Gotta admit, though, my geeking hours are seriously at competition for my guitar hours these days and I’m not sure which way the pendulum will swing.

http://www.vercot.com/~jeoss/

I was experimenting earlier and discovered that everything ran fine when the utilities were in my system path, but as soon as the app is launched via cron, with its pathetic bare-bones set of environmental variables, it fails with these weird errors.

I find it odd that the qx calls worked find as long as the executables were in the system path.

Anyway, I wrapped all of the references to constants in qx calls in the same syntax you used. It is working better now.

I also found that there was a hardcoded “library” in the old one, and a copy/paste error in the code that was supposed to unmount the second Samba connection.

All of that should be fixed now.

print qx(XSLTPROC –novalid $myxslt $myitunes);

to:

print qx(@{[XSLTPROC]} –novalid $myxslt $myitunes);

allowed the xsltproc command to run. It seems that none of the constants within the qx() function are converted to their values. The program sends XSLTPROC to the shell instead of /usr/bin/xsltproc. I don’t know what the proper behaviour is supposed to be, but that’s how it’s working for me.

It’s either my own path problem or Apple made some change in system configuration in a recent patch.

I’ll look into this tonight.

Thanks for bring this to my attention!

chris@aurora:/home/slimserver$ ./plmapper –force
Configuration

Itunes library: /home/slimserver/iTunes Music Library.xml
NAS music library: /home/slimserver/music
Destination directory: /tmp

Generating playlists…Can’t exec “XSLTPROC”: No such file or directory at ./plmapper line 280, line 91.
done.
Building file tree…done.

One added benefit of the Sharpie method is that I seem to use whatever color I have on hand at the time, so I can easily spot what era photos were scanned in.

There are some that I scanned using an auto feeder some years ago, and it wasn’t until later that I noticed how much dust those scans had. I can easily find the offending snapshots for re-scan by looking for silver dots (the color I used at the time).

I actually have two: my trusty old Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M sheet-fed scanner, and a cheap Canon flatbed scanner.
The ScanSnap (current models are the S1500 and S1500M) goes for around $420 on Amazon, but it does come with an OEM version of ABBYY FineReader OCR and Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro.
I use the ScanSnap for almost everything I scan. It does both sides of a sheet in one pass, in about four seconds.

I keep the old USB-powered CanoScan flatbed scanner for two things: photographs and books. The ScanSnap is good for magazine pages and such, but does not have true photographic quality. And unless I bandsaw the spine off a book (which I do from time to time), I need a flatbed scanner to scan a page or two.

If you are serious about your receipts and documents and taxes and so on, go for the ScanSnap S1500 (PC) or S1500M (Mac). With a flat-bed a twenty-page document will take ten to fifteen minutes; with the ScanSnap it takes about forty seconds. The provided software will make it easy to OCR the docs so you can index and search them.

Scanning each page by hand gets old quickly. You will save yourself many hours with the fast sheet-fed one. Just remember that it doesn’t do photos well and it can’t scan bound books.

Good luck!