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Taking creative license

Recently, I gave in to the urgings of a friend (and my father, who’s been after me for years) and started watching Season One of the Fox drama 24. I had never seen an episode, but had been using my past experience with Fox television as a reason not to watch—the only thing on the network that I’ve ever liked was their football broadcasts. Nontheless, I gave in and asked for the first season of 24 for Christmas.

After I got home, I fired up the first show, and…was hooked in about 20 minutes. Since then, I’ve been staying up later than usual, and waking up even earlier than usual, and have managed to work my way through the first season and part of the second. But this post isn’t really about 24; it’s about ‘artistic license’ as applied by directors of TV shows and movies. In particular, one of the opening scenes in Season Two really caught my eye (click for larger image):

Shot of Lake O in 24 opening

You see, Lake Oswego, Oregon is about 10 miles from where I live, and I guarantee you, it looks nothing like the above image.

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Thanks for buying AnyMovie on DVD!

Congratulations on your recent purchase of AnyMovie on DVD! You are just a few quick steps away from enjoying this fine feature on your home theater system. To get started, here's all you need to do...

  1. Remove the AnyMovie DVD from the bag provided by the store.
  2. Remove the shrink wrap from the AnyMovie DVD. Note that this step will require either exceedingly long and sharp nails, a pair of scissors, or a knife of some sort. Take care when using the scissors or knife that you don't accidentally damage AnyMovie's packaging--we spent hours creating those glorious photos and writing that flowing text. It'd be a shame to damage the package before you even have AnyMovie open!
  3. Remove the decorative slipcover that protects the AnyMovie DVD case, which in turn, protects the AnyMovie DVD itself. Don't misplace this slipcover, though, as you'll want to keep it handy when storing the AnyMovie DVD in your DVD rack. During this step, you may notice that the slipcover and the actual DVD case have identical artwork, front and back. This may lead you to wonder why we included the slipcover, since it appears redundant, increases shipping costs, and eventually increases landfill usage. Don't worry about such things; that's our job. Just rejoice in the knowledge that you'll soon be enjoying AnyMovie on your own theater system.
  4. Using either your sharp fingernails, the scissors, or the knife from step two, remove the sticky anti-theft wraps that we have thoughtfully placed on the top, right, and bottom edges of the DVD case. You may find these annoying, especially as they have a tendency to either tear apart or rip off portions of the DVD case artwork, but rest assured--they're there for your protection. Really. See, if they weren't there, then we'd be forced to charge more for the AnyMovie DVD due to increased piracy. You see, there's no telling how many people would stand there in the store, rip the shrink wrap off the package, remove the slipcover from the DVD case, pry open the DVD case, and remove the disc(s) before slipping out of the store unnoticed. Thanks to these plastic peel-offs, though, we don't have to worry about such things.
  5. Turn the DVD case on its edge, and look at the long side of the case. Notice the two tabs with the words "Open" and the small arrows pointing up. Insert your sharp fingernail, or other suitably pointed object, into the nearly-invisible crack at the top of these tabs, then pry in a downward direction. With luck, the tabs will pop open. If you're out of luck, though, your fingernail will pop off, or your sharp object will break. If this happens, please find another fingernail or sharp object to use to complete this step. If you're bleeding, first apply a bandage to prevent any blood from staining the AnyMovie DVD. (Our warranty doesn't cover malfunctioning discs caused by consumers' bleeding onto the media).
  6. Open the DVD case, and quickly scan through the valuable movie discounts and other advertising we've included to keep your costs down. Again, we're acting in your interests here. Without these inserts, your cost would be notably higher. If you splurged on the Special Edition of AnyMovie, then you may find some interesting-looking related extras. If you bought the standard version, you're now staring at an empty black case, devoid of anything useful other than the disc itself.
  7. Remove the disc from the carrier. Note that this will require at least two hands, and possibly three, especially if you have small hands. Do your best not to touch the disc in any way during this step; you may get a fingerprint or scratch on it, which will, of course, not be covered under warranty (we cannot be responsible for damage caused by the consumer).
  8. Insert the DVD into your player, and then sit back and enjoy AnyMovie!

Yes, I received a few DVDs for Christmas. Yes, I think the packaging for DVDs has gone beyond ridiculous to the point of idiocy. Do I think things will change anytime soon? Unfortunately, no. But I feel better now, having ranted about it a bit!



Macworld: 2005 writings

Macworld logoThe following is what I could find online of my 2005 articles for Macworld. I wrote more than what's shown here, but these are the ones I could find…



On the strangeness of electrons…

Happy Holidays!

As you may know, I'm in Colorado for the holidays this year, visiting with the family. If you've never been here, the air is extremely dry, especially in the winter. And dry air makes a great breeding ground for static electricity. Coming from humid Oregon, I'd pretty much forgotten about that fact. Until this morning, when I touched the trackpad on my 12" PowerBook G4 and watched a very large, very bright spark travel between my finger and the pad. Zotttt!

Immediately, the trackpad was rendered next to useless. The cursor was generally restricted to a square area of about 200 pixels in the top left corner of the screen--though I could occasionally coerce it into other locations. Knowing what little I know about electricity (stay away from it!), I thought for sure I'd fried some key electronic part that controlled the track pad.

Nonetheless, I tried my usual first troubleshooting step--a restart. While things changed a bit, the trackpad was still basically unusable. I could drag it all over the screen, but only in huge jumps. When I lifted my finger, the cursor would jump to some other spot on the screen. I was now pretty convinced I had a hardware issue.

Then I remembered that I had SideTrack, the replacement trackpad driver, installed. SideTrack is such an essential piece of software for me that I had totally forgotten I had it installed. In the 'why not try' category, I downloaded the newest version and installed it. One restart later, and...presto...I once again had a fully-functional trackpad.

So the question of the day for any of you technical types is: How could a jolt of static electricity permanently affect a software application? It seems very odd to me, especially given that SideTrack isn't the kind of thing (I wouldn't think) that would be writing anything permanent to disk (which might get scrambled by a shock). Any ideas?



10.4 + 0.3 = 311.6??

megabytes to upgrade

Well, it does when you're talking about installing 10.4 from the retail DVD, and then upgrading it to 10.4.3. I re-partitioned a portable FireWire drive tonight, so that I could put both 10.3 and 10.4 on it for testing purposes. I haven't clean installed 10.4 since the release back in April, and I hadn't really noticed just how many megabytes of updates there have been. Suffice it to say, there've been a lot! Seven packages the first time around, then five more after that.

To Apple's credit, I guess?, it only took two restarts to get the system up to date. But I shudder to think about those who lack broadband access to the net; even a moderately-speedy DSL connection would groan under the weight of these updates. Approximate download times for 311.6MB:

Connection SpeedDownload Time (Hrs:Mins)
28.8Kbps25:12
33.3Kbps21:36
56.6Kbps12:50
128Kbps (ISDN)5:40
512Kbps (DSL)1:25
1.5Mbps (Cable)0:29
6Mpbs (Fast Cable)0:07

So what does one do if you only have modem access? From my memories of my 56Kbps days, the modem more routinely connected at about 44Kbps, meaning probably something like 15 hours of download time. And I don't believe Apple allows user groups to distribute update CDs any more (do they?). Anyone out there still on a modem connection? If so, how do you stay current with 100MB+ updates becoming routine nowadays? (Note that this doesn't just apply to Apple's updates; even updates for things like Quicken, Acrobat, etc. are swelling into the multi-megabyte size).



Strangest OS X screenshot …. ever?

Last weekend, I was working on a relatively large--OK, a huge--17.8GB QuickTime movie. This was the raw capture of 35 or so minutes of flying time in X-Plane.

strange screenshotI had the original movie open in QuickTime Player, and I had also exported a notably smaller (200MB) H.264 version, which I was playing with in Motion. Then, for no apparent reason, all heck broke lose--both screens on my system suddenly went 70s psychedelic on me, as seen in the grab at right of a portion of the screen (click for full-size).

In addition to the messed-up colors, things were also not in the right spot on the screen--you can see this with the location of the Smart Folders object in the large screenshot. The system seemed to be working fine; I just couldn't make anything out on either screen--except the menubar (but not the menus themselves). So I used Command-Tab and the 'Q' key to quit various running apps, including QuickTime and Motion.

After quitting nearly everything I had running, the screen returned to nearly normal--the only remaining issue was that objects' shadows were really messed up, showing pieces of other windows instead of a fuzzy gray/black shadow. I logged out and back in, and that fixed that issue.

What this reminded me of, more than anything, was mucking about with my Apple ][ back in the day--if you "poked" some data into the wrong memory locations, you could mess up your display in quite a creative manner! It almost seemed like that's what OS X was doing--I had used all the available RAM, so it started using the video card's RAM for storage instead. Yes, I know this isn't possible, and it's in no way what happened.

Anyway, in five years of OS X usage, this is by far the oddest visual distortion I've ever seen, so I thought I'd share. I was quite impressed that the system itself was still usable--I have yet to restart since that incident, in fact, and all has been fine after the re-login.



New comment tools installed…

Today's lunch hour project was to enhance the comment engine here on Robservatory just a bit. To that end, there are now two new features active:

  • Instead of a generic Recent Comments tracker in the sidebar, a new Unread Comments tracker (thanks to the Smart Unread Comments plug-in) shows only the comments you haven't personally seen. There's also a link to mark them all as read, in case you'd like to catch up right away. (Since the plug-in uses cookies to track the unread comments, everyone's starting point is the same--they are all unread, since the cookies haven't yet been created on your machine). This should make it somewhat easier to keep up with comments posted here.
  • Posting comments is now easier, thanks to the LivePreview plug-in. As you start typing your comment, you'll see a real-time preview (JavaScript required) below the text area. This is pretty slick, as it will preview HTML on the fly, so you can check bold, italics, and links before you hit the Submit button.

Not earth-shattering changes, but they should make working with comments a bit easier for everyone...



I just don’t understand…

I read today that pearworks has been forced to discontinue distribution of their awesome pearLyrics widget--this handy tool downloaded and displayed the lyrics for the currently-playing iTunes song. pearworks received a cease and decist letter from Warner/Chappell Music Limited, requiring that pearLyrics be removed from distribution. You can read more about it here on the pearLyrics site.

The reason for this posting, though, isn't to try to start a groundswell of opinion to get pearLyrics back on the market (though that would be a nice outcome). Instead, there's a Big Picture item here that I just don't get: why do the record companies care about the distribution of lyrics? Regardless of whether I own a CD by Band X or not, why does any record company care if there are lyrics servers out there distributing the words Band X's music? I understand that the lyrics are copyrighted, but it's not like the words do a lot of good to anyone without the music (do they? Is that what I'm missing?). And this isn't a case where someone's done something like scanned the latest Grisham novel and put it online for download--in that case, the product is the words, and the artist is clearly damaged by the distribution of the scanned words. But with songs, the words themselvese aren't really good for much of anything without the accompanying music and vocals, right? So why do the record companies care?

To me, this is completely 100% backwards from how it should be--I would think record companies would want people distributing lyrics to songs. That way, someone might stumble across a song with interesting words, and then go out and (gasp!) purchase the song. Instead, the record companies are going out of their way to prevent the distribution of lyrics. Can someone brighter than I explain exactly why they're concerned about this? Like Windows and $50,000+ Cadillac pickup trucks, I just don't get it, so I assume I must be missing something obvious.



I’m in the wrong business…

Disclaimer: This post is only very barely, just kind of a little tiny bit, related to anything in the world of technology. If that bothers you, stop reading now. :)

Moose Muffin bookA while back, someone gave our daughter Kylie a present--a book called If You Give A Pig A Pancake. This slender book quickly became one of her favorites, probably because of the large illustrations on each page.

So we were out doing the weekly shopping on Saturday, and noticed another book by the same author. This one's called If You Give A Moose A Muffin. Knowing how much she liked the other one, we casually tossed the moose book in the cart and proceeded to check out. We get home, and sure enough, Kylie thinks this one's a winner too.

Then last night, I'm entering the shopping receipt into Quicken, and I nearly choked when I saw what we paid for the book--$15.99! Amazon has it cheaper, of course, but it's still not inexpensive...especially when you realize what you get for the money:

32 pages, including the inside cover, and a total of 304 words.

Using Amazon's price, that's about 3.5 cents per word (or 5.3 cents per word for what we paid). By itself, that may not sound like too much. But had my Panther book, at 174,907 words, been priced similarly, it would have retailed for ... $6,121.75 (or $9,270 at 5.3 cents/word)! Zowie! On the other hand, if we could have sold even two or three at that price... ;)

Now, in all seriousness, this is a great book with funny text and wonderful full-page color illustrations, which probably accounts for the majority of the cost. Still, I've learned two things from this. First, always check the tag on a children's book before throwing it in the cart--the thickness of the book is clearly independent from the price of said book. And second, I'm going to put the other "Give A..." books on Kylie's Christmas list right now!



Digital cameras, now and not quite now…

As a follow-up to my Cameras, then and now… story, here’s what’s happened with digital camera evolution in our household over the last three years.

As noted in the other writeup, our current digital camera is the Canon PowerShot SD400, a marvel of features and compactness that we bought this past July. It replaced a Canon PowerShot S30, which I purchased in January of 2002. So just how far have consumer digital cameras come in three years? Probably a lot farther than this article will demonstrate, as I’ll only be speaking to the differences in the two cameras we own. But even there, the changes are pretty dramatic, starting with (of course), the size:

s30 vs. sd400

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