What Comes To Pass

Falling Apart At The Seams

Geez, my Markdown formatting is dead now. I don't have time right now to perform the thorough refitting that this blog needs but watching it reminds me of the ending to "Hot Shots: Part Deux" when Topper Harley is coming in to land his F:15 whilst almost every part of it is falling off, eventually crashing onto the deck of the aircraft carrier with just the cockpit.

Later

John

SPAMALOT

Just a short post to note that; apparently the US has been enjoying a Monty Python Musical. Lucky bastards!

The rest of us however can enjoy SPAMALOT, a musical based on the Quest for the Holy Grail, by purchasing the Original Broadway Cast Recording.

The show has such classic tracks as the extended “Knights of the Round Table” song and “Brave Sir Robin”. It also manages to shoe-horn in “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life”, not from 'Holy Grail' at all but still a classic.

Extremely funny stuff, especially the song: “Diva's Lament (What ever happened to my part?)”

Back to the Grindstone

Later

John

Winners!

Another term of New Labour. I believe the term is 'w00t'. A reduced majority is like complaining that your football team only won 5-3 instead of the 8-2 rampage they managed last season. I'm sure the front bench will be licking their wounds as they pass, without any sort of legislative hurdles, act after act after act. However it does little to soothe the rage and disgust at George Galloway winning his seat in Bethnal Green. It is arguably the worst blow to racial relations in the United Kingdom in recent history. A man who landed from his native Glasgow to whip up racial tensions in one of the poorest constituencies in the country and to oust, in a display of vitriol not seen outside of the ranks of the SDP (although in fairness he now IS the SDP candidate), one of the finest Labour candidates in the country who's dedication to her community was such that she was perhaps one of the 3 backbencher's names I could ever remember. I'm with Paxman on [this](http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_4520000/newsid_4520100/bb_wm_4520131.stm). I cannot believe that a man who visited, sycophantically bootlicked and subsequently supported one of the most brutal dictators of the late 20th century could win a seat. The fact that he had to resort to the politics of race to do so is indicative of exactly what low Mr Galloway is willing to sink to, although whether it was possible to submerge oneself any further in the slick of political baseness having actually praised a tyrannical dictator and supported his regime in front of his oppressed people is debatable. I don't even care that Labour didn't win Bethnal Green, if not Labour or Conservative then Lib Dems at least! The RESPECT coalition is a disgrace to British Politics and proof that Extremist Politics when married with Extremist Religious Beliefs make a potent combination and one which must be dealt with immediately. Later John

Applescripting Tiger

It has to be said - Tiger Roxxors your Boxxors. I’m loving Mac OS 10.4, it’s above and beyond what I expected, even from Apple.

Anyhow rather than repeat press-releases I’d like to share one of the coolest ‘hidden’ features of Tiger which I’ve combined with some clever scripting and hacks to create the ultimate wake-up alarm.

There is, in Tiger an amazingly cool screensaver. It reads an RSS feed of your choice and then displays the articles in a fantastically beautiful 3d data matrix that spins elegantly against an azure backdrop. I can’t really explain it properly except to say that having the news presented to you in such a way is a wonderful experience.

Here’s the Screensaver in action.

Anyhow I’ve long been a fan of writing elaborate Applescripts to wake me up in the morning or perform tasks whilst I sleep and I decided that what I really wanted was to combine my usual “Morning’s Here” wakeup with a sweeping visualization of the days news to read when I became more awake (and had of course, found my glasses).

The first bit of code was easy, iTunes like every Apple application is easily Applescripted so getting it to play my wakeup playlist only takes this much code:

tell application “iTunes”

activate

play playlist “Morning's Here!”

end tell

Now I had to get the screensaver to trigger. Also easy:

tell application “ScreenSaverEngine”

activate

end tell

But then hit a problem. When I sleep I like to have my computer running tasks such as downloading TV shows or optimizing its file structure for maintenance and I simply set the display to sleep. The problem is that all the shiny 3D RSS data is wasted on a black screen and I don’t necessarily want to move my mouse to wake the display from sleep, especially if such activity would also cancel the screensaver.

I knew there was an energysaver.plist file but I really didn’t want this Applescript to screw around running Shell Scripts to manually edit Preferences files, it just didn’t seem elegant or simple enough and to be honest was a little too tech-hacky for my liking (I’d rather have an ingenious hack that a newcomer to Applescript could use than one which required some knowledge of Unix commands that not everyone can be bothered to learn).

Then I remembered reading a MacOSxHint about how Exposé cancels display sleep, it was discovered when people were screwing around with Applescript to make the then new, Exposé function do things like turn all your windows tiny even after you ended the effect.

So I did a little ferreting around and discovered there was a call you could make to System Events which triggered the Exposé effect:

tell application “System Events” to key code 101.

So now the script does the following:

• It triggers Exposé, ending the display sleep on my computer.

• It tells iTunes to start playing my wakeup playlist.

• It activates my screensaver which dutifully starts reeling off all the day’s news in glorious OpenGL 3D.

If you’d like to try it out, the script is available here.

Other stuff in Tiger is so cool I can hardly begin to explain it, like the new Ultra-Ultra-High Definition Low File Size H.264 video codec.

I’ll leave you to check it out if you’re interested

Later

John

I'm STILL not dead

C’mon, I’m in my final few months, what do you expect?

I’ve got so much to write about the election but I also have several tomes to read on Carriage of Goods By Sea and therefore I’ll have to postpone much of the blogging (which I was quite looking forward to). I’ve only time to write now because the bus that normally whisks me off to Colchester breezed past me without so much as halting, I hate new bus drivers.

Anyhow here’s a good article to read. It has been related to me by a good friend of mine that I “Worship Tony Blair”, now that may not be true but I am of the opinion that he is arguably the best statesman Britain has seen over the course of this past half century and that he is a massive electoral asset. This article deals with the slightly foolish portion of the left who insist on lionizing Brown over Blair. Mr Brown is a superlative Chancellor, I don’t know how he’ll do as a prime minister when the time comes but I can tell you now that Blair is bloody good at it.

Now for some 1 paragraph comments on most of the Election news:

The Lib Dems are WELCOME to Brian Sedgemore, now if they’d be kind enough to take Livingstone off our hands I’d be rather indebted to them. I think accepting a far-left wingnut who more or less owes his electability to New Labour’s appeal to the centre is a stupid move by the Lib Dems but it does show how far they’ve come and to what depths of British politics they shall now sink - Welcome to the Loony Left lads.

My vote will be cast in North Essex, a Conservative stronghold. I am at least happy that the Conservative candidate is one of the most agreeable MPs I have ever met. Bernard Jenkin is competent, upstanding and generally a nice fellow to talk to in my experience, more importantly he’s well versed in local matters and is articulate in Parliament. If I can’t have a Labour candidate it’s just as well the Tory candidate isn’t a total write-off.

Personally I’d much rather vote in Colchester. I have no idea which way that’s going to sway but I’d do anything to get rid of Bob Russel the incumbent Lib Dem, even if that would mean tactically voting Tory. No matter how horrifically a Conservative government would harm our Public Services it is the fairer choice set against the fall of Britain on the world stage, the outrageous tax & spend policies which would destroy any notion of a high spending government in the future and complete subservience to the European Union which doesn’t look on healthy footing as a political body at the moment.

That’s all for now!

Later

John