A bit off topic

While I know this little blog doesn’t get much traffic, I would like to give a shout-out to my friends at SomaFM. Although I’ve never met them, I’ve grown to like what they’re about a great deal. Their website and iTunes radio streams provide me with a never ending torrent of great music that I pretty much play all day.

I support them every month and would encourage anyone to check out their streams (my personal fav is Indie Pop Rocks) and, if you feel so led, donate whatever you feel comfortable with.

In the face of unrelenting pressure from big corps and the RIAA constantly telling us what to like, they’ve been a real breath of fresh air.

The Joys of Automater

Thanks to this page, I was able to experience my first real joy with using Automator. We had a folder containing 300+ 600+ files with multiple periods in the file names. This was causing a sort problem when users were looking for a particular file. Rather than replacing each superfluous period with an underscore one by one, I employed Automator to do it for me. Here’s a screenshot of the workflow:

1: Tell the Finder to get a specific folder
2: Tell Finder to get the contents of the folder
3: Filter items in folder based on criteria (so I didn’t mess with files that didn’t need changing)
4: Remove file name extension (since I’m replacing periods with underscores, I didn’t want to mess up the extension)
5: Replace all periods with underscores
6: add proper file extension back to each file

The process took about 35 seconds and worked pretty well. I had a slight problem with one user clicking on the new file names and the file would disappear in his Finder. I think this was due to him having the folder open while all these changes were being made. A Finder relaunch did not fix the problem, but restarting his computer did.

Bad Programming

Thinking your the savior of all things programming? Read this…