Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with script

Imprinting in Blender

Blazecock Pileon — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:48:41 -0800

How to get an "imprint" of a model in Blender? I have an object in Blender (a "chicklet" or "tile") with rounded edges.

I would like to make another object which "fits" this tile loosely. Imagine another squeezed cube with an imprint of the chicklet, with some room to fit, about the same width.

Is there an easy method in Blender for using my first object to make an imprint in a second object?

Once the script is done, what's next?

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:12:58 -0800

Let's pretend I am not too far away from completing a feature-length screenplay on spec. I live far from LA with no connections to Hollywood, and I've got very little money squared away. Once the script itself is done, how would I most effectively pimp out my product to a studio? Let me vent my frustration: every time I read a book or an article about breaking into this-or-that part of the movie business, the author has an opinion that manages to completely contradict some other author I've read. Hire an agent immediately or you'll crash and burn! Wait, don't hire an agent, send your script directly to a bunch of indie producers' assistants! And so on. Everyone seems certain that their advice is the only correct advice, which implies that either most of these Hollywood Insiders are talking out of their asses, or that selling your average script is essentially a crapshoot, or both of the above. Is the crapshoot theory correct, or can you recommend some effective steps I can take (other than the obvious: proper formatting, copyrighting, etc) to sell this script? If I had more money I would be awfully tempted to move to LA and shop around for agents, but -- at least for now -- that doesn't look entirely feasible. Send an e-mail to scriptquery@gmail.com if you like.

Simple commenting system

bjork24 — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:39:18 -0800

Is there a simple PHP/MYSQL commenting system available anywhere on the internets? The Google has failed me. All I'm looking for is a very simple commenting script, like what you'd see on any given blog, but I don't need all the bloggy stuff. Just a form, a database connection, and output. I'll style everything myself, of course, but I'm too lazy to roll my own (last time I did, it got bombarded by spam). Any suggestions?

PS - Searching google for anything that involves the words "comments" or "commenting" is very difficult.

working with tar archives...

timebomb — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:10:43 -0800

How can get the sum of the files sizes of all php and css files within specific folders of a tar archive? Ultimately, I want to create a graph showing how code grew over the duration of a project. To do that, I would like to build a script that sums the sizes specific files of specific types within specific directories of the archive file.

I have a folder containing a couple hundred backup files of a web development server. The backup files were archived using the "tar czf" command line.

In each archive file, I want to search within the following directories for php and css files:
var/www/dev/
var/www/dev/includes
var/www/dev/css
Subdirectories of these directories should not be searched.

Can you guys get me on my way?

So far I'm stuck trying to list files I need in the tar file. I have:
tar -ztvf archive_name.tgz var/www/dev/
which is listing all subdirectories and all file types.

The OS is Ubuntu 8.04 Server Edition

Thanks in advance!

iPod iTunes music library management

Yorke and Vedder — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:36:45 -0800

Is there a way, (3rd party program, plug in, etc...) that will let me compare my iPod's music library against my iTunes library, (maybe on dual panes?) and visually mark which songs on my iTunes library are not in my iPod and viceversa? Maybe there's a script out there that does this...? I've tried other media managers, (MediaMonkey, Songbird, Winamp, etc...), but none of them offer that feature either.

Any suggestions?

How do I extract the URLs from a web page?

storybored — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:47:13 -0800

What's the fastest and simplest way of extracting the URLs from a html file? Input: Any html page.
Output: A .txt file with the list of all the URLs in the page.

Is there freeware that does this?
How about a macro of some kind?

A script would work but I don't know any of the script languages that run on PCs. Wouldn't mind learning but only as a last resort.

On the meaning of "off" on the page.

Bookhouse — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:10:23 -0800

Please explain a few bits of television script convention to me. In television scripts I've read I've noticed the following usage of the word "off"

BOOKHOUSE: I swear, I don't have any crack.

Off Omar: This guy is lying.

The way I read it is, the line above is played off of Omar, whose reaction to the line is shown. Is that correct? Are there some finer points to it?

Also, what does it mean when an action is underlined?

Looking for coverage work

Bookhouse — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:34:47 -0800

How does one find work as a script reader in Hollywood? What are other bottom-rung industry jobs for writers? I've just moved to L.A., and am interested in finding work as a script-reader while I work on my own writing. However, I'm not sure how to get started. Does one query agencies? Write spec coverage? All tips and advice welcome.

Also, information on other industry jobs that are a good fit for professional writers is welcome.

A question pour VOOO.

phunniemee — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:00:52 -0800

Television show, movie, cartoon, what was it that featured a character saying, "pour vous," in this particular way? Whatever it was, it was said in a sing-song voice and was overly enunciated. As in: pour VOOOO (with a higher pitch on the pour).

I have no idea when I saw this, where I saw this, or even what kind of character said this. I am pretty sure it was said while said character was handing something to someone else.

Anyway, it's been bothering me for a while, since I've adopted it for when I cheesily gift things to people. I'd love if someone out there knows where it's from.

Is there a way to show all my blog posts?

jejune — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:46:42 -0800

Is there a script that will show summaries of every post from my blog, using a feed from a Blogger blog? I use this widget to display the first 100 or so characters from each post from a feed of my blog. When you copy & paste the code from that webpage into a Blogger blog post, it displays headings from your blog posts along with a summary for each one.

But the problem is that there's a limit: it only displays your 25 most recent posts. Is there any kind of widget that will show all the posts, with no limit?

It would be sufficient if there were a script that would let me specify: "Display posts #1-25," then separately, "Display #26-50," etc. That way, I could just combine them.

How to delete long path names with bash shell script?

jackofsaxons — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:07:17 -0800

BASHFilter! I've got a simple bash script that I've written to clean out a frequently used NAS. I run it every 30 days, it sets proper permissions, removes extraneous files and directories, but it frequently hangs on paths longer than 255 characters. I'm no bash ninja, so I've been beating my head against a wall trying to figure out how to check path length of directories, and then prompt for either renaming to shorten them, or prompt for deletion. Help me Metafilter!

How do I rewrite this script to make it do what I want it to do?

iconomy — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 09:53:18 -0800

Can you help me? I'd like to use this mootools script on a contact via email form on a site I'm designing for a friend, and I need to know if something about it can be changed. As it is now, when a trigger word is typed, all the words typed so far in the field disappear and you have to start all over again. How can I change it so that all text typed in the box remains even when Event is triggered? Is it possible? If so and you care to explain, please pretend as if you're talking to a moran.

INTERCUT JULIE GOOD MORNING BLUEBIRD

saysthis — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:12:21 -0800

I'm translating a script into English, and the dreaded "Hollywood format" in particular. Doing this in Word is a freakin' impossible task with all the goofy formatting and margins, so is there any particular freeware screenwriting software or preprogrammed Word styles I should be aware of? Would sure as cooter save me some hours of my life...

What's life like on the bottom rung of Hollywood?

nushustu — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:56:34 -0800

How much does a script reader make? I have a friend who is a script reader. He works for a company in Hollywood that apparently just got relatively huge amounts (half a billion) of cash with which to make money. Apparently, this means he is going to get to move up the totem pole in the film production world.

However, he's always very reticent to give ANY kind of details on what he does, or would be doing in his new job. I get the feeling that he doesn't make much money or something, or that he has no plans lined up, and that he's embarrassed about what he does or something. Which is weird, because I just think it's cool that he's working in Hollywood at all. I've gently pressed for details for a number of reasons, one of which is just plain old curiosity about how the movie business works. I just think it would be interesting to know what Hollywood is like for the non-actor groundlings. Also, because I imagine it might be fun to take a look at a script every now and then. I don't think I could do that full-time, but the idea is still intriguing.

I feel like if I knew a little more about that industry, I could find openings to talk to him about his life a little more. So how does that system work? If he gives good input on scripts, could he end up producing movies? And how long does that generally take? What is the average age of a script reader and what do they make?

Looking for a CMS or Forum that supports anonymous posting.

ilikebike — Mon, 19 May 2008 23:44:10 -0800

Looking for a CMS or Forum that supports anonymous posting. I'm creating a complaint/gripe type of site, and I need a script or method for visitors to post items to the main page (probably w/ verification), and then allow a comment or forum system tied to it that also supports anonymous posting.

If no such CMS is available, is there are forum solution that does this?

Give me a break!

Slenny — Sat, 17 May 2008 05:03:58 -0800

How can I install/use the DOS batch scripting SLEEP command with Vista Ultimate? It does not exist by default. Back while scripting on XP, I used to install the free package "Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools" which came with this command. So basically, I just want to put a 60 second pause in a loop in a script. I am not looking for CPU intensive work-arounds or solutions involving cygwin.

Thanks.

Shell scripting or something better?

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:19:40 -0800

Faster techniques for grabbing lines of a file and doing text manipulation and arithmetic via shell (or other) scripting? 1. Are there faster ways to grab lines of a text file?

Currently I use while read line and sed -n #p filename in bash and csh scripts to grab lines of a file I'm interested in. This seems slow. Are there better (faster) ways to get the line of a file, or to iterate through specified ranges of lines in a file?

2. Are there faster ways than awk to grab values in a line?

Let's say I have the tab-delimited line:

abc 123 345 0.52

What I'd like to do is get the second and third values, or the fourth value, as quickly as possible. Is there a better way than awk? Will a perl or other interpreted language script run faster than a shell script for scraping values from a text file?

3. Arithmetic with bash?

I've been doing $((${value1}+${value2})) for integer arithmetic and calc ${value1} / ${value2} for floating point arithmetic within bash. Will I gain a performance benefit from switching over my code from bash to another shell script language, or to another interpreted language entirely?

Thanks for any and all tips and tricks.

Pay for adult screenwriting?

Astro Zombie — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:43:41 -0800

About how much can a writer expect to make for an adult screenplay? $400? Less? More? Anyone?

Trying to keep the Users folder from getting cluttered.

soplerfo — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:41:28 -0800

How can I keep the Users folder tidy in Leopard? I work at a university where we're moving towards having users login with their Active Directory accounts on Leopard workstations for the first time. We're hoping to keep the Users directory on these workstations clean. We've setup a nice default profile that works wonderfully, now we just want to be able to delete the user's folder after they logout. (we can't do a nightly cron job, folks have 24 hr access to these machines)

We were looking at Bombich's LoginWindow manager, but it doesn't seem to work in Leopard. From what I can tell, Bombich has ceased development on it.

I have a tidy little perl script that will delete all but the admin user's home folders. I figure I just need some way of triggering it with the appropriate permissions

I'm not great with Apple stuff, so I may just be approaching this in the completely wrong way - I'm certainly open to any and all suggestions.

Script needed to diff and then play sound when refresh reveals tickets are on sale.

|n$eCur3 — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:07:38 -0800

W.A.S.T.E. of a question, but I need a script that will perform a diff and play an alert sound when a reload reveals that the HTML page has changed relative to the previous reload. I have firefox set to refresh a page every 30 seconds, but I'd rather not stay up all night waiting for the page to change.

So, is there any kind of script that someone would like to write for me, or one that is preexisting that will play an alert sound once it detects any change in the page?

Bonus points if it works for multiple tabs.

Thanks!

My website's scripts eat up too much bandwidth. How do I resolve this?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 09:21:43 -0800

My site's cron tasks eat up a lot of bandwidth. Can I change the paths from http to local? Or can I move the tasks to my home server? One of my websites (the election one) runs a truckload of PHP to parse, mesh, filter, and cache an equally large number of external RSS feeds which are then stored and included in a reasonably lean (~10k) index.html. This creates a strange situation where the bandwidth consumed by the PHP (locally, but via http) far exceeds the actual bandwidth consumed by visitors. My web hosting provider has warned me about the excessive activity, but given the limited number of visitors, upgrading to a hosting deal with a higher bandwidth limit isn't really worthwhile for me.

How do I resolve this?

Current situation: a bunch of FeedForAll PHP scripts are executed using a Ruby-as-CGI script (which wackybrit kindly helped me with) called via cron at regular intervals, varying by nature of content: none-time critical content would be updated hourly, whereas latest news etc. is updated every 10 minutes (was 2 minutes, but I took it down a notch for now to avoid further problems with my host). My monthly bandwidth limit is 8 GB; actual visitor usage is a modest fraction of that, but the scripting alone was responsible for 37 GB (!) in March.

Several options:

1) The bandwidth is measured by the host using HTTP responses. If I run the scripts using local UNIX paths, e.g. /usr/gnfti/www/ etc., the scripts generate no HTTP headers and thus don't count towards the quota. Of course they will still incur server load, but I have discussed this with the hosting company and it seems they're okay with it if I limit the use somewhat as a compromise. But then, not all of these scripts seem to be okay with local paths, most notably the keyword filter (rssFilter.php), which is responsible for 25% of the bandwidth on its own.

Any ideas how to make it work this way anyway?

2) I have a home server running WAMP on XP. Could I run the PHP on this box instead and have the output automatically upload to the remote server via FTP? Most of the bandwidth is to do with moving stuff around locally anyway; the actual output is in the order of kilobytes. I imagine this would involve running some sort of cron + FTP client/scheduler on the home box, but my knowledge in this area is limited.

Could this be done, and if so, how?

3) Lastly, if you have any suggestions on how to pull this off aside from the examples above, that too would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or insight you might have to offer, guys.

I'm looking for an image gallery script with easy adsense integration and option to embed and share photos.

bostonhill — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:54:13 -0800

I'm looking for an image gallery script with easy adsense integration and option to embed and share photos. Currently, I've been experimenting with Coppermine but it doesn't have the embed photo option I would like to have on a page I'm working on. Is there any image script out there that makes the adsense integration and embed possible?

I like the 'times to come' coppertime hack via; http://herselfswebtools.com/themes since it has the sponsors bar included but they have no option for embed and share photos.

Thanks!

Fast Web Development Tool Needed

jurczyk — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:10:51 -0800

What's the best web site builder software for a non-beginner? I know there are a lot of applications out there for beginners who don't want/need to learn HTML, but I want to create a number of basic sites (20-30) quickly (within a week) and then edit the HTML, do some SEO for each, etc.

Desired features:
- choice from a number of templates
- ability to easy add content (text, graphics/pics, multimedia)
- ability to eventually expand the site to develop more than 100 pages per site (i.e. I don't want an application that limits the number of pages in a site)

I'm open to either
- a standalone web site builder application (e.g. http://www.ewisoft.com/)
- a hosted application (e.g. HostGator's built-in Web Site Builder)
- a traditional CMS
but the speed to create a site is the most important feature for me

I use HostGator for my hosting and Dreamweaver 8 for my editing/design/development.

Thanks in advance.

Clear temp files Quick and Dirty

sonicbloom — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:48:02 -0800

I'd like to create a batch file to clear out my cookies and Temporary Internet Files folder. I'd like a script that I can double click on whenever I feel the need to clear cookies or Temp Internet Files. I know how to clear them manually on IE. I just want an easier way. This is only for IE at work (although I'm a religious Opera user). I don't know any visual basic. I assume a batch file command might work.

Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script, actually,,, hang around dude....

oblio_one — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:38:30 -0800

Anyone know of a backup script or utility that won't hurt the OLD copy? Is there any software/script for this situation:

I have two hard drives / directories, one a master backup (A) which is out-of-date, the other is the drive I work with day to day (B).

I'd like to copy/move all the files from B to replace the out-of-date versions on A. However. if I just copy the root directory I lose anything that was on A but not B.

Sort of like a CVS update, but CVS has not been setup previously. like this:
for all files on B
if (file exists on A)
replace A's copy with B's
else
add it

and don't touch any file/dir that's on A but not B.

I've run into this need twice this week and while probably trivial to script out it seems like a need others would have had too, so maybe re-inventing the wheel to write it? (plus I suck at batch scripting)

I can't find the key words to google for it, but this has to exist for unix and windows, right? A handy free backup app that has this feature through configuration would be of great interest too.