Programming

I have a number of AppleScript applications that need to run at odd times. These maintenance tasks often attempt to run while the computer is sleeping. Particularly those that rely on UI scripting do not function during this period.

This most flexible way of dealing with this is to manipulate the power management settings directly via the pmset(1) command.

The variety of options available using pmset is staggering and beyond the scope of this post. Here’s what I do to wake the computer up at specific times so that scheduled AppleScripts can run:

Hexo, the static blogging system that I use is very extensible and provides numerous hooks into generation pipeline.

While working on a Russian language blog that’s coming online soon, I had the opportunity to write a filter to render Cyrillic text in a different font than the rest of the body text.

I wanted to set the Cyrillic text apart both in color, typeface, and font weight. Although I could have extended Hexo using a new tag, I decided to use a filter so that after rendering HTML anywhere on the blog, items demarcated by double pipes || would be replaced by a new <span>.

Because the blogging system that I use doesn’t apply finely grained object-level caching rules, I end up with objects such as images that cache appropriately but an index.html page that does not. I don’t want client browsers to hang on to the main index.html page for more than an hour or so because it should update much more frequently than that as its content changes.

It’s possible that I could dig around under the hood of hexo and create a version that applies customized caching rules. Instead, I make a second pass over the content, adjusting the Cache-Control and other metadata according to my needs. For this task I use the Amazon Web Services command line interface AWS-CLI.

[N.B. 2016-03-26 Nathan Ifill pointed out that it is possible to use Anki’s built-in conditional replacement feature to do what I’m illustrating. I’ll have to work on another example!]

Anki is a widely-used flashcard application. If you’re learning a foreign language and you’re not using Anki, you should be.

If you are using Anki and are picky about the appearance of the cards, you should know that JavaScript can be used in the card template. This opens up a number of possibilities for dynamic cards. I’m just touching on the technique here.

How to identify Russian letters in a string? The short answer is: [А-Яа-яЁё] but depending on your regex flavor, [\p{Cyrillic}] might work. What in the word does this regex mean? It’s just like [A-Za-z] with a twist. The Ёё at the end adds support for ё (“yo”) which is in the Latin group of characters.

See this question on Stack Overflow.

I use the excellent, dependable Pinboard service for managing my bookmarks. A one-time fee gives you lifetime access to the service; and there is an API that has fostered an ecosystem of desktop and mobile apps that interact with the service. Of course, Safari can synchronize bookmarks among devices; but it doesn’t allow tagging. Since tagging is a major part of my workflow, Safari bookmarks don’t work for me.

So, here’s where pinboardspotlight.py comes in. It’s a relatively simple Python program that downloads your Pinboard bookmarks, writing them to local .webloc files and applying the tags you’ve used in the Pinboard metadata to the local files. Now you’re Pinboard bookmarks are searchable locally.

TIL how to use anchors in Markdown documents. I needed to use this in a long blog post in my Octopress blog and was stymied.

As usual, I found the answer on Stack Overflow.

Beam me [up](#enterprise), Scotty

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It’s a great way to move around in longer content.

2014-03-03: I no longer publish using Octopress; but this should work in most cases where Markdown is used. Bitbucket is a notable exception. For Github wiki, you’ll need something like: