If you want to watch a PAL movie in an NTSC DVD player, you are out of luck. There are DVD players out there that will play both PAL and NTSC discs, and, in fact, I have one of those. The problem with that solution is that see flickering lines and some jagged lines when watching PAL discs. This could just be a flaw of my cheap DVD player.

Anyway, on to the point of this article. Read the rest of this entry »

I was looking for a way to have an AppleScript round a number to the nearest even, whole number. I did some googling and found some examples of rounding with AppleScript, but I had to modify them to do exactly what I wanted. Here is what I came up with:

property this_number : ""
display dialog “Enter a number” default answer this_number
set the this_number to text returned of result
set rounded to (round (this_number) rounding up)
if rounded mod 2 is not 0 then
set evenNum to (rounded - 1)
else
set evenNum to rounded
end if


For Christmas, I was given a black 30GB iPod by my wonderful girlfriend. It is an awesome piece of hardware. I had used my friend’s 60GB 5G model, so I wasn’t unaccustomed to the operation. I promptly bought a Belkin case for it, as I’ve seen how easily iPods can become scratched.

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It’s when I see something like this, that I start to wonder, “Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if people were required to take a test, before operating a computer or using email or the internet.”

Seriously, shouldn’t everyone be informed that they should not actually “unsubscribe” to all the emails they receive? Shouldn’t they know how annoying it is to forward every email to every person in their address book?

The unfortunate user belonging to the picture at the right, eventually just changed their email address. I can almost assure you that their inbox is in practically the same condition now with the new address.

At one point I decided to have the web server email the day’s access_log to me. Instead of emailing the entire log, I grep’ed through the log to only get “today”, piped that to grep again to exclude entries that contained the IP address of the Intermapper server, and then piped that to mail. So, everyday I have the previous day’s log waiting in my inbox.

#! /bin/sh

today=`date +%d/%b/%Y`

/usr/bin/grep "$today" /var/log/httpd/access_log | /usr/bin/grep -v 192.168.1.70 | /usr/bin/mail -s "access_log for $today" me@email.net
exit 0

I save this shell script and schedule it with cron to run ever day right before midnight.

59 23 * * * /bin/sh /Library/Scripts/mail_log.sh