a bad skill to have knowledge of.
Like any good thing (“Master Ninja I”), there’s always going to be a sequel (“Master Ninja II”). Take my Random MST3k AppleScript from a few days ago, for instance… now there’s Random MST3k v.2!
It’s now been improved so that, instead of making a list of all the movies and then trying to figure out which ones don’t have a label, it now makes a list of the movies from the get-go that aren’t labeled and then picks a random movie from that list. This should help speed up picking a movie at random: imagine having 100 movies, and you’ve already watched 99 — it’d have to keep trying random numbers until it’s picked that one that hasn’t been seen yet! (But if you’ve got only one movie left to watch, why would you even bother with this script? Huh?) Now, any movie it picks will be one that you haven’t yet seen, assuming you’ve been labeling the movies that you have already seen like you’re supposed to.
Yeah, I guess it’s a basic script, but it’s my basic script and I’ve never really coded anything in AppleScript before these, so nyah nyah, I’m proud of it.
I’ve got a Firelite portable 80-gig hard drive that I use to store a bunch of episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, thanks to the Digital Archive Project. When I want to watch one, I have to look through this list of episodes and pick one out at random to watch. The problem is that sometimes you can’t decide if a movie will be “good” to watch based on title alone, and reading the list of episodes sometimes tells you more about an episode than you wanted to know. So I put together this handy little Applescript to pick out the randomness for me! It’s quite brilliant, actually — once you’ve seen a movie then you can highlight the file with any label and it’ll skip over those until it finds one that you haven’t watched.
And yes, the name of my portable external drive is “Satellite Of Love”. I thought it was fitting.
March 8, 2008 · No Comments