Aughr’s Blog

Automatically posted by del.icio.us.

• 1 - Election Night Cheat Sheet – contrapositive

• A guide for election night (Nov. 7, 2006) on the races to be watching as the polls close.

• (tags: politics election)

• Dismantling Cheney’s Control - The Washington Note
  Steve Clemons describes to what extent foreign policy can/will change over the next 2 years, even with Democratic control of the House. He also points out that Democratic control of the Senate could be damaging to their ‘08 Presidential bid.
  (tags: politics clemons democrats election 2006 cheney linkblog)
• This is Baghdad. What could be worse? - washingtonpost.com
  Anthony Shadid describes the changes in Baghdad over the course of the last year through tales about the people who are living through them.
  (tags: iraq war baghdad linkblog)
• The New York Review of Books: A Country Ruled by Faith
  Garry Wills describes how evangelicals took over the government in the Bush administration, leading to troubles in all sorts of areas, from sex education to the Iraq war and aftermath.
  (tags: religion politics evangelicals garry.wills bush government linkblog)
• Toward Freedom :: Bush Moves Toward Martial Law
  Bush just passed a law that makes it easier for him to impose martial law.
  (tags: bush martial.law patrick.leahy national.guard linkblog)
• 5 Myths About Turning Out The Vote - washingtonpost.com
  Michael McDonald documents the myths about GOTV operations & turnout in general.
  (tags: gotv politics washington.post myths linkblog voter.turnout)

After a few hours of effort, I’ve finally gotten a script I designed to work with OmniOutliner Pro. The concept of it is to have a “tags” column, where I can input keywords to search for, in my history notes document in order to extract information about specific tags. I organize my notes in terms of class & reading notes, so I needed to do something about separating them out when running the script. As well, I didn’t want it to break when running multiple searches in succession without removing the previous results. My final script (for now) is this:

tell front document of application “OmniOutliner Professional”
unhoist
expandAll

set theCategories to {”Class Notes”, “Reading Notes”}

set theTag to the text returned of (display dialog “Enter the tag to find:” default answer “”)

set theRows to (every row whose (third cell’s text contains theTag))

repeat with theHeading in theCategories

set theAncestors to (every row whose (level is 1) and (topic is not theHeading))

set theAffectedRows to theRows & theAncestors
set theAffectedRows to expel descendants theAffectedRows

if (length of theAffectedRows is not (length of theAncestors)) then
set theAffectedRows to (items 1 thru -((length of theAncestors) + 1) of theAffectedRows)
else
set theAffectedRows to {}
end if

select {}
select theAffectedRows

set newRow to make new row at the end of rows
set topic of newRow to (theTag & ” - ” & theHeading)

if (theAffectedRows is not {}) then
copy selected rows to end of rows of newRow
end if

end repeat

end tell

I probably could clean it up a bit and make it more efficient, but it’s working, so until I want to add new features I’m not going to touch it.

I tried to get something like this to work:

set theAncestor to every row whose (level is 1) and (topic is theHeading)

set theRows to every row whose (third cell’s text contains theTag) and (ancestors contains theAncestor)

Unfortunately, that kept throwing errors and I couldn’t get it to work.

In the notes, each day’s notes are stored under their own row with the date under the respective top-level row (”Class Notes” or “Reading Notes”). My next step in the script is to have all of the notes in each top-level extracted section organized by date, but that’s going to be a much bigger pain, so I’ll hold off for a bit.