$ong ¢ontest

Kamehameha’s 87th annual Song Contest has been airing for a little more than half an hour now, and I must say that I’m somewhat disappointed. This year marks the first year KGMB 9 has picked up the broadcast, and I’m somewhat disappointed by the noticeable increase in commercials.

Song Contest has had commercials for as long as I can remember, and it’s not the ads per se that bother me. What’s new is that they are now clearly and obnoxiously separate from the body of the program. Jack, I love you, but I really don’t care that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Song Contest used to be a package deal, but apparently the tasteful, soft commercials — spots that were about image, not commercialism — weren’t profitable enough.

Hopefully that’s the last we’ll see of LOUD BLARING SPOTS for the remainder of the evening.

People Living Worldwide

Twitter started as an experiment to strip away all the complexity of social networking sites. At its core, it’s a micro-blog: a tiny line of text updated as often as every few minutes with the thoughts and goings-on of ordinary people worldwide.

Today, a new mashup combining Google Maps and Twitter was released. Twittervision is like a birds-eye view on the mundane. You can watch people going to bed, shopping at the supermarket, holding twittersations with people on the other side of the world, and more.

I wonder what would happen if somebody launched a mashup of journaling and Twittervision. Could it be a new way to share insights from devotions? A new way to stay accountable?

Removing Duplicate Dictionaries from Script Editor

For a few months, I’ve had a number of duplicate dictionaries listed in the Open Dictionary dialog box of Apple’s Script Editor. (This application is used to write and debug AppleScript code — the Mac equivalent to batch files or shell scripts.) While this wasn’t really hurting anything, it was kind of annoying to have the same program show up five or six times, typically after I upgraded the offending apps to newer versions. Since I had trouble with a Google search for "Script Editor" "duplicate dictionaries", I thought I’d share the solution I eventually found.

The solution turns out to be forcing Launch Services to rebuild its database. The database maps file types to applications that are supposed to open them, but sometimes it gets confused and can hang on to old versions of the same program. The magic incantation, according to macosxhints.com, is:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/
Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister 
-kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

Thanks to this post at Apple Discussions for pointing me in the right direction.

Holding the Keys

Web 2.0 start page Netvibes released a developer preview of its new Universal Widget Architecture (UWA) today. The system combines a new widget format with small amounts of glue code that help the widget run in Google IG, Apple Dashboard, and soon Opera and standard web pages. The new universal widgets were compelling enough that I signed up for a Netvibes account after playing with it anonymously for about a year.

There is still a barrier to overcome, however, and it’s not Netvibes’ fault. Continue reading