Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Random Points¶

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I think we are coming close to finishing the next releases of the ASCII Projektor toy and – more significantly – of UnicodeChecker. Both of which is nice.
In case you are interested in testing almost finished new releases, particularly that of ASCII Projektor, let me know.
Two somewhat obscure Mac programming facts were learned the Hard Way™ in course of this. The first being that if you try setting colours in AppleScript to adjust a Terminal window’s look, things can easily look a bit crazy. Particularly if you create the script with those numbers from within Cocoa. While in Cocoa RGB colours have their components stored as floats in the range from zero to one, in the AppleScript/Terminal world things are different. Colour components are stored as numbers in the range from 0 to 65535 there. And you definitely want to use some unsigned int type variables when dealing with that. They preserve your sanity. All other types don’t.
Despite Apple’s QTMovie documentation claiming that the QTMovieHasDurationAttribute and QTMovieIsLinearAttribute attributes are zero for QuickTime VR films, that isn’t actually true for all such films. QTMovieHasDurationAttribute seems to be one for all VR films and QTMovieIsLinearAttribute is one for some. Doesn’t make much sense to me but keeps me from easily detecting which films are static QTVR films (and should be ignored by me).
Sweet bonus fact: If you want to copy a file path that is to be pasted as a string, don’t just put it as a NSStringPboardType on the pasteboard but be sure to add it there as an NSFileNamesPboardType as well. The Terminal will be smart enough to properly escape the filename on pasting then. Nice touch!
Tatort was from my home town Bremen tonight, so I had a look. And it wasn’t particularly good. Mainly because of the loads of weirdo/bad/unnatural acting.