The Blog That Goes Ping

Added another Shoes app to the Shoebox; this one makes mazes.

Just put up my second Shoes application in the Shoebox!

This one rolls pretty dice.

I added an app to the Ruby Shoebox.

John M McIntosh announced on the squeak-dev mailing list that “I’m pleased to say that I’m one of the 1.5% of the iPhone developer population that has been accepted to officially build applications for distribution via Apple’s iPhone Application Store.”

He’s prepared a 93-day plan to build a new fully documented Objective C based source tree to host the Squeak VM on the iPhone and in addition as a 64bit VM on OS-X. He’s already collaborating with Impara who are looking at adapting the Squeak UI to the iPhone’s multi-touch paradigm and platform widgets, and is looking for further support (and funding) for this work.

John is also looking to offer support for Squeak developers hoping to make their applications available through the iPhone Store, although he notes that Apple has a number of restrictions limiting the types of applications that can be made available in this way.

[From Squeak on the iPhone! « The Weekly Squeak]

I love Smalltalk, specifically Squeak. I don’t actually use it for much, I have just enough experience playing around with it to see what is so sweet about it, but not enough to be really effective with it. Smalltalk on the iPhone? Now that’s cool.

I have a folder full of old mail in Apple’s Mail application. It’s gigantic. About 70,000 messages. Most of them are duplicates, because it’s the result of finding old folder of mail upon old folder of mail and merging them together into one great hoard. The actual number of real distinct messages is probably a smallish fraction of 70,000.

What’s worse, some of the 70,000 are blank. In an inept attempt at writing a Python script to clean up a similar uber-mail-folder in the past, I somehow took a lot of old mail and destroyed the body of the emails, leaving the headers intact. So my gigantic folder includes many duplicates, but some of the duplicates aren’t real duplicates because they have missing bodies.

I want to somehow eliminate all the duplicate messages, and there are scripts to do that in Apple Mail. The only one that I would have trusted not to accidentally kill a real message and keep the one without a body, chokes and fails on a folder that large. (It also choked and failed on a smaller folder. Maybe something changed in Leopard that breaks that script.)

So I wanted to go through and destroy all the messages which have blank bodies — they’re no use to me and they make it dangerous to get rid of duplicate messages. I tried exporting everything to a mbox-format file, and use some of Python’s nice mailbox-manipulation libraries, but the file was insanely large, and Python on my macbook staggered under its weight. (Besides, my use of Python caused this problem, a while back…)

So eventually I turned to AppleScript. (I first tried using rb-appscript, but it turns out I don’t need any special Rubyness for this, and it’s easier to learn from examples of AppleScript on the web if I don’t have to translate them into Ruby before I use them.)

I wrote a script in Apple’s Script Editor called “Winnower.” It takes messages in a folder called “doing” and sorts them into two folders, “blank” and “done,” depending on whether there’s any content in the body or attachments on the mail. I put a few thousand messages at a time into the “doing” folder and then run the script. (The full weight of the 70,000+ message folder was too much for this script too.)

It looks like this:

tell application “Mail”

set doingbox to mailbox “doing”

set blankbox to mailbox “blank”

set donebox to mailbox “done”

set doingmessages to messages of doingbox

repeat with thisMessage in doingmessages

ignoring white space

if mail attachments of thisMessage is {} and content of thisMessage is equal to “” then

move thisMessage to blankbox

else

move thisMessage to donebox

end if

end ignoring

end repeat

end tell