You can do some entertaining and evil things to an Illustrator document with Scriptographer. For instance, I implemented a static version of the XScreenSaver module Interaggregate in about 80 lines of code, which by itself isn’t terribly practical, but being able to generate hundreds of randomly-sized circles each with their own vectors and calculate their intersections over time does suggest some interesting art-hackery.

I wanted something simple: an app that allowed me to enter a list of tasks and how frequently I want to do them (daily, twice a week, etc), and sort the ones I’ve been neglecting to the top. It should show me when I last did them, and have a calendar view showing my historical performance. And it doesn’t really need to do anything else. Systematic doesn’t have the calendar view yet, but it does everything else, and it’s dead simple.

You have two buttons at the top of the screen: add a task, and edit the task list. Below that is your list of tasks, with the do-soon ones at the top. Tapping on any task starts a timer that tracks how much time you’ve spent on it, and you can stop, pause, restart, or adjust the time spent. Your progress and deadline show up in small print on the task button.

In the editor, you name the task, select an icon, a frequency (once, daily, weekly, monthly), a duration (from 5 minutes to 50 hours), a repeat count (1-50 times per period), and a deadline. So, I can say that I want to practice Go-San-Go three times a week for ten minutes per session, with my success evaluated on Sundays.

And that’s it. Until the author adds the calendar view, you can only see your previous session for each task, but it uses Core Data for storage, which means everything is stored in a simple SQLite schema, and the DB itself is available from the File Sharing pane in iTunes, so it’s trivial to extract the data yourself.

$2.99, designed for iPhone-sized screen; I suspect it just looks huge on an iPad right now.

Judging from the backlash, I’m guessing that the assault on Chick-fil-A just set back the gay-rights movement about five years.

Judging from the responses to the backlash, they plan to keep digging.

Pro tip: when framing your opponents as intolerant hate-filled bigots, try not to showcase your own hatred, intolerance, and bigotry.

Calculate the offset required to convert from Mac OS X Core Data timestamps to Unix timestamps.

date -uj 010100002001 +%s

Better than just saying “add 978307200” or “add 11323 * 86400”.

[Update: “…without spending an extra $180 on a third-party tool that unlocks hidden, unsupported functionality”]

Layout a sentence that contains a mixture of English and Japanese.

In Word, you can say “use this font for Japanese characters only”, automatically leaving the rest of the sentence in a more-appropriate font. If you want to do this in InDesign, you must assign a character class to each string of Japanese text, or else layout the whole sentence in the same Japanese-capable font.

And that character class will not be applied if the sentence is used in a running header. Which means that you cannot use character-class-based styling in text that will be used as a header.

The workaround, which doesn’t work, is to use position-based nested styles in the header.

The workaround for the workaround, which doesn’t work, is to use regular-expression-based styling in the header. You can do something half-assed with regexps in a normal paragraph style, but the exact same regexp that works in the body text doesn’t work in a header style; the regexps are apparently applied before the variable substitution (which, come to think of it, is likely the problem with nested styles as well).

You can probably do Word-style font-mixing in the Japanese version of InDesign, along with vertical text, furigana, and all of the other things Word gives you in all versions, but I can’t buy that in the US. And, frankly, it’s far too expensive to ever consider trying to import a copy just to get potentially prettier printouts than Word.

[Update: it is claimed in a number of places that all of the Japanese functionality is present in the US version of InDesign, but that none of it is exposed in the UI. So, if someone sent you a document made in the Japanese version, you could print it, but not edit it. This suggests that it would be possible to export such a document to either the Tagged Text or XML formats and do some scripting work.]

…it really sucks to run out of inodes when the device is barely 40% full. I mean, it’s not like I’m adding 250,000 files a day or something goofy like that.

Oh, wait, that’s exactly what I was doing. Drat.

…in case anyone needs it. Yuu Hasebe.

W. T. F.

Personally, I want something more like your old Twister video…