The Saturday stroll through those internets. Things I found along the way:
Spinach is bad for you while booze isn’t
Men are smarter than women and coding in Basic is awesome
In politics that are not occupied with an impromptu re-enactment of mideval ages there is Herman Munster (again!) and a President that will fix everything, with, well: Torture if his own Party would only let him
But there are also more substantial things to find, like the Stormtrooper Effect
Entering
star trek closer video
into google will provide you with lots of different sources for a rather entertaining mashup. It’s interesting how content that is able to strike a cord with people will propagate into lots and lots of outlets. Virtually impossible to control.
little people a nice project. Almost cute.
Unrelated, just that I picked up it from there: BlogsNow is seriously clogged by spam right now. Problem is that 90% spam is preventing the crawl of the real sites get done in time. Many of those spam sites don’t even react in time. Spam is usually horrible about that. They just junk as much as they can, no matter if it even makes sense or not. They are just rushing to the next thing. And it’s done by idiots in the first place. No wonder they can’t keep their stupid little scripts straight.
Maybe someday I will find the time to read this interesting yet long article about the difference of BSD and linux.
I had not thought that RED would show images @ IBC. I thought I needed to get ready to eat my hat on that one, when they actually did. The footage itself I have not seen, just the the youTube version. Interesting choice of subjects I would say.
Now looking at the images of the actual device over here I think that RED is back in the bin where I had them @ NAB: Funky billionaire bubble stuff. No practicle application that I could think of.
Looking at the thing I wonder what kind of camera operator they would have in mind? By the time you are done you have to spend between 50 and 100K for the kit. You want to be caught with some funky lump of metal for this kind of money? I didn’t think so either.
Toshiba and Memory Tech announce a HD-DVD / DVD disc
They call it ‘tripple layer’. It plays in DVD and in the new HD-DVD players. Which is the end of the usual chicken and egg drama with new formats: Not enough players, not enough discs. And it finally respects the consumers.
Every launch of new technology pretends as if people have nothing in their home. Just empty shelf space to fill with their products. With a DVD/HD-DVD combo disc there would be room for a transition. If the Studios would release movies on these combo discs and would not charge more for it, then the format war would be over, and everybody, including Hollywood would be happy.
Technically it is not possible for Blu-Ray to pull this stunt. Given the impact that this would have if executed right it is very surprising how the HD-DVD could take so long to get going on this.
Update: Arc Technica has the better view on this matter.
opens terminal in directory of finder window
To open your current working directory from the terminal in the finder simply type:
open .
That is open “dot”, which you can replace with other valid file names. Works with other files as well. Pretty much does what would happen if you would click on the thing. In unix a . is the current directory
AppleScript I hate. The concept to have a scripting system to drive Applications is great. The implementation sucks ass. No, really, it’s worth this trip into the dumb language bin. AppleScript is a stupid hack. It’s syntax makes no sense for anybody. Only a couple (and I mean less than hundret) zealots that happen to get scared of any real language still use it. Worst of all: the makers of AppleScript are still with Apple and have given us “Automator”. Just add another layer of crap over another one. AppleScript thinks that people want ‘human readable code’. No they don’t. Specially if it makes no sense at all. End of rant.
It is also plain broken:
launchctl is the utility to start and stop processes for Apples launchd tool. For an application I am writing I would like to start / stop services, and launchctl does just that. I can create a .command file and that makes a shell script clickable. The only caveat is that terminal will launch and the window will not go away once the script is done. Not as neat as it should be. As an aside: stay away from the “Save Settings as Defaults” in Terminal.app. This will also save your current running application for instance as that. If you have a login to another machine, than all future Terminal windows will want to log in to that machine. The remedy is to trash the terminal.plist out of ~/Library/Prefecenses. And the ‘close winow when shell exits’ option does not work. Hence the detour to Applescript. But, that does not work either, since Applescript just beachballs if it launches a launchtl unload ... for instance.
Applescript is a freaking hack. It makes me sad and angry (ok, actually that would be an overstated, computers don't that do that anymore to me) since it's sitting in a place that an amazing application could occupy. Imagine any decent widespread syntax, an API library to all Applications and some GUI glue. That together with some way of version manage / download these 'system scripts' and you would have lots of people developing nice short cuts, meta apps or whatever you want to call it. It would be extending what Unix did 30 years ago for command line applications. Use Photoshop, mail and iDVD in one workflow for instance. Or google, iTunes and a printer in another. You see, it would be awesome. For everybody. But instead Sal and Co. give us what they can come up with. Which is frankly not much. Sigh.
“Office space” did not do that well in theaters 1999. It developed a following over time. Much like the Big Lebowski it created a culture of references that most big box office hits lack and probably also envy. It’s director made a second film called “Idiocracy”, and it opened last week. Yet, you probably have never heard of it. There is an uncommon reason for that. The Studio did zero PR on this movie. Something that never has been done by a Hollywood studio before. There are no trailers, no PR material, nothing. It opens in a couple of Cities, and Fox probably hopes that it is out of the Cinema’s before a Starbucks, Carls Junior or Costco lawyer sees it. It’s plot line is as thin as it can be, the visual effects are excellent B, no C movie class. Yet, I think it is worth watching. The best that could happen is that “Idiocracy” performs like “SOAP” was supposed to do. Maybe that would teach 20th Century Fox a lesson or two.