Daniel Von Fange

Small town death.

I bought my car from "JP". My his son taught my brother how to drive. I've fixed JP's wife's computer. JP died in a motorcycle accident this week.

On the way to church yesterday, I saw that a gas station's sign said "We will truly miss you JP Patterson".

Hissss.

Turned off the car tonight, ready for sleep. Heard a hissing noise coming from one of the rear tires. Inspection reveals a screw poking in. I guess I'll have a flat to deal with in the morning before I start driving off to an AM event.

Hey, here is a chance to not get upset. :)

Voting for Bush.

So who am I voting for?

While Bush definitely not perfect, and I disagree with his "big government" approach to domestic issues, I think Kerry would spend even more than Bush. As far as overseas war issues are concerned, it's pretty much no contest. Kerry will chicken out if the going gets tough, and both world leaders and terrorist know this. Bush has followed a consistent plan, which while not perfect has a good chance of working.

Come elections, I'm voting for Bush. This scrappleface article pretty much sums up my opinion of Kerry:

"He's a profoundly moral man, yet a man who never lets his morality dictate his policies. Like John F. Kennedy, Mr. Kerry won't be a Roman Catholic president, he'll be a president who says that he's a Roman Catholic."

"Perhaps the most impressive feature of Mr. Kerry's campaign can be encapsulated in a single sentence: 'I have a plan.' With that uncharacteristically succinct quartet of monosyllabic words, he has captured the imagination of the nation in a fashion reminiscent of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."

...

"For all these crises and more, Mr. Kerry has a plan. We know that it's a great plan, because he can't tell us what it is until he sits in the Oval Office. It's a very presidential plan. It's not a mere legislative plan, otherwise Mr. Kerry would have introduced it as a bill during his 19 years in the senate. No, this plan is something grand, something majestic, something unexpected, mysterious and special."

Anyway. :)

TextMate Todo.

I just changed to having my "todo lists" in TextMate. Previously I've used Omni Outliner and Tinderbox, but I wanted to experience the unix way for a few months. Pervasive user scripting inside a text editor is a major mental shift.

Here is a bit of scripting that fetches my current assigned tickets from our project's trac site and replaces my current selection with todo items for the tickets:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
# Note: This script requires ruby 1.8

require 'open-uri'
require "rexml/document"

puts

xml = open("http://devsupport/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/report/4?format=rss").read
rss = REXML::Document.new xml
rss.elements.each("//item[author/text()='DanielVonFange']/title") { |element|
   task = /(\#[0-9]+): (.+)/.match(element.text)
   puts "[ ] #{task[2]} - #{task[1]}"
}

Another small script is for my completed todo items. I click on a line, press command-shift-D, and the todo item vanishes from the list, and appears in a log file along with the time that I finished it, and what file it came from.

Log entry:

[X] Blog Textmate converting me to a unix head - Tasks rip, GTD completion.
      in Blog 08:48 20041019 Tue

Log script:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

task_text = $stdin.read
task_text.gsub!(/\[ \] /,"[X] ")

from = File.basename(ARGV[0],".txt")

File.open("/Users/dvf/Documents/Writing/Life/plan/Completed.txt",'a'){|archive_file|
   archive_file.puts
   archive_file.puts task_text
   archive_file.puts "      in #{from} #{`date \"+%H:%M %Y%m%d %a\"`}"
}

This script must be saved to a file, and then called as command, passing along the name of the current file being edited. So it the command in TextMate would look something like this:

ruby /path/to/script/task_completed.rb  $TM_FILEPATH

These are just quick hacks, but I'm slowly learning the way of the scripted editor.

SMIL.

I needed to display four separate sets of video and pictures across four monitors hooked up to one computer. The images needed to be shown at the full 1600×1200 resolution of the monitors, while the video needed to be scaled up to that size. While bumping around, I ran across Quicktime's support for SMIL, a W3C standard for munging video, audio and pictures together.

After a little bit of learning I've written a ruby script that goes through a folder of media for each screen, and creates an XML file to present it. It works well.

Everybody loves free speach.

On the internet, you tend to subconsciously assume that all individuals are in favor of free speech. I've just had a little bit of a wake-up call. Russian blogger Greycardinal writes on the placing of a Russian newsman under virtual house arrest.

I had to LMAO when I read this. Traitor Babitsky then whiner Politkovskaya and now the ever maliciously insinuating Yuri Bagrov.

I mean lets tell truth here-why they would even think this could be a direct or indirect result of their work if they were not already aware that they were guilty of being less then honest in their writings?

Split Screen Acting.

One day this week, my sister decided to shoot a movie in an evening. She wrote a script and then played all six parts herself. Rather impressive. However the necessity of only having one of herself onscreen at a time was rather limiting.

Remembering the spilt screen technique used in the Parent Trap, I wanted to try to duplicate the effect.

First, we shot a conversation with me filling in for the duplicate Elizabeth. We had a conversation, then switched places on the couch and then said each others lines. Having a real live person to speak back too vastly improves the naturalness and timing of the footage.

I then imported the video into Final Cut, and selected a frame to use for the base of my mask. I imported that frame into photoshop and divided the two scene areas with a selection. I followed the line of the couch (probably unnecessary, but they always tried to follow lines in the Disney ones.) I then blurred my mask by about 3 pixels, so that there would be a smooth transition between the two areas.

Back in Final Cut, I lined up the video tracks, and applied the mask to upper one. Then for the audeo, everytime I was speaking in an audio track, I keyframed the audio track level to off.

The final result came out pretty good.

Laszlo goes Open Source.

The rich web application toolkit Laszlo just went open source. I've wanted to mess with Laszlo for a while, now maybe I can find an excuse.

The Laszlo in ten minutes area allows you to step through the basics of writing Laszlo's xml file, and get live feedback on your modifications of their tutorial. It's a great way to get a feel for simple development.

Whoo hoo.