The trace had to be a little eclectic for realism’s sake, so I didn’t just do the redraw with Ctrl + D transform ninja skills, but let the software trace it. Big mistake.

It was one of those things that InDesign got a little upset about the complexity of — which is okay — and had to import as encapsulated postscript instead of as native vector data — which is also okay. Trouble was, it wasn’t just borderline too-complex, it was stupidly over the edge. I stuck it on the A-Master (which keeps me sane and the .indd filesize down) and got to work for about a week on the rest of the content and so forth. As we get closer to press (I was aiming for today… others apparnetly have different ideas) I’ve started doing the Indd->PDF shuffle and discovered the absolute pain of waiting for it to “render” (basically that’s what it’s doing) the EPS onto every page as it creates the PDF file.

I endured this for about two days and then finally snapped this morning, went back to Photoshop with the source image and processed it to make it look similar enough before pasting the raster scan into the A-Master in the traced thing’s place.

As if by magic, the generated PDF size dropped from 55MB to under 4MB.

Raster images are your friend.

p.s. hopefully I’m back here now. Am away next week with GPRS Internet only, then in New Zealand (with Internet, albeit with uncertainty about having a computer in the accommodation). Yes, busy as ever. On Facebook quite a lot, because status updates are more managable than full blog posts!

Anyway. I’m kinda pissed off with myself for wanting to take the thing down anyway and try fixing it because that is SO GEEKY and anti-social, etc. Like, I’m sure there’ll be a quiet hour or three in which I can do that without appearing such, but… bleh. Disliking… various things. Oh yeah I’m talking about a projector with RETARDED MGA (26-pin, 3-row. Used as AV feature connectors on mid-90’s Matrox cards and possibly later, D-SUB part impossible to source with a day’s notice.) CONNECTORS that SO NEARLY match up to VGA VESA spec as to be indistinguishable. The only difference is two pins for some kind of digital IO… even device ID pins (introduced in DDC spec for supplementing proprietary ID bits manufacturers were starting to use anyway, apparently) are the same. The digital IO pins seriously should have been saved for some other socket, because this causes so much unneccessary pain. Grrr.

I’ll source real parts upon return to Sydney if I haven’t ‘accidentally’ dropped it from the back of a rapidly-moving vehicle before then. I am sufficiently pissed off at the eBayer who neglected to say that absence of cables meant impossible connection. Despite listing PC and video input in item specs. Bastard. Grr grr grrr. Okay I’m done being angry at the world now. Time to go finish packing then throw crap in car then sleep for… six hours, then get pink slip for car because it goes out of rego in the middle of the week away (!) and THEN drive with people southwards to Orient Point. And in that week I’m hoping to do stuff with people/read books WAY more than geeking. Will see how this goes. :-/

The grain wasn’t really a problem anyway, because most of the vision was intentionally grungy/the input was only a seed for further digital genesis, so that was cool. I’ve got to get the composite input for this computer working before I do another one of these things or get a real capture card, though, because it’s a pain having only one camera. Usually I’d flick it around to a light source bright enough that everything would flare out and then repo, or switch to a heavily distorted effect, or slide my finger over it (it’s a webcam, okay?) to black. The vision mixer didn’t get a workout because I couldn’t get TV-out working properly in time (mostly because effecTV’s fullscreen mode did weird things to sync on composite outputs, but hey, VGA worked).

I’ve really got to learn how to use PureData before next time, too. It looks so incredibly powerful, wow. I don’t understand where it outputs sources/runs, though. Looks great for routing and filtering stuff to the hilt, but where that all ends up is beyond me! Again, hopefully before next time.

It just occurred to me that pretty much every camera with IEEE1394 on the planet can be used as a V4L source. D’oh. Maybe I should finally buy a real camera instead of some boring capture hardware. Capture hardware doesn’t NEED to be boring, if you’re in a Windows environment and need a device that does real-time effects… but I’m not $2500 enthusiastic about all this just yet. And probably won’t be until it starts to have some abstract kind of earning potential… which I’m pretty okay without, but nevertheless, it’s difficult to justify that going into a hole of depreciation.

So… for next time, more cameras mixed (with vision mixer) into capture device, more cameras using FireWire, more effects custom-designed using PureData, and digital vision mixing with FreeJ. I’m happy with VGA output because you’re pushing native resolution to the projector that way. I’m also not too concerned about PC resources/performance. Tonight I’d say it was online for 3.5 hours without a glitch (with the exception of a kick-out 10 minutes in, and I was still partially setting up and wasn’t particularly in the middle of anything), running from a USB source. There used to be a time when that would just not have been possible with consumer gear (the camera cost about $90–110, which means it’s a rather-decent webcam. Probably, at this stage, one of the more expensive components of my setup!)

Oh, and I didn’t get to record any of the performance, sorry. Gem recorded another person’s performance for me earlier in the evening, but I’m too tired to share that right now… probably tomorrow, before Selo comes to my house and kicks my dog… err I mean camera’s SD card memory. I gotta do it before this month ends, because I’m now hilariously over quota. It’s got to be all because uploads count, seriously! I’ve been doing nearly 1GB a month to Flickr alone. Anyway. Stopping rambling and starting sleeping.

That was yesterday. Today, I called again because I couldn’t get it un-setup. And got the most completely and utterly clueless technical support person I’ve ever encountered. Not to sound misogynistic or anything, but… well, no male tech has ever come close to this woman’s sheer level of cluelessness. She hadn’t heard about their MAC address locking auth which has been going on since the beginning of time. Obviously, this was an impediment to getting things working when clearly it was a locking problem. She read me an SM server IP address off some sheet she had (which, so she claimed, was the way they did things now… yeah, righto. I’m now connected just fine without any such defined server, thanks) which I entered — of course — to no avail. Then I asked if she knew whether I should be using a SM or a DCE auth server, in light of the fact I’ve been connected for a couple of months without any problems (no joke… when Telstra works, it’s the most spectacular thing in the world. Getting it up and running is often quite a different story.) and she said:

“Uhhh I don’t know… SMTP server? Hmm…”

*josh bangs head against desk*

Some minute and a half later she realises, “Oh, that’s about email, right. Let me check that for you.”

Uhh, yeah, that’s what I wanted you to do three minutes ago. *waits on hold*

“Well, I just spoke with my supervisor and they don’t know either.”

Please, give more support contracts to the Indians. They know more than support-script-monkeys in Australian call centres.

So, next question — can you tell me when I’ve shown up as authenticating/connecting in the last 72 hours?

I know what the answer to this question should be, because they’ve been able to do it before. Hers was “Oh, hang on… oh dear, this is too technical for me.” *Raised eyebrow, before violently ripping limbs from tech-support voodoo doll reserved for this purpose* Realising the irony of her statement, she laughed airily, “And I’m meant to be the support person!” Oh, really? *Starts to warm soldering iron for use in doll’s eyes* Unsurprisingly, she couldn’t figure out what was going on enough to answer my question.

She proceeded to launch into the standard “Oh but you said you were using a router and actually we don’t support those so I’m sorry we’re not really trained in how to use them…” I was tempted to cut her off and start setting it up on another computer now to prove it still wasn’t working, but thought the pain had gone on long enough. So she continued with her “Bad user, you and your stupid non-desktop-solution that uses third-party routers.” Nevermind that these routers feature Telstra-licensed heartbeat software (at least, one would hope so, because bpalogin is GPL’d and router firmware certainly isn’t!). I could see the “contact the manufacturer” recommendation coming — it did — but then she threw out another gem that can’t possibly be ignored. She proceeded to actively recommend a third-party support company to setup my Telstra Bigpond Internet connection, as though they’d somehow be able to fix my (Telstra-induced) MAC locking problems.

At this point I took the doll downstairs, and left it sitting on the gas stove.

Addendum: I have encountered good female techs plenty of times in the past… I’ve just never encountered any male techs this bad. I think it’s probably a result of moronic gender equity corporate policies, whereby they employ useless females to make up the numbers — simply because not many work in the industry, doubtless at least in part because of the “clueless female” flack that some apparently cop. Proud to be a part of the problem. *rolls eyes* It was said in jest, live with it ;-)

When I’m in significant pain (be that massive headaches/migraines w/ various assoc. symptoms, or general other illness… vomiting etc., or specific physical pain) my first motive to “alleviate” it is simply distraction. I’ll start by hopping between thoughts as rapidly as possible because every thought I land on somehow I manage to link back to the problem at hand (i.e. pain), and I can only avoid coming back to that by randomly jumping between thoughts before following them to their “logical” (read: present circumstantial) conclusion. This is, inevitably, pretty useless… and when I finally give up on finding disconnected thoughts I settle for patterns. If it’s not a headache (i.e. I don’t mind my eyes being open) I’ll trace lines on whatever surfaces I can see, or, if I can’t see (/don’t want to open eyes), I’ll invent patterns/logical problems. Which I can never remember afterwards but am aware occurred. And proceed to solve compulsively until the pain disappears (generally where replaced with sleep).

The thing is, these are usually strategies I semi-consciously employ after recognising pain. Today it was different.

I would close my eyes at work, trying to focus on an aspect of a rather gnarly CSS situation (web-geek stuff, to demystify/ungeek this post) , and suddenly the various symbols in the game would be re-arranging themselves (or, I would be controlling them but without even thinking of the game) in my [perceived field-of-view? is there a word for imagined vision once you close your eyes? I take it that’s normal… it’s not imagination and it’s not synesthesia, so… I think that it’s normal]. Normally I can feel headaches coming, but sometimes I’ll just have a really dull one from staring at a screen for too long… it doesn’t particularly bug me and, if anything, I was pretty good with screen-time-focus today. Anyway, I leave work and go to bible study at Ant and Sarah’s flat, and am completely fine (if remarkably full of food following dinner and Ant’s, err, “21st” cake) until we’re praying… at which point I shut my eyes again and am completely unable to concentrate on what’s going on around me. I’m more aware of a headache when I open my eyes again, but it’s not significant.

Later, Gem is driving back home (for which I’m so thankful, because, as will become clear, I really shouldn’t have been driving) and I shut my eyes for a moment — you know that moment, as a passenger at night where you can just lean your head back and enjoy darkness, momentary rest? Then, by the time I open them again (two seconds later, max), everything is that much worse. I really want to go back to puzzles in my head to distract from (now apparently oncoming) migraine.

This is all really strange. These things aren’t meant to happen on their own, its some weird reflex that’s meant to happen when you’re allowed to shut your eyes and clench your teeth to respond to headaches, not before… time to crash. Speaking of which, that’s what I’m going to do now. *rearranges puzzles/sleeps*

Anyway! Digression aside, I was using IE5.5+‘s filter thing (pretty well documented PNG fix with some caveats… it’s the best we can do until IE7 in all its splendiferous glory dribbles from Microsoft’s front door. Don’t ask me where that came from.) with great success, but for the incessant security warnings every time I loaded the page. Yeah, great, this really looks usable. Not. Every twit using XPSP2 is going to be pretty happy to stay on a page when their browser is blurting security warnings at them… and don’t get me started on IE7’s proposed phishing alert thing that lets users report false positives. Dumb users (i.e. 97% of the population) are going to be scared away regardless, and malicious users (i.e. 2% of the population) are going to write viruses that exploit the reporting mechanism to let sites through.

Wow. This is a really windy post.

Okay. On topic (hah!). The moral of the story is, don’t execute web pages locally. IE won’t trust you. However, if it’s on any random web server (I ended up installing Apache on loopback), IE is perfectly happy to let it execute whatever the hell weird kinda code it wants. And that, kiddies, is why we all love Microsoft.

Business was good, but for one question, the details of which I don’t exactly recall (23 c), which was so poorly written only BS teachers could manage it. It depresses me to think there are people that can spend that much of their life professionally applying buzzwords and doing absolutely nothing. Your mother was a hampster and your father smelt of elderberries! Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!

And they did. The wonders of Monty Python!

So, today, I plan to spend some time doing stuff with Tori because she’s about to fly away for… a long time… and then when I get home/before I go out play with Cinelerra, which, miraculously, I finally have working well. The secret is to ignore the stupid DEB and go straight for the RPMs with alien, which makes the experience remarkably painless. Err… in a totally non-abducted-by-aliens kind of way.

ANYWAY! My biggest qualm with it is its render/batch render thing, not because it’s slow (it is, kind of, but that’s mostly just the way I’ve got this computer setup), but because it seems impossible to export in a format that everything likes (aside from straight raw DV, which I haven’t tried because I need to put another hard disk in this computer. I would have, but I’m out of IDE channels and really need to think about how to store things properly.)

At the minute, I’m generally rendering in MPEG-4 (ffmpeg) and then effectively transcoding back to MPEG-4 using mplayer to make it more player-friendly. I take it the codec is exactly the same, it’s just that Cinelerra seems to have some quirk that means only mplayer can read the rendered file, whilst xine and VLC fall over and promptly die.

Shrug. I’ve just been editing video sequences, though, so at least I haven’t had to deal with audio as well. One would presume that would be rather less painless — it’s not, at least not in terms of setting up Cinelerra for audio playback/NLE stuff. Despite having both ALSA and esound output options, ALSA would just make it crash (this seems widely documented with no fix available), and esound wouldn’t work because… well… I don’t think my local esound server has a port open, and Cinelerra, being some broadcast-quality high-and-mighty piece of crap, decides that talking to a local sound server is beneath it. Ironically, the simplest of the lot, OSS, worked without any difficulties… but that of course means I can only have one sound stream going simultaneously. Which, admittedly, isn’t a huge problem when you’re trying to work in Cinelerra (it’s hardly as though you want other sounds going on whilst you’re trying to edit audio), but disabling the server, etc, can be a little bit of a pain.

I went to buy a three-pack of 24 exposure 35mm film for my SP 500 today, and, because it was on special (probably because the film expires next month), treated myself to Kodak’s over-marketed offering that I’ve always been a little dubious about. Disclaimer at this point — I don’t think there’s anything technically wrong with the film by any stretch of the imagination. I’m sure it’ll produce great shots. But the branding and marketing of this doesn’t exactly assist the photographer (I so nearly wrote “end user” there — must get out more.) in capturing great shots, at least not in terms of exposure.

To explain: this film is billed as being multi-purpose. It does everything. Apparently. It also does it well. Apparently.

Okay, nothing wrong with that. You could use good quality ISO100 stock to do “everything”, albeit with a little bit of pain. By the same token, this film stock does “everything”. It’d just help if I’d known what I was using before I got home and had time to look up the specs online.

The bottom line is this: on the exterior packaging there is absolutely no mention of the speed of the film enclosed, aside from fleeting comparisons to other Kodak products, saying “look, this is better, it does more stuff” — never mind that if you inspect closely it’s actually slightly different stuff. Deceptive marketing certainly plays a part in the problem.

So, I couldn’t find information about that anywhere on the packaging. I loaded it into my camera and ran off a roll of it, with the ISO speed set to 400 (that’s something I’d personally consider fairly useful, if not overly versatile — certainly something I’d consider probable if they’re marketing a consumer brand high-quality stock), trying not to worry too much about it.

Yeah, a recipe for disaster.

I got home, checked Kodak’s specs, and it turns out the film was ISO/ASA/DIN/whatever you want to call it 200 speed film. Nothing I can do about it now, of course, apart from hope that post-processing will be able to clean up the underexposed mess. I went and had a closer look at the cartridge after I’d thought about it for a bit, and it does say the speed on the side of it — but of course, I didn’t think to check this until I’d already wound the film on, so even had I thought of it at the time it wasn’t the best option.

Why can’t film manufacturers label their products more thoroughly and cut down on overhyped marketing that fails to actually inform the consumer of what their product is?

So that’s exciting. I’d post pictures, but just imagine any generic curvy CRT TV and you’ve got the right idea. ;) It wasn’t really worth the time it’d take to find the camera, take a photo, come upstairs, upload photo, resize photo, login and upload via FTP, and then figure out the path to the file for inclusion in this post!

It also has wonderful wonderful mono sound, but that’s okay, because we’ve got a nice Sony system hooked up for that… at least the audio side of things is pretty good quality, even if the vision is functional but far from excellent (Infinitely better than the 20-or-30-something year old set we used to use as the main TV, though!)…

Later: As a direct result of the wonders of procrastination, I ventured downstairs with a camera and took a photo of a perfectly boring TV.

There you go.

The USB drive has gone some way to alleviating the pain, but still, it’s not as good as direct access to my network, especially in terms of live editing of remote sites… not that I’d ever do such a thing! Best practice be damned. ;-)

Yes… if anyone has one they want to lend/sell (even if it’s only 10Mbit, that’s fine), then get in touch via the contact form, or just email me.

Die, bitch
May your days be filled with insufferable pain
It’s not like I ate my sister’s brain
She deserved it, stupid horse
I’ve decided to eat her, pass the sauce!
Kristen is a Novotel
Tori is a Novotel as well.
The hotel industry is huge
Ebenezer Scrooge
is pegging pegs on Josh

There is no rational explanation for any of this.

How cool are dogs? I finally met Tuffy “The Man” Holloway today, Sam’s little dog, and one of the few I know which has a website dedicated to it. He is such an attention seeker! Very cute, though… also very fluffy. My dog, Dumbledore, currently has a short haircut, which I think I prefer… he stays clean, and doesn’t smell as bad!

The other cool thing about dogs is that even when they do bite you playfully, it doesn’t hurt… and, if it does, then at least they realise you’re in pain! Tori’s cat isn’t too good like that… aptly named “Psycho”, she (? I think it’s a she…) was hanging off my leg the other day, in between attempting to consume my hand. You can tell they’re related to tigers, which, incidentally, eat an average of 18 kilograms of meat a night… how insane is THAT?

A note, for anyone who is looking to implement not-overly-documented dropdown menus — read your base source file in its entirety before even contemplating trying to implement. It was two lines. Two bloody lines of JavaScript which turned into a ~1 hour nightmare search — not to mention time which I haven’t counted, because it was hackish, not goal-oriented coding. Of course, the longer spent, the more it hurts to find out exactly what I’d missed.

  var ddmx = new DropDownMenuX('topnav');
  ddmx.init();

Those two lines. So much pain!

Oh, and just to clear up any confusion, the acronym which is the title of this news post ends in D, for “Document”. Not “dotcom” or anything stupid like that ;)