Tech Friday: The Forgotten Art of Scripting

Well, maybe it hasn't been been forgotten by everybody, but it has been a long time since I looked at scripting, which might be considered another name for "accessible programming for casual users".

In the beginning was the shell script.. any of several flavors of command line languages that manipulated UNIX operating system shells. These included component programs with funny names like AWK, and SED that allowed the manipulation of data and (especially) text files. And they all still work and and are used. I'm personally fond of grep, which is a sort of search engine on steroids available on any UNIX variant (like the Mac OS X)

Then there was the DOS batch file, which appeared in the earliest versions of DOS and has been carried up through all versions of Windows with the availability of the Windows Scripting Host. It has now has morphed into the PowerShell... but you can still write and execute a simple batch file if you want. Great stuff for network administrators.

Then there is JavaScript, which has nothing to do with Java, used for calculations and manipulations of web pages. I wrote my TimeCard web page program in JavaScript; and it works, and it it is fast, but working with the language was kind of a mess.

Why bother?

The later versions of the Tandberg Codian Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) for videoconferencing includes an XML-RPC interface to allow programmers to interact with the box without going through the provided web interface. The latter, by the way, is actually quite good. Our idea is to figure out the basic sub-set of functionality that we usually use 90% of the time, and build a custom interface for that 90%.

XML-RPC is, (it appears) to be a languishing standard for having one machine issue calls to another machine, and allow the second machine to execute commands. The reason I call this "apparently languishing" is that Google searches for XML-RPC turn up documents mostly from the early part of the decade. Also, there are few good tutorials on how to get things to work... right now I'm winging it using an (excellent) free client for the Mac which sends XML-RPC commands to the target box from a Mac workstation. Still, XML-RPC is what our box expects to receive...and for the moment at least, that's what it will get. Once we've figured out what to send...we'll figure out how to send it, ultimately using any scripting language that will work, but starting with AppleScript, which is native to OS X and which comes with an editor and dictionary built in.

Odds and Sods

"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." Glen Prickett senior vice president of Conservation International quoted in Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat.

Delicious Monster has developed a personal inventory program that works with bar codes. You can inventory your books and CDs using the iMac's camera.

The Lean Startup, blog and workshops, has a ton of information about using a lean engineering methodology for product development.

Apple has released version 4 of the Safari web browser. Two nice features are a cover-flow interface which works like the Finder or iTunes to flip through the browser history, and a sort of marquee that shows a customizable set of pages based on pages most frequently visited. Lifehacker has a work-around to allow you to add pages of your own choosing.

I like the update. It crashes every so often, though.

Interesting take on libraries from Don Lancaster:

Many of the fundamental premises of what a
library once was now border on the ludicrous...

• That information is scarce.
  
• That info is only available at a special place.
  
• That only one copy of info is available.
  
• That a specialist is needed for info loan.
  
• That info is only available during restricted hours.
  
• That control freaks should be in charge of anything ever.
  

If libraries are to survive, they will have to totally rethink
what they are and what services they are going to offer
to which people in what manner.

He expands this in a full discussion of soon-to-be obsolete technologies.

Still I actually bought a book yesterday. In a store. (!)

But what I really want is one of these.

Single Payer Health Care - Sen. Bernie Sanders

In our morning paper there was an article about Bernie Sanders who has introduced legislation in the senate to establish a real single payer health care plan. This is not the watered down version promulgated by Obama and Senator Bauckus who are discouraging participation of single-payer advocates in the debate about revamping health care. I sent him a note.

Dear Senator Sanders:

Hi.... I was delighted to see coverage of your single-payer health care initiative this morning in the Free Press. I only hope that you'll be able to convince your colleagues that have been corrupted by the insurance companies campaign contributions.

I don't think this issue takes on the urgency that it might since all members of Congress are covered by a single payer government provided health care plan. Hey....all we want is what you guys have!

I've lived both in Canada (single payer), and German (hybrid single payer+employer system) and both systems were far superior to what ordinary Americans are able to get even in Burlington with Fletcher Allen and a high-deductible CIGNA policy obtained through the Chamber of Commerce.

The amount of energy and frustration to say nothing of the dollar cost that we personally invest in attempting to manage our personal health care is just crazy. And we are the "lucky" ones with health insurance, and good hospitals and doctors.

Thanks for your advocacy on this issue. It should be at the top of the everyone's list.

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I still like reading our printed paper. For one thing, it doesn't provide ad-links to colon cleansing products. In fact the Gannett web site which hosts the paper (it is a Gannett paper) is a disaster.