This is hugely off-topic, so feel free to skip to the next article, which will likely have something to do with screenwriting and/or filmmaking.
My assistant Chad and I use Apple’s [iCal](http://www.apple.com/ical/) to keep track of appointments. It’s nowhere near as sophisticated as Exchange or a real professional calendar system, but for the most part, it works. He maintains “John’s Work” calendar, and I maintain “John’s Personal” calendar. We both use the built-in publish-and-subscribe feature, so we see the same things on each computer.
After doing this for several years, however, some problems have arisen — mostly stemming from syncing with various [Palm](http://www.palmone.com/us/) devices. Calendar events get duplicated, often six or seven times. Multiply that by several years, and the files get huge, and slow: my Work.ics file ballooned to 1.7 megabytes.
After searching the internet for a program that would fix this, I finally had to write my own. In the interest of paying-it-forward to the next guy with the same problem, here’s what I wrote. Continue on only if you’re truly geeky, or desperate.
UPDATE: Changes with OS 10.4 (Tiger), and specifically iCal 2.0, means that the script as written won’t work anymore. Sorry. But the underlying concept still holds. With an hour and a little ambition, it should be possible to eliminate duplicates in the same way. Just be sure to always work on a backup of the calendar file.
So far, I’ve worked on one movie in which the Earth is destroyed. In Titan A.E., a mysterious alien race called the Drej show up one day and blow up the Earth because…