Grading is such a great joy. If I keep telling myself that, maybe I’ll begin to believe it.

After adding the script to move by paragraph in BBedit (see here), I realized that using live-search was a more efficient way to quickly navigate to a location. Just press option-command-F (or control-S if you use Emacs shortcuts), and a search bar appears at the top of the document. Then, start typing the word or phrase that you want to go to, and watch it get selected. Pressing return and shift-return moves through all of the matches.

Alt-down-arrow in BBedit moves the cursor to the bottom of the screen. That is helpful for quickly placing the cursor in approximately the right position, but I wanted a way to navigate quickly between paragraphs. So, I started exploring grep searches. I added the following script to the script folder and assigned it a keyboard shortcut. It moves the cursor to the beginning of the next line that has non-whitespace at the beginning of the line.

1
2
3
4

tell application "BBEdit"
	find "^(?=\\S)" searching in text 1 of window 1 options {search mode:grep, starting at top:false, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false} with selecting match
	select insertion point before found object of result
end tell

I then added another script that is identical to this one except that backwards is set to “true” for moving the cursor to the previous paragraph. Unfortunately, the script didn’t quite work the way I wanted. It finds the next line that begins with non-whitespace. That works pretty well, except for lists. It stops at each top-level list item, but skips indented items. I’d prefer to skip the entire list, so I tried a search with a lookbehind positional assertion that found the first line following two returns. That skipped the lists, but paragraphs that had more than one blank line between them presented a problem.

Finally, I modified the script to use two positional assertions: “^(?<=\s\s)(?=\S)”, it finds the next line that begins with non-whitespace and is preceded by two whitespace items. So far, so good. Here’s the modified script.

1
2
3
4

tell application "BBEdit"
	find "^(?<=\\s\\s)(?=\\S)" searching in text 1 of window 1 options {search mode:grep, starting at top:false, wrap around:false, backwards:false, case sensitive:false, match words:false, extend selection:false} with selecting match
	select insertion point before found object of result
end tell

I have long suspected that the real reason that Macs have been untroubled by virus attacks and other malware is simply the lack of market share. The best target is the one that you’re most likely to hit, and the sheer numbers of Windows machines made it the target OS of choice. As more and more people begin using Macs, we will begin to see our artificial immunity start to slip away.

A few scares have surfaced in the past year or so. It’s estimated that 600,000 Macs are infected with the latest malware, Flashback. To check your machine for infection, and to remove the malware if infected, follow these steps from MacFixIt at CNET.

If I were to categorize this post, both “dumb moves” and “lessons learned” would be good options. I recently experienced a problem with LaunchBar crashing, which is something that has never happened to me before. This was not just an occasional crash, it crashed immediately after starting the application. The log file reported the error “NSInvalidArgumentException.” I took the standard measures of closing and restarting the app, which had no effect. I then restarted the computer, which also had no effect. I then decided to delete and reinstall Launchbar and its associated preference files. I then went to the Objective Development site to download the latest release. On the download page, I noticed this:

“NSInvalidArgumentException” crash

There is currently a known bug in version 5.1.3 of LaunchBar that can, under certain circumstances, crash LaunchBar immediately after startup. The Nightly Build fixes this issue.

I downloaded the Nightly Build, and the problem was solved. Of course, I lost my index preferences since I deleted the preference files. No major inconvenience, but I learned to check the developer’s site before taking any drastic actions.

By the way, I love Launchbar. Give it a try.

I wanted to create a new banner picture for my personal academic website, which is also created with Octopress. First, I experimented with TiKZ, a nice graphics package for TeX. I then played with Context Free.

Since two of the courses that I teach are Philosophy of Religion and the History of Medieval Philosophy, I decided that a picture of a manuscript would make a nice background image. Fortunately, there are many online archives of medieval manuscripts. Unfortunately, the copyright statements were not very clear, and I did not want to risk using something without permission. So, I decided to create my own using Pixelmator.

The first step was to set the image size. For this, I just expanded the window to its largest size, then measured the header at 1260 x 173 pixels. The examples below are 800 x 110.

After opening a new file, I selected the background layer, then from the File menu, selected Filter… Generator… Clouds, resulting in this image:

I then changed the colors on the clouds generator to light brown and dark brown, experimenting with different shades.

I then added a text layer and filled it with Latin text taken from Proslogion by St. Anselm. I used the Cantebriggia font from Paul Lloyd Fonts. The font is particularly good for this purpose, having a slightly uneven, hand-lettered look. The dark text clashed with the site title and subtitle, so I used Soft Light blending and reduced the opacity to 35% to fade the text resulting in this final image:

If you’d like to see the final version, browse to http://ridenour.org.

Occasionally, something happens that gives one the feeling that life is now complete. That’s the feeling I got when I read that Tweetbot for iPad was released yesterday.

It’s my favorite iOS Twitter client, nothing else is even close.

Go to 52 Tiger to watch this video of Steve Jobs presenting the original Macintosh.

I just read Ed Bott’s thoughts on Apple’s end-user license agreement (EULA) for iBooks Author, or, as Bott calls it “Apple’s mind-boggingly greedy and evil license agreement.” The relevant conditions of the license agreement are

1. If you provide your book for free, you may distribute it however you like.
2. If you charge for the book, you may distribute only through Apple.
3. Apple may decline to distribute your work.
4. Apple is not responsible for any damages you may incur as a result of either using the software or by Apple’s refusal to distribute your work.

Here are some of Bott’s objections:

I have never seen a EULA as mind-bogglingly greedy and evil as Apple’s EULA for its new ebook authoring program.

Dan Wineman calls it “unprecedented audacity” on Apple’s part. For people like me, who write and sell books, access to multiple markets is essential. But that’s prohibited…. Exactly: Imagine if Microsoft said you had to pay them 30% of your speaking fees if you used a PowerPoint deck in a speech.

He then imagines the worst-case result from using iBooks Author:

The nightmare scenario under this agreement? You create a great work of staggering literary genius that you think you can sell for 5 or 10 bucks per copy. You craft it carefully in iBooks Author. You submit it to Apple. They reject it.

This is certainly an unusual license agreement, but it’s far from “greedy and evil.” Bott’s analogy is weak, Microsoft does not give PowerPoint away. Apple could charge for iBooks Author, I suppose. What’s the latest price for Adobe Indesign? Here is why complaints about the EULA are irrational. Imagine that Apple had developed an application that allowed someone to prepare a text to sell for iBooks. You couldn’t do anything else with the application, but that’s no reason to complain. There are other ways to prepare epub books that can be sold through Apple. The software is free, and you’re welcome to use it or not. If that were the case, then no one would be complaining (not true, some people will complain about anything).

So, what then is the complaint? The reason for complaint appears to be that iBooks Author can be used for something other than selling books through Apple’s delivery system. It also allows authors to prepare a text as a PDF to distribute at no cost. So, if the software were limited to just preparing texts sale via iBooks, then no complaint. The mistake that Apple made seems to be in giving people one option too many. I have never heard so many people complaining about free software that gives people too many options.

I’ll certainly experiment with iBooks Author, but I’m not sure that it’s best for my situation. If I were at a school that provided iPads to all students, then it looks to be an excellent textbook authoring tool. As it is, I want students to be able to access the material on whatever device they happen to have, so I may have to continue using my usual method of LaTeX to PDF or Scrivener to epub and Kindle.

Today, Apple announced new products focused directly on the education market. First, there is an iTunes U iOS app. Second, we now have a textbook authoring tool for iBooks. Both are free.

I have self-published a collection of public domain readings for my Introduction to Philosophy course. I have also published two collections of devotionals for my Church in both .epub and .mobi format for iBooks, Nook, and Kindle. Simple text is not difficult to produce, but anything more complex can quickly get very tricky. I’m looking forward to playing with these new options. It’s too bad that the Spring semester starts Monday.