Just thought I’d shed some light on the issue (because googling it myself turned up less than useful results). I just had an issue where the following messages were being spewed into the output of every osascript (applescript) command:

$ osascript -e 'tell application "finder" to activate'
[000:035] MagicCam 0: Current process: osascript, Flash is loaded: no
[000:035] Error(magiccammac.cc:276): MagicCam 0: MagicCamOpen: Not an allowed process!
[000:002] MagicCam 0: Current process: osascript, Flash is loaded: no
[000:002] Error(magiccammac.cc:276): MagicCam 0: MagicCamOpen: Not an allowed process!
[000:000] MagicCam 1: Current process: osascript, Flash is loaded: no
[000:000] Error(magiccammac.cc:276): MagicCam 1: MagicCamOpen: Not an allowed process!
[000:002] MagicCam 1: Current process: osascript, Flash is loaded: no
[000:002] Error(magiccammac.cc:276): MagicCam 1: MagicCamOpen: Not an allowed process!

This has the potential to break a lot of scripts that use osascript to get information from (or about) running applications.

It turns out this is due to a google quicktime component, which I believe is related to google gears and video chat. To get rid of the error, you can delete “Google Camera Adapter 0.component” and “Google Camera Adapter 1.component” from /Library/Quicktime/. I make no claims that google video chat will work after you do this (it surely won’t), but I never use it anyways, and I’d rather not have it break anything that relies on osascript output.

OSX only (Leopard and above). Apparently Apple added this for time machine’s use, but didn’t expose it in the ln tool.

Yes, this means you can shoot yourself (and your computer) in the foot (and, err, power supply). However, it has its uses as long as you take care.

Right now I’m using it to serve up content in my web sever that lives outside ~/Sites (because the content is a subfolder in a git repo, and I don’t want to have to keep mirroring it). This can’t be done with symlinks or aliases, as far as I could tell…

(view link)

Given the integration of PDF into Mac OS X, I was surprised to find that there didn’t seem to be any tool to convert HTML files into PDFs. So, like any frustrated coder I wrote my own little script to do it: html2pdf.py

Requires python and OSX 10.5 (Leopard). It uses a WebKit view for the rendering, so in theory it should work with any URL that safari can handle - but I haven’t exactly tested it thoroughly…