Blame YouTube

Today we made a big element of Finn's Hallowe'en costume for this year. For about two months now, he has been saying he wants to make a Predator costume. First, he's never seen the film - he's 12. Second, I tried to explain that I am there to help him, not make it for him. I am happy to help in any way he needs, short of actually completely doing the thing while he watches TV or plays on a phone. So here we are, a week before 31 October...

Finn, like all kids, has been watching YouTube and there are some ace Hallowe'en costumes on there. When I opined that Predator was going to be difficult and expensive to make Finn switched to something else he'd found on YouTube - Sonic. Right from the off this would be difficult to pull off but oh no, he explained, there's a guy that shows you how to do makeup on YouTube making a version of Sonic that riffs off the Sega original. The video only last 12 minutes, it's easy! So we watch the vid:

It is a very effective makeup job! We explain that a) it doesn't take 12 minutes to do, b) the material cost for doing it isn't the same as the cost for watching the video, c) the skill level required is not the same for watching the video, d) even if a, b and c were all achieved, there's only a week to go.

Despondent at those bad grown-up-type people spoiling his fun, Finn's face was set in grump. I tried to find another solution... A year or so ago, I had noted this on Etsy:

So I pointed it out to Finn and he was reservedly interested. I told him if I bought the mask he'd be mainly responsible for making it, but that I would be with him as he did so to help and offer advice. He agreed, so I bought it. It's very nice and prints out very well - the scale on A4 should probably be amended to 152 mm, but it will be slightly different on Letter.

Anyway, I printed it all out and said to Finn we'd try a test run, knowing that we would need to print again onto thicker card (or following Steve Wintercroft's solution of backing onto discarded cereal packs). He ummed and ahhed about doing it and finally this afternoon cut the pieces out and started folding them where needed. Between the two of us we came up with a completed, if not expert, skull after a couple of hours!

Because of the time needed, I have bought some 170gsm paper for the printer and we'll print directly to that. It might not be as sturdy as backing on card, but it will be easier to achieve I think and faster to do. Finn actually enjoyed the fairly fastidious work involved with making the mask today (and the next time will be more so!) and had a real sense of achievement at the end (and lots of praise from me). We still need to sort out a costume to go with and I reckoned he should be completely in black (as in the picture). If I can get some phosphorescent paint for the mask it would look a little like he's just a floating skull, which would be cool. We'll see, I'll post our progress.

The reason for this post being called "Blame YouTube" is that I think that our young'uns are getting an increasingly unrealistic view of the effort required for anything - YouTube video of 5 minutes == 5 minutes work required. Never mind that the "stars" of YouTube put a *lot* of work into what they do, it's what separates someone who gets a million views from someone who gets 30.

Hopefully, doing this will get Finn a more realistic view of what can be achieved and the amount of work needed. As it is, I have no doubt there'll be lots of handholding for this first go. We've agreed to set the Predator costume as the goal for next year's Hallowe'en so we'll see...

InDesign is good but so annoying!

Just a rant really. I'm engaged in creating documentation for a software product. There are probably going to be about 2.3k pages long. I'm outputting to PDF for the moment, so it will be completely digital (plans are to take it to wiki, but that's for later) so there's no output to dead tree.

I was struggling with the Table of Contents feature and it was hard to find any help, even with the whole interweb in front of me.

Anyway, just by clutching at straws I discovered the Bookmarks window that I found contained bookmarks I'd never knowingly added. Clearing all the extraneous bookmarks might have done the job - just waiting on the export of a PDF...

Yay! That worked! /me dances!

In other news, the other thing that bugged the shit out of me in InDesign was the fact that my books constantly have warning triangles saying "you edited this document (a chapter of the book) outside the book!" It is *never* true but that doesn't seem to matter to InDesign. Anyway, the solution is as dumb as you might expect: If you have the Book window open while you edit, save and close your chapter, all will be fine.





















Next problem, Updating the ToC is broken. Instead of going away to trawl the documents and then building the complete ToC, iD now does the trawl, but only builds the first page. Every time I have to manually add a new page and reflow text onto it, whereupon it builds the remaining pages (of which there are about 30 now). This one I haven't resolved and can get no help on aside from exporting to IDML and re-importing, which didn't work.

Problem 3. Do not make cross-references until the very end of your editing of your document. If you do it earlier you will find that typing slows down to one character per second appearing on-screen.

The Piracy Threshold

On 17th February this year, Matt Gemmell posted an insightful and perspicacious article to his blog entitled The Piracy Threshold. In it, he describes how people basically want to be honest, but once the difficulty of being so reaches a certain level, when dishonesty is not only the easier option but also the one to keep you sane, people turn to copyright infringement in response.

Like many other people the world over, I've done my fair share of downloading in the past. As other research shows, those that download are often the greatest consumers of legally-acquired media too. I think my 650+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection, my large book library and accumulation of CDs would point to that.

Just post-Christmas I decided to spend some of my gift vouchers on the Blu-Ray of a film I didn't catch at the cinema, Rare Exports directed by Jalmari Helander. My laptop, though impressively furnished with ports and power only had a DVD drive, so my first step was to enquire with Dell, the laptop's manufacturer, about the feasibility of replacing the DVD drive with a Blu-Ray drive, and if it was something I could do myself, or would the laptop need to be returned to Dell. After 45 minutes on hold or switching departments I got the good news that yes indeed I certainly could replace the drive myself. Delighted by this I asked how much such a drive would be, whereupon I received the bad news. €738. That's nearly $1,000 or £620. For an internal Blu-Ray drive. A price I could buy a Blu-Ray equipped laptop for. Okay, next idea. The reason I wanted the Blu-Ray drive for the laptop was so that I could show my Culture and Media class the film, but obviously I wasn't willing to spend that kind of money to do so, so I thought I'd try a new angle... ah yes! Samsung do an external, USB-powered Blu-Ray drive! It doesn't burn Blu-Rays only DVDs, but that was fine. If I really needed to burn 30 GB of data, my desktop machine has a Blu-Ray burner. Right, okay. €15 for the film, €80 for the drive, but I'm sorted for any future Blu-Ray films I want to show my class, so that's an acceptable outlay.

Ah, not so fast. VLC 1.1.4, my preferred animation player can't play Blu-Rays. Since the time I started on this quest, VLC 2 came out with the potential to play Blu-Rays but only if you download an AACS dll from somewhere and a list of certificates from somewhere else, and then your Blu-Ray will play only if it is included in that list of certs. Windows Media Player doesn't read Blu-Rays (perhaps still in a sulk over the failure of HD DVD). This means I need to actually *pay* for a media player? Something I haven't done since Windows 95. Okay, let's see what's on offer...

After hunting, the main "recommendation" was Cyberlink's PowerDVD. I put the inverted commas because no-one actually recommended it, it was more a case of "Dude, I'm afraid free and open source players are probably never going to be able to offer easy Blu-Ray playback because of all the licensing". So I stumped up the £79 for PowerDVD 12, that's about €95 or $123, and installed the mess of shovelware that comes with it. I wasn't happy, but I guess I was sorted. I tried it out on my desktop machine and yes, it worked. It showed the disc. So I installed it on the laptop and it worked there too.

Now, I don't show my class films on the laptop's screen, that would be crazy. I use the school's projector to throw the image on the wall where the whole class (all 12 of them split over two classes) can see it in comfort.

When I tried to show the Blu-Ray the first time I got a warning because the projector was hooked up through VGA to the laptop and oh no, you can't play a Blu-Ray through an analogue connection! So, adding to the expense I had run up to try and show this film I had to add an HDMI cable to the mix, another €10. It would be fine, my laptop is well-furnished for I/O, it has an HDMI port and so does the projector.

Before we go further let me tell you more about my laptop. It is a Dell Precision M4600. It has an Optimus system with an integrated Intel HD chipset for low-end graphical work and an NVidia Quadro 2000M for when more grunt is needed. Fortunately, you can shove applications onto that card as you like and VLC works nicely with it. But I wasn't using VLC for showing this film, I was using PowerDVD. Hunting for the reason why it still wasn't working, I went onto the Cyberlink forum to discover that people had been complaining about the issue that PowerDVD couldn't be moved away from the integrated chipset for two years already. Nothing had been done about it in that time. I was stuffed. If I wanted to play through HDMI I needed to use the NVidia chipset because that was where the HDMI connection went to, otherwise it was only VGA, which can't be used for Blu-Ray playback.

When I go to people's houses to repair their computers I charge €45 an hour to do so. I reckon I spent at least three hours trying to sort this issue out, so let's add up:

Rare Exports: €15
Blu-Ray drive: €80
PowerDVD: €95
HDMI cable: €10
My time: €135
Total: €335

Have I reached my "Fuck this point" as Matt Gemmell so eloquently puts it? Gosh yes, some time ago, and even if I hadn't the fact that one of my students (not in that class, you greedy studios) could find a torrent of the film and download it within two hours certainly would have pushed me over that threshold. To add insult to injury, the dodgy version of the film, while not as high resolution, was actually better since the subtitles were in French.

The fact is, people do want to be honest in my experience. I certainly do. I want to reward the makers of films like Rare Exports for entertaining me (not that I've seen it yet. Part of the reason I wanted to show it to the class is so that we could discuss it fresh). I couldn't care less about rewarding the money men in the middle that have no talent except for making money turn into more money.

Interestingly, this situation and Matt Gemmell's blog post turned into quite a talking point in the class with several saying that they had been trying to purchase legitimate versions of albums or films and being unable to, found better solutions through "piracy". They are students, so not overburdenend with cash, but they wanted to give it to you film and music companies. You turned them away, so is it too hard to understand why they went and got what they wanted elsewhere? Are you stopping sales yourselves? We live in a connected world, where information can be transferred at the speed of light, but are you working by telegram? Carrier pigeon?

Take some responsibility for your own actions before you blame others.

Striking over retirement is like...

Today we went into Bordeaux to watch some movies and as part of the French national tradition the streets were crowded with poor deluded people "manifesting" for keeping the retirement age at 60.  I'm sorry, is there something I don't understand? You're demonstrating to have a higher tax burden? What's worse is that these people have convinced young folk to join in - people who will be paying for the organisers' extended retirement. Singapore has just abolished statutory retirement and while I'm not saying that's right either, this seems to be more ridiculous. Some of the people were chanting that they wanted no change! LIFE IS CHANGE!

I am not an economist and might probably have it completely wrong, but it seems to me that if you have an ageing population and a very good public health service, coupled with an increased life expectancy, isn't it only logical to expect people to contribute to the state's coffers for a little longer? Otherwise, where is the money going to come from to look after the aged, to pay for retirement funds and healthcare if it's not taxes? So, fine, the current generation want to live forty years sponging off the state and leave their kids and grandkids picking up the bill? I think that's disgusting, particularly at a time of financial crisis in the world.

The retirement age was set at 60 in a time when people were expected to live to 70. Now, someone living to 100 is less miraculous an event and will become more and more commonplace over the coming years with improvements in healthcare and if people still want to retire at 60 they'd need to pay as much in tax as they receive in their pay packet to fund it! I'm sure they'd complain about rises in income tax, or VAT.

This is not my most thought out blog post but I am severely pissed off with a whole bunch of French people today (and on all the other days where such retirement strikes occur). For me striking over the retirement age is as stupid as complaining your car's new square wheels don't roll very well.

One calendar to rule them all

I've been trying to locate a way to link my Datebk6 calendar on my Palm (a Treo 680) with some kind of .ical-compatible calendar on the PC so that I can have all my appointments, etc. wherever I am. I do use the Google Calendar since GMail is such an important hub for my work, so that's the one I'd like to work with.

Things I've tried so far:

• Airset - would work if I could use Palm Desktop 4.1.4. I can't I have to use 6.x because the Treo won't sync to the older version, otherwise Airset's cloud-based computer with built-in calendar app that syncs to .ical would be ideal.
• I found someone saying that the Yahoo calendar syncs to Palm Desktop, but again only the older 4.1.4 version
• I found software called DBA2CSV/Palm2Google, which looked ideal on first blush, but it's really a one-way thing for people migrating from a Palm platform to something that supports the .ical standard. The author replied to my query very rapidly though, so I can recommend it for the responsiveness of the author if you do want to migrate (although it does seem to really be a one-use tool and thus somewhat expensive)
• If I could get Palm Desktop to export my calendar data in .vcs format, the standard from Microsoft used for Outlook that .ics the .ical standard is mainly an evolution of, things would be better, but the option to export as .vcs is ghosted on my Palm Desktop - I wonder if it's because I don't have Outlook?
• Thunderbird 3 now has a new calendar extension called Lightning that can optionally understand .vcs files, so if I could translate my Datebk entries to .vcs, then into Lightning where they could be synced through .ical to Google Calendar that would tortuously solve the issue - after all, it's not like I'd need them to be so synced I'd need it OTA, I don't want OTA, just to sync with palm Desktop.

Dang! Since the Treo is dead tech, it seems that the only alternative to stay with some kind of PalmOS is to get a Palm Pre, but the cost is out of my budget for now, especially if bought on a contract. Gah

Vista bashing is sooo tired

For the umpteenth time reading on the web I get the message "Vista suxx, XP rules". I for one would never go back to XP. I have a modern machine with enough memory, a good enough graphics card and processor power to spare to be able to run Vista and you know what? It's better than XP for me.

• Aero? That thing that you get "advised" to switch off if you have to use Vista? Get real bitches, turning off Aero reduces Windows to the kind of relationship it had with your graphics card in XP and before! I like the fact that now a whole bunch of operations can be offloaded to the graphics card, like window redraws for instance, without tasking the CPU.
• The Start menu? We get told to replace it with Classic, just like Win2k, well, no, the fact you can hit the Windows key and just type the name of your app quickly to get to it rather than cruising up and down lists of items without handy identifiers like program icons in a carpal tunnel syndrome-inducing fashion is better why?
• The fact that indexing is done behind the scenes for quicker searches? That's good too (not that it matters when I use Directory Opus anyway, the one program that no version of Windows is complete without.

I'm sure there are plenty of other technical reasons why I can rightly prefer Vista over XP, but I can't think of them right now and a rant is supposed to be written in a hurried fashion, otherwise the passion goes from it. Oh yes, and those that tell me I should use Linux? Maybe I will when the apps that I put bread on the family table are available for it. The time is getting closer, but it's not there yet.

Gah, an article without a picture?

Dickhead data destruction

So yesterday (or rather the early hours of yesterday morning) should have been great. After months of trying I finally cured a problem I had where I had had Vista installed on two drives and the one that was D: wouldn't relinquish being system even though everything was done on the C: drive, even to the point where D: was absolutely necessary for the booting of C:, without D: on the bus the computer wouldn't boot. After hunting around for ages and having tried all manner of things to fix the situation I found this intriguing thread and piped up with my problem wondering if it could be resolved using the same method as hnyman on the forum had cured his similar-seeming problem. Pages of thread ensued, complete with my photographs of the monitor for situations where copying pages of info out by hand was not a realistic idea. So 4AM 18.06.09 I finally solved the issue, not using the software that the forum was for: EasyBCD, but another tool called BootIt NG, commonly known as BING. It's a scary tool for neophytes like me, but with handholding and patience from the marvellous Jake Johnson - Coolname007 on the neosmart forum - I got it so that D: was no longer necessary to my machine! Yay!

I should have left it at that I retired to my bed, fatigué mais heureux, but oh no. In my exhaustion the thought obviously meandered through my brain that I needed to teach D: a lesson - mess me about for months would you? I am your master now.

So what did I do? What the fuck did I do?! I formatted D: HA! That'll teach this inanimate bit of electronics a thing or two about the real boss of the computer... Great, I even felt satisfied. I could definitely go to bed now... no, wait a minute. Let's call this partition "NewTek:" and put all my NewTek-related stuff on it! Yes, great idea, I can just go to that temp directory I set up on E: and copy everything out of it onto the defunct D: That way I'll have my LightWave on there (ooh look, peak speed of 89MB/s), plus all the documents and images I've worked on for the company (hey, nearly done now, just another 500 MB to go) and what else? Oh yes (the copy has finished), I know I'll put my LW Content folder on there, complete with the lighting plan I made of our living room when we wanted to move stuff around, and the very important project I'm working on for Nelson Mandela, and all the example content I can learn fr... hang on, where's the lw content folder? The blood drained from my face and I could feel an incipient duodenal ulcer just ready to spring into blood-curdling action. The fucking. lw content. directory. Containing about 5GB of assets and material. Was. on. D:!

And so started the day for me. I went to bed thinking that things would look better in the warm light of day, but after about ten minutes of thrashing around and gnashing my teeth I got up again and tried to recover my fuck up. And here I am at nearly 3AM the next day thinking to myself over and over "why don't you need qualifications to run a computer? A licence or some kind of training to make sure you don't charge around like a bull in a china shop as I had done"

So here I sit, writing this blog post as I wait for GetDataBack for NTFS to go through all the files on the drive, knowing inside that it won't do any good and that I could probably have recreated my work in the time I've wasted trying to repair the damage I did. So, I'm going to bed. This saga will end in one of two ways: the worst, but most likely I fear, is that I've lost ten years of work and had better get a move replacing it. The sunny alternative is that a program, perhaps even GetDataBack recommended by my good friend Peter Jespersen, will completely recover all my lw content. I'd like to say a big thank you as well to everyone that has helped me with this, as much for their shoulders for me to cry on as actual technical help.

That's it. My eyes have gone woggly. It's a technical term. G'night. I shall keep y'all posted on progress and make this post a little purtier with pics, etc. maybe even dancing girls, I don't know.

Why I won't buy Sony

It seems people have short memories. I told my brother I wouldn't buy a PlayStation 3 or a Bravia TV like him and he was nonplussed, he didn't know why I wouldn't give the giant megacorporation more of my money (I have a PlayStation, a Mini-Disc player and various other bits from years gone by). In short, here are the reasons behind my decisions:

Rootkits and DRM
It wasn't enough that Sony were putting rootkits on music CDs in 2005. When confronted with the info by Mark Russinovitch, they issued an uninstaller to remove the rootkit (something very difficult for an end-user to do short of completely reinstalling the machine), but replaced it with a dial-home program! In the ensuing outcry they issued a complete uninstaller. Sony also started using a protection program on their DVDs that didn't agree with plenty of DVD players (including some of the company's own models). Finally, it was discovered that their MicroVault USB keys also had rootkits installed on them. (Ed's note: Admittedly this rootkit stuff won't bother my brother since he is a member of the church of Steve Jobs)

Aibo
Aibo was a really cool idea. A robot dog that you could teach tricks? How cool is that? Unfortunately Sony forgot that some of the fun of discovery is exploration and clamped down on people experimenting with new and expensive acquisition. Fortunately, people wanting to mess with robotic lifeforms now have Pleo, a robotic dinosaur, which positively encourages experimentation with its USB port and SD card slot. (Ed's note: Sony's robotics division was closed in 2005, and it seems that Ugobe, maker's of Pleo, are running into difficulties too - seems the time isn't yet right for robotic pets. Sigh.)

Batteries
In total over seven million Sony laptop batteries have had to be recalled over between 2006-2008, despite Sony apparently knowing of a problem in their batteries' construction since mid-2005.

Blu-Ray Disc
I'm not going to argue over the relative merits of HD-DVD and BD but it does feel like there was some trickery going on here to ensure that Sony actually won this format war after having lost twice before (with Betamax and Mini-Disc and you can possibly add a third in there in the shape of the insidious Memory Stick format). Certainly the fact that the PlayStation 3 has a BD player was a big contributory factor in the format winning. Since it's the only choice in high definition I am sure that I will end up getting a Blu-Ray player at some point, but it won't be made by Sony (okay, okay, the drive will, or it will be licensed by Sony, but I can't escape that can I?)

Corporation - An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary)

All these opinions are my own and don't belong to anyone else. Any errors made in this post are my own responsibility and will be corrected. They are on my blog to make sure I don't forget why I dislike Sony and are not there for any other purpose.

Last day at NewTek Europe

It's my last day at NewTek Europe tomorrow. I have been made redundant because of the drop off of LightWave sales meaning that my position was costing the company too much. It's quite exciting though.

Long distance work

Working from home using your computer sounds like a doddle. Using Skype means no expensive transatlantic phone calls and email, online docs, spreadsheets and mind maps make working together easier, right? Well, only so far. If you've never visited your clients you don't know how their office is laid out spatially meaning that if you are dealing with several people in the organisation you don't know if they can just nip over and check on so-and-so, you don't even know if they can see if someone is in the office!

So you end up with half a dozen Skype chat windows, trying to track people down and playing round-robin chasing the people you need, and it's oh-so easy to ignore that flashing Skype window meaning that working becomes a matter of twiddling your thumbs waiting for responses and then not having enough time to do what you need to meaning you go to bed ever later (note to Cory Doctorow: EST is a great idea, but if you also have to live and in another timezone the payback's a bitch).

Anyway, sometimes it's really nice to do, it's just not great for the family.