Thunderous Crickets

Turns out there are some of you people out there on the internet using my photoshop text export scripts. One of whom asked me if I could write a version that output each text layer of a group of selected layers sequentially to the clipboard, so it could be used by clipboard history. Sadly, I didn’t figure out a way to do this. For some reason the clipboard history of the few Apps I tried (Clyppan and Quicksilver) don’t pick up on all the output text when you run them in sequence (at least the ways I tried). However, to try to make up for this I did make a revised version that outputs the text of each separate layer of a selected group to separate files. Enjoy.

Something I was thinking about today… time for me to talk about an article from 3 months ago, because hey I’m really on top of things! I debated bringing it up at all, no matter how long after the fact, because it seems like blatant trolling to me. Clearly now I’m going to take the bait though, sigh. I speak of the Wired article proclaiming “The Web is Dead” by Chris Anderson from several months ago. I should link to it, but I guess I am enough of a snob not to do so out of spite. Use Google to find it dear reader WHILE IT STILL EXISTS!

I’m not going to go in too deep but it may go without saying that I don’t agree with the premise of this article. If it doesn’t by the way: I don’t agree. It seems most of the comments are with me, not that this is the sign of a rational argument or position here on the web, sorry I mean on “the internet”. In this case though, c’mon! Some of the comments have made many of the points I would: drawing false correlations with data, ignoring evolving web tech, ignoring history of software development and history cycles, etc. Does this really matter though, is the article just trolling? While I really like a lot of Chris’ writing (especially his last book), it sure fucking feels like it. This isn’t evidence however, just a dirty feeling when I talk about it that I’ve been tricked into doing what they wanted me to do all along. “Of course its ridiculous! Now send more of those fucking page views to Wired on the dead, dead web.” Well maybe Wired doesn’t think the web is so dead just yet. Despite my dirty feelings though, if I do make the assumption that this wasn’t “look-at-me” journalism (which seems like a sadly growing amount), and that these are Chris’ thoughts in earnest, I think at the very least he is severely underestimating the next round of web tech, not that apps won’t be a part of the future, just as one might have pointed out they were always part of the past (grrrrrr).

Which brings me to my real point, as with many things on the web the new tech is here and has been here, it just hasn’t been done much. I think what this really reflects is a sad lack of initiative on the part of web devs in the mobile space especially, myself included. This did get me thinking about an ongoing presentation/application I’ve been working on that showcases the very evolving web tech that addresses things in the article. But you don’t have to wait for me to stop playing video games and get off my ass to finish this stuff, there’s a great overview at diveintohtml5

Maybe this really is a good thing, insomuch as it is a call to arms for us to rise from the grave an consume or conscript via vicious viral infection those that might stand in our path. Maybe I’m just a thoughtless zombie

How did you spend last night? It wasn’t by chance chasing a 5-6 inch rat around your home or apartment was it? If not then I envy you. Now I know what you might be thinking, “Wow, this dude lives in a fucking dump, or maybe NYC, if he has rats running around..,” Well, neither is true… or so I thought. Perhaps there is a east coast wormhole under my fridge, or maybe this place isn’t all that great after all. I’ll stop the NYC jokes though, LA has plenty of rats as anyone from Downtown to the Palisades knows. The Palisades rat story is especially crazy if you haven’t heard it. Anyway, as many friends know, I’ve had a lot of issues with this place, but I think its had more positives than negatives. However, chasing a small rodent around your apartment with hot murder in your soul is a pretty big fucking negative.

So this all started when I was doing some work on my laptop last night and I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Must have been something caught in my eyelash. Whatever, back to the code. After a while though, it was time for tea. So, I walked into my kitchen. When quick as a flash I saw a grey blur (with a tail?) blink before my eyes on the floor between the cabinets and my fridge. I stopped. Now, when you envision this happening to you in your daydreams, in the supermarket aisle as you pass the rat poison, you think you’re going to respond with the cool detachment of a man who knows he can take care of shit. I’m not the sort of guy who likes John Wayne, but in this instance he’s the macho archetype that jumps into my brain. “Bah! It’s just a god damn mouse! What’s the big deal! Are you yella or sumthin partner!” Then you walk up and confidently crush it beneath the heel of your cowboy boot. (Maybe its that I just finished Red Dead Redemption?) My actual response was a little different: “HOLY FUCK!” I exclaimed to no one in particular, and then took a step back. My body flooded with adrenaline and I froze. While I didn’t scream like a little girl on the outside, I’m ashamed to admit I did on the inside. Part of me thought “Simple. Go grab your laptop. Open your stove turn up the gas all the way. Then, light a candle in your living room. Walk out of here and never come back.” Realizing the “Flight” part of my adrenaline wasn’t exactly coming up with the best course of action my brain switched fairly quickly to “Fight”. I could hear John Wayne in my head laughing. “Guess that little mouse just got himself a house of his own, since this yella bellied, computer nerd, city boy ain’t got the guts to be the man of his own house. Huh huh huh…” More adrenaline surged. Fuck you John Wayne.

I’d love to say that my “Fight” self was a picture of detached cool that I wished myself to be. Sadly it turned out to be more a deranged lunatic bent on rodent death. I grabbed a broom from my utility cupboard. “Sorry my little gray friend but you picked the wrong fucking house, and you’re GONNA DIE!!!” I thought as maniacal laughter filled my imagination drowning out the contemptuous John Wayne. I walked into my kitchen. Unsurprisingly the mouse had fled. I started moving things to see if I could find him. My dining table, my fridge, my stove. He was nowhere. I started looking down on the floor for holes he might have run into. I opened my back door from the kitchen and stared moving some excess stuff out back to clear the kitchen. Still, there was nothing. WTF?!? Did I imagine the gray blur? It had been so very fast, maybe it was something else? I started looking through the cabinets where I kept my food and all over all the floors in my kitchen. There were no signs of mice past or present. Odd… Maybe I just imagined it. I walked into the hallway, a sort of three-way crossroads between my kitchen and the other rooms in my apartment. Yeah, maybe I had imagined it. I started to calm down I texted my cousin, the only person I thought who might be up at the same time as me to relate the funny madness of my current situation.

As I finished my text, something came from my bedroom into the hallway. It was no longer a blur. It was not a mouse but a 5-6 inch gray rat, fast, but plain as day. “FUCK!” I shouted reflexively, the rat jumped startled as me and ran past me back towards the kitchen. My adrenaline kicked in again and this time I started swinging the broom honed in on my now visible quarry. It was at this time that I learned something: rats are fast. If I might say, my reflexes aren’t half-bad for a man of my years. Video games give me reasonable eye/hand co-ordination, and I now work out just enough now to give it a more than a little physical backing as well. However, it seems evolution has honed the rat to be surprisingly fast. I went after the rat with a flurry of blows and it avoided them all even jumping through the air a few times as I swept across the floor trying to jam it against the wall. It was impressive, in a filthy, darting sort of way. After several seconds of intense attack, the rat escaped deeper into my kitchen. Shit, that thing is fast, I thought. If you didn’t know: rats are fucking fast. Take note. Coming to this knowledge I realized the rat had probably left the kitchen and got into my bedroom (shudder) while I had gone to the other side of kitchen. Keeping an eye on the kitchen entrance I quickly closed my bedroom door and the bathroom door. I wanted to avoid it getting into any other parts of the house again, especially my bedroom (shudder again) Standing at the kitchen entrance I came to a grim realization. This thing is so fast I could chase it around all night and still might not be able to kill it, even with my crazy rage going. Maybe I could chase it outside. The back door was on the other side from where I was, and was unlocked, but this was still a problem. I knew how quick it was now, and that it had gotten away in the brief time I was on the other side of the kitchen before. Also my back door is kinda loud, there was a good chance it would scare it out and I couldn’t stop it from going into my living room. This sucked. If only I had someone to help me open the door, and switch places to help me keep it from escaping, while I could shew it outside or kill it. There was someone who could help… I felt bad and stupid at the same time, but I called my cousin. My cousin lives about 4 miles away, and it’s late. “…Dude, I just need someone to open my kitchen door. I know how fucking stupid this sounds, but this thing is fast and big…”

To wrap up, my cousin did come and my plan failed, although it did ultimately leave. :) I thought he’ll open the door flush it towards me and I can either kill it(fat chance) or flush it back towards the door and hopefully outside. Alas it seemed to vanish again then i discovered it was under my fridge. It made a break for my living room, while me and my cousin mad attempts to clobber it with the mop and broom we had at hand. Fortunately/Unfortunately it got past us and ran into the wall furnace in my living room. Initially I thought I was fucked, but I opened it up and discovered a nice un-screened hole that I’m pretty sure drops to the crawlspace below my apt. My cousin observed that this was probably how it got in in the first place since my place seemingly lacks any other entry point. Since it’s summer and the heater isn’t in use right now I made a makeshift plug for the hole and resolved to call my landlord the next day.

In the grand scheme this is a stupid problem, but nonetheless THIS FUCKING SUCKED. I don’t recommend it.

I know many.., ok perhaps all of you reading this, will be *ahem* laughing at my expense. Which I can’t really discourage, because in the abstract anyone chasing rats around their house at midnight like a crazy person (i.e. making strategies, calling and waiting for backup), is of course undeniably funny, as long as it isn’t you. The sad thing for me is I bet many of you will never have to have this experience and even if you do you probably will be smart enough not to blog about it on your personal site or facebook. So I don’t get to laugh in return. You’re smarter than me in this respect. A man once said “Life is hard; it’s harder if you’re stupid.” Fuck you John Wayne.

Maybe these have been up for a while but I just found them today: videos from jsconf posted on blip.tv. Yay! I was happy to find these since I didn’t get to go to jsconf.

I watched Douglas Crockford’s “Really, Javascript?” presentation, among others, which was very interesting. I think he might have given this same talk at TXJS as well. In any case, one point of particular interest is Crockford believes that HTML5 should be scrapped because it’s not fixing XSS security issues. Not sure about my own opinion on this as I would have to confess great ignorance about anything beyond basic XSS stuff. To me it seems like the web is evolving at a stupidly slow pace however (if we’re supposed to be depending on the W3C anyway), and the idea of scrapping what took too fucking long to begin with IMHO seems… dumb. On the other hand it would be pretty lame if web security became way less stable than it is already, and I’m ignorant of the full spectrum here. Anyway, food for thought and more reading/research I need to do obviously.

I recently wrote a follow up script to the last set of Export/Import text scripts for Photoshop I did a while back. I found in my actual day to day usage of the script it was rare that I wanted to dump all the text layers in a file, what I really wanted was to be able to copy the text to the clipboard so I could take it wherever I wanted. So that’s what I did. This script takes the active layer, if a text layer, and exports it to the clipboard.

Unfortunately this script is OS X(Mac) only, though it should be easy for me, or others, to port to XP. Not sure about Windows 7, and I don’t have access to a copy of Photoshop on Win7 anyway. As for OS X, the script requires running another shell script to actually copy the text to the clipboard. To make this work you have to create a shell script with executable permissions BEFORE you run your jsx, which I’ve outlined in the instructions. I’ve even written a handy applescript to do it for you if you are so inclined.

Instructions (MAC only):

First Setup Shell Script

1. Run setupClipScript (linked above)
— OR —
1. Open Terminal
2. Type “echo ‘’ > $HOME/Documents/clipScript.command” and hit enter
3. Type “chmod 755 $HOME/Documents/clipScript.command” and hit enter

Next Copy Script

Copy it to your system and choose “File > Scripts > Browse…” and select the script you want to run
— OR —
1. Place script in ‘/Applications/Adobe\ Photoshop\ CS#/Presets/Scripts/’
2. Restart Photoshop
3. Choose File > Scripts > psdExportTextL_Clipboard

Normal safety warning here: PLEASE SAVE YOUR FILES BEFORE YOU RUN SCRIPTS. I did suspend/save history state for the script, but things can still go bad and often do.

Scripts are only written with CS3 and above in mind, but I only verified them in CS3 on os x.

You can download the script here (right click and choose “Save As” to download).

Next I’ll probably add XP support, just didn’t have as much need as I primarily work on os x. The script has the annoying side effect of leaving open terminal windows open every time it’s executed. Maybe there is some way I can get rid of these, but they are a minor price to pay, for me anyway. Still haven’t figured out why my Photoshop executes scripts differently when I shortcut them. I bypassed this issue by “shortcutting” them via actions instead. Anyway, enjoy the js magic.