I'm always pleased to see people post their little twenty-line hacks on use.perl, following lines like, "I wanted to do X, but it was annoying to do manually, so I wrote this." It's really weird that I do that less and less as I become more of a coder and less of an admin. (Really, that change is pretty complete by now.) So, I'm trying to get back into the habit of writing little time-savers.
My current batch are little scripts to make my Apple-based data available to my old unix-based tools. I want mutt to have my address book, I want my long-defunct countdown calendar to get information from iCal, and so on. I started to write some things in AppleScript, but that was doomed, so I moved to Mac::Glue, but I think I'll have to finish it later this week. Then I'll post it. I'm surprised I haven't seen an addrbook2mutt script before.
pudge, who runs use.perl, often bugs the hell out of me, but other times he says things that are really quite reasonable, and one of them was reasonable enough that I remind myself of it now and then. I mentioned some very cheap piece of payware, like Synergy, maybe. He said, "I like to write free software that makes pay software unnecessary." I'd like to do some more of that, myself.
This, though, after paying for NetNewsWire. My demo expired, and it's saved me so much time that I didn't want to go on without it. Now that I've shelled out (oof!) $40 for a news aggregator, I need to start really putting it to use. Time to code up some feeds and script some news munging!
Don't forget the fun feeds!
