Cute little Nokia tablet thingy

I like this! It’s got a four inch touchscreen, WiFi, runs Debian, and is hackable. Neat!

Also, Camino now gets the official riney seal of approval. All the goodness of Firefox, without some of the annoyance; for example, maximize *works* (as in, fills up the whole screen), and Flash movies don’t make the entire system slow to a crawl. Recommended.

I’m pretty happy about the fact that yesterday, I signed the contract for my first, albeit small, writing gig. I sold my Project Redshark article to O’Reilly’s Make Magazine. Massive amounts of thanks are due to the guys at O’Reilly for liking my stuff and choosing to run with it! I’ll give out the details about how and where the article’s going to appear later on.

In less happy news, my email/webhosting/dev and test server got owned pretty badly yesterday. Thanks a bunch, you freaking jerkoffs. No permanent damage, apparently – was quick on the case and has things straightened out.

Also, Firefox is screwing up on my Mac. Clicking on links doesn’t work – you have to either open in a new window or tab for anything to happen. Also, it won’t quit – the window closes, but the application has to be force-quitted. Stupid. I’m posting this from Safari which feels hopelessly clunky in comparison. Maybe I’ll give Camino a shot…

This is pretty good, if a bit smug: How To Be A Programmer – A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary

Sitting here waiting for the debut of Systm. Don’t bother trying to go there. The guys weren’t quite ready for what amounted to a double Slashdotting – the ordinary Slashdot hordes, and the less numerous but doubly ravenous G4/TTV fans.

I went to the Breaking Benjamin / Exies / Silvertide show last Saturday. It was a remarkable experience, only in that the doors opened promptly at the advertised time of 7pm; the first band, unremarkable hair metal necromancers Silvertide, started playing an hour after that. Pretty good show.

The reddish blob in the center is the singer. Thanks, stupid no-good camera phone (thanks also to The Plex’s stupid no-decent-camera policy)

Phil, my houseplant / platonic life partner, now holds a place of esteem above my sliding glass door. Vaya con Dios, Phil.

The Ion got here, after the UPS guy conveniently left it on my porch, even taking the time to stand it up on end so it was clearly visible from the street. It’s nice. I need a new table for it.

Clicking reload enough makes the UPS driver drive faster, right?

Status: In Transit – On Time
Scheduled Delivery: May 18, 2005
Shipped to: LADSON, SC, US
Shipped or Billed on: May 16, 2005
Tracking Number: 1Z 1A7 15V 03 8507 169 5
Service Type: GROUND
Weight: 29.80 Lbs
Note: Your package is in the UPS system and is on time with a scheduled delivery date of May 18, 2005.

Why is desktop video editing and DVD authoring so damn screwed up?

Every single video-related project I’ve tried to do has been a complete feast of terror. To date I’ve only been able to actually make one thing work.

Case Study 1: Video from ReplayTV to DVD
Software: iMovie, iDVD
Experience: Teeth-chatteringly Awful, But Ultimately Successful

---

A while back I decided to make a DVD version of the movie Yellowbeard. Inexplicably, there’s been no DVD release, and even VHS copies are like hen’s teeth on EBay. I managed to record it a few years back on my Replay, so I had a reasonable quality source that I wanted to transfer to DVD. I also wanted to make it close to a real DVD, so that meant some basic menus, chapter markers, that sort of thing.

Getting the video to my Mac was easy enough, using DVArchive to download the raw files, and using the Replay 5K toolchain to make clean MPEG-2 files from them. They’re MPEG2 already, but some bits need to be twiddled to make them fully compliant. I don’t pretend to understand this. Then I went to import these files into iMovie. Surprise! It doesn’t accept MPEG2 files. In fact, it doesn’t accept MPEG at all, or, in point of fact, anything other than Quicktime or DV. Uncompressed, huge-ass DV. Do I need to mention how completely absurd it is that a video editing application won’t accept the most popular video format in the world? So I had to use yet another utility to decompress the 96 minutes of video into DV format. Yeah, I had to buy a new hard drive for that. Once iMovie would open the video, things went reasonably smoothly; I laid out my chapter markers, and told it to export to iDVD. Then things went to hell again.

When you open up iDVD and create a new project, it creates one for you using its default template. The default template was, if I remember correctly, some completely absurd and insipid “kids theater” theme, complete with animated puppet show bullcrap flying around the screen (and grinding my G4 to a halt, incidentally). Um, no thanks. It’s relatively easy to find the “Customize” panel, where you are allowed to choose a new theme. You CANNOT choose no theme. You have to pick one of their prefab abominations, or you’re out of luck. You can’t make new ones, either. The best you can do is pick one of the less insipid ones, turn off the animated awfulness, replace the background images, etc. Well, this is okay to a point, but most parts of the DVD editing system are completely awful, and the parts that aren’t awful are implemented badly. For example, you can easily create new buttons that will link you to other parts of the DVD….but you have no tools to help you position them. Either the button goes in the location pre-destined for it in the theme you picked, or you can just drag it around your own self and try your best to eyeball it into something loosely approximating where you want it. No left/right/center/justify buttons, no grid to snap to, no “select-some-things-and-say-align” command…nothing. Then, once you’ve gotten your button placed, it may decide to keep it there and it may not. You may not find this out until you burn the DVD. It also lost the concept of direction at one point, such that when you pushed the “down” button it would pick a menu option to the left and so on. The only way to fix this was to delete all the menus and start over. Great. I ended up burning a whole assload of coasters, but I eventually got all the bugs beaten down enough to produce a single correct DVD. I have it on good authority that this sort of insanity (especially the “you can only use our templates thing”) is endemic to home DVD packages; Pinnacle, Ulead, and Nero all suffer some level of screwed-uppedness.

Case Study 2: Stolen TV to DVD
Software: Adobe Premier Elements
Experience: Crushing Failure

---

I downloaded some episodes of Star Trek with Bittorrent. I dragged and dropped them into Premier. Knowing that the menu editor in Elements is even worse than in iDVD (seriously), I told it to create a menuless, “Autoplay” DVD (something that iDVD can’t manage). It burned without incident. Popping the resultant DVD into the player, I had an hour’s worth of silent blackness. Hrm. I grumbled and fiddled around, downloaded a fresh version of the codec, and reburned. This time I got a picture. Occasionally. A very stuttery, half-speed picture and no sound. Thanks. I’ve since found out that when somebody writes a video codec, there are different API calls you have to implement for playback and editing. Apparently the dillweeds behind the Xvid and DivX codecs either didn’t bother to implement the editing calls, or screwed them all up. I’m basically boned there, unless I want to fix the drivers myself; the words “cold day in hell” come to mind in regards to that.

Case Study 3: Video from Camera to DVD
Software: Premier Elements, again
Experience: Hair-pulling Horribility

---

I just now tried to copy some video I took with my Cybershot P150 to a DVD. The video is ordinary-ass MPEG-1, 640×480. Can’t get much simpler than that. Couldn’t be hard, right? Unless you’re me. Dragging and dropping it into Premier results in a fascinatingly screwed up video; the audio works, and the video plays at regular speed, but it seems to randomly select a frame of video from a roughly 5 second range to either side of where it’s supposed to be playing. It’s a spastic and entirely useless performance. Mind this is on a mostly fresh install of XP Pro on a reasonably beefy box.

You know, as hard as VHS tapes sucked, they just worked. You hooked VCRs together with little wires, pushed Play on one and Record on another, and it was good. Is there any way to make this DVD thing not be so completely awful?

Oh, and also, Firefox seems to hate Tiger, or vice versa. It locks up like that’s it’s job ever since I upgraded.

Just ordered an Alesis Ion synthesizer.

Officially it’s for testing out Airspace but…come on. Do I really need a reason? Look at that thing.

Also, I need to learn to be more careful about what images I store on my server. After looking over my site traffic with Analog, a server log analysis package, it turns out that the most popular file by far on the entire site is the picture of Morgan Webb giving me the finger.

This image drew three thousand hits in the last month, almost ten thousand total. A couple people are using it on some popular forums (g4tv, theforce.net, etc). Host your own images, you lazy bastards! I swear, if the hits keep up, I’m replacing it with a picture of my butt. And nobody wants that.

Whoo…finally finished the Xbox article.

Also, watched Metropolis. Really amazing flick. It sure would be nice to see the original version, before it was mutilated by Paramount. Idiots.

Upgraded to OS X 10.4 today. Fiddled around with Quartz Composer, and made a pretty thing: pt1.qtz (save as – left-clicking fails. no mime type for qtz set)