Apparently, Amazon has some difficulty telling the difference between 1 and 2.

Unfortunately, Delicious Library doesn’t provide any mechanism that I can find that lets a script know that a lookup has been ignored. If it did, things would have been simple; we could just assume that ignored lookups aren’t valid product codes, so they’re likely to be serial numbers. Instead, I ended up making a number of tests on the scan data to try to figure out if it is a serial number or product code:

1. Check to see if it starts with the letter “S”. Nicer vendors prefix their serial number barcodes in this way to make automated scanning easier.
2. Check the length of the code; UPCs, EANs, and ISBNs are generally 10, 12, or 13 numbers long. Anything that doesn’t match is probably a serial number.
3. Finally, we can check to see if the scanned code is all numeric or not; if it’s not, let’s make it a serial number.

These checks aren’t 100% fool-proof. In an ideal world, I would pass the code through the checksum algorithms used by the various code standards to see if it is a valid product code or not. For my purposes, though, they seem to be accurate enough. I also made one small but helpful change; the script now launches Delicious Library if it’s not already running.

You can grab an updated copy of the Delicious Barcode Scanner script, and inventory ’till your trigger finger is sore.

OS X doesn’t have drivers for USB/RS-232 bridges out of the box, but there are plenty of generic drivers out there. Following this example, I used the 2303 driver from Prolific. To get the driver to work with the barcode scanner, it’s necessary to jump through a few hoops (specific to my model scanner, but others are most likely similar):

1. Before installing the driver, connect the scanner to an available USB port, so we can configure it as a simulated RS-232 device.
2. Since the OS has disabled the scanner, press and hold the trigger for about 5 seconds, until it beeps.
3. Scan the programming barcode to place the scanner in “USB-COM-STD” mode. The scanner will then reinitialize in that mode.
4. Open System Profiler, and select USB from the Contents list. In the device tree, find the barcode scanner and select it.
5. Make a note of the values listed for Product ID and Vendor ID (in my case, they were 0×4204 and 0×05f9, respectively).
6. Edit the Info.plist file for the driver as detailed in the example; note that the IDs displayed by System Profiler are hexadecimal, and the plist requires decimal values, so you’ll have to convert them (mine worked out to be 16900 and 1529).
7. Reboot!

The scanner should now be recognized as a serial device. To test this, I opened Terminal and ran screen /dev/tty.usbmodem3d11 (your device name may be different). I then scanned a barcode and watched the results appear in Terminal. Magic! With that part working, I installed Art Coughlin’s SerialPort X Scripting Addition, and put together an AppleScript to read data from the scanner’s serial port and send it to Delicious Library. If you’ve gone through the same steps, you can download Delicious Barcode scanner and run it for yourself. It will prompt you to select the relevant serial port, and will stay running until you quit Delicious Library.

Hopefully, someone will find this helpful. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

UPDATE
Delicous Barcode Scanner is now extra delicious.

What is this trying to say? If you start dating people you find on their site, all of your friends will give up on you? I can assure all of my friends: nothing will change; I gave up on you long ago.

I can understand the importance of telling employees not to continue stocking recalled product, but shouldn’t they also remove it from the shelves?

I haven’t actually had the chance to fully run it through its paces yet, so we’ll see for sure when the next update is released.

Originally, I had WordPress MU file sitting in a WPMU directory. With each upgrade, I’d have to make sure I didn’t disrupt the existing important files (like those in wp-content).

My new structure involves a version-specific directory within the WPMU folder (eg wordpress-mu-2.6.3). Alongside that is a directory named const, to hold all of the files that remain constant between upgrades. Finally, there’s a symlink named current that points to the current version-specific directory. I then create additional symlinks within this directory back to files and directories in const.

I’ve attached a sanitized copy of the final script (upgrade-wordpress-mu.sh) for your pleasure. It first checks to make that it’s running as root – my WPMU installation is outside the scope of my home directory, so that’s a necessity. There’s a few more checks to make sure the user has specified a version, and that there’s an archive of the WordPress MU files for that version. Then it goes to town, extracting the files, and symlinking the relevant items in const. I won’t go into the nitty-gritty, since it’s all pretty self-evident from the script.

If you do choose to use this yourself, just be sure to change the path on line 27 (unless that really is where you want your files).