My Toronto Star crossword puzzle fetcher

On weekday afternoons, the Toronto Star publishes an eight-page PDF edition, “Star PM.” I download this for one reason: the free crossword puzzle.

But sometimes I forget to download this, and since there’s no archive, I lose the opportunity to do that day’s crossword. So I wrote a script to automatically fetch today’s Star PM and save it to my hard drive. Then, I went one better. Using the CoreGraphics Python module, I remove pages 1-7 of the PDF, so I store only the crossword puzzle. Then, it prints the PDF to my default printer.


## Toronto Star crossword puzzle fetcher
##
## Paul Schreiber <misc at paulschreiber dot com>
## http://paulschreiber.com/
## 1.0 -- 26 December 2006
##
## Licensed under a CreativeCommons-Attribution License:
## http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
##
## Usage: starpm.py <directory to store crossword puzzles>

How to fix Safari if it can’t view plugin content

For a while, I haven’t been able to view plugin content (Flash, QuickTime, etc.) in Safari. I decided to do some quick regression to determine the source of the problem.

First, I viewed the pages in another browser, Camino, and they appeared correctly. So my plugins themselves were not corrupt.

Next, I logged in as a different user and viewed the pages in Safari. They appeared correctly. So Safari itself was fine.

Third, I logged back in as my original user and looked for potential culprits:

  • I renamed ~/Library/Safari to ~/Library/Safari.orig and launched Safari. No luck—it was still broken.
  • I deleted ~/Library/Caches/Safari and relaunched Safari. No luck.
  • Then, I moved aside ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist and relaunched Safari. Aha! That was it.

Now, I didn’t want to lose all of my Safari preferences, so I deleted the newly-created com.apple.Safari.plist and put my old one back in place. I went into Terminal and issues this command:
defaults read com.apple.Safari

I searched through the pages of results, looking for anything relevant. I spotted “Saft Block Plugin,” but it was set to 0, or false. Wait — then I saw that WebKitPluginsEnabled had somehow been set to false.

I ran this command:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitPluginsEnabled 1

and relaunched Safari and I was back in business.

Salary disclosure

A few years ago, Charles Fishman wrote a fantastic article on Whole Foods for Fast Company. There’s a lot of information on and insight into their philosophy and business practice.

I want to draw your attention to one thing:

Each store had a book in the office that listed the pay of every employee for the previous year. The book was available to anyone — and was especially valuable if you were promoted or if you relocated, and wanted to see how your pay compared with your colleagues’. The pay book, surprisingly little used, set a tone of what Mackey called “no secrets management.”

It’s too bad more companies aren’t like this. Randy Cohen, The New York Times Magazine‘s “Ethicist” columnist also thinks salary disclosure is a good idea:

The one who benefits most when such information is suppressed is your boss, not you or your colleagues. It can help an employee to know that the person at the next desk makes twice as much money for performing the same task. If salaries are reasonable, employees will understand and accept them. If they are not, secrecy helps only to sustain that injustice.
…
In money matters as in many others, knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Thieves are the ones who operate under cover of darkness.

When marketing attacks

AOL’s marketing is so pervasive, it has snuck its way in to their bounce messages:

: host mailin-02.mx.aol.com[205.188.155.89] said: 550 We
    would love to have gotten this email to [email protected]. But, your
    recipient never logged onto their free AIM Mail account. Please contact
    them and let them know that they're missing out on all the super features
    offered by AIM Mail. And by the way, they're also missing out on your
    email. Thanks. (in reply to RCPT TO command)

Music business takes a few steps in the right direction

While the big four record labels are still stuck in the previous century, technology continues to democratize the music industry. Not only do we have cheap multitrack recording software and online distribution, but we’re seeing some interesting funding models as well.

In September, Wired covered Nettwerk‘s return to good-guy status, helping the Barenaked Ladies break free of their label (and make $6 per CD instead of under $1).

TechCrunch ran with news of SellaBand, a German company that brings the distributed funding model (of, say Prosper or Kiva) to music.

And this week, my friend Travis reminded me of Amie Street, which introduces demand-based pricing (get in early to get cheap music). And it’s all MP3s, no DRM.

(See also my previous post on recommendation services.)