Video imperfection

I left a previous blog post about my adventures with presentations and video on OS X hanging slightly, by not explaining whether I was successful in crunching a Quicktime video out of my Keynote presentation.

The story so far: I wanted to create a video slideshow + audio track from a Keynote presentation. I had an MP3 of the audio (thanks to Roo), and was trying to glue that together with a Quicktime stream of the slides and transitions. I’d found Keynote’s Quicktime export unsatisfactory, iMovie 6 editing facilities inadequate, and import of static images of the slides into iMovie produced low quality material.

In the end, I was successful. I exported images from Keynote; purchased Still Life to create an iMovie project; downsampled the MP3 track to a lower quality but still acceptable 8kbps using Audacity [NB this step was crucial to creating a final file that was of a reasonable size]; imported the MP3 track into iMovie and then copied each slide frame enough times to cover the time I was speaking over it. Finally, I bought QT Pro and VisualHub to give me more control over the Quicktime file output. The key things in reducing the video size turned out to be downsampling the audio and not worrying too much about compression since the slides were basically static images.

Result: a 45 min presentation which is about 70Mb in size, including speaker audio and audience questions. I’m happy with that.

A week or so after all of these shenanigans, Apple released iWork 08. I’d only bought iWork 06 four weeks previously, and was told that there was no upgrade pricing. The first time Apple has significantly upset me in my 6 month relationship with them.

Anyway, Keynote 08 contains a new Voice-over Recording mode. I gave it a quick try in the Apple Store on Regent Street before I bought iWork 08, and it seemed OK. Unfortunately, my fellow IBMer and Apple zealot Ian Smith has taken a closer look at it, and reports that it gets out of sync. Not good news. I had been hoping to revise my presentation and re-record it so that I could put it up on Slideshare. I might still try to do that just to see whether I suffer from the same problems that Ian discovered.

There has been a lot of controversy over iMovie 08 – it doesn’t open projects created in iMovie 6 by default, and I’m not sure that I’d even be happy trying to do what I did before with the new version, having heard about its deficiencies.

Ian has taken a look at the issues around HD video and the Mac, too… it sounds like there’s still no nirvana here, even though iMovie 08 now supports AVCHD and HDD-based video cameras, there are still a bunch of limitations.

I’m not into video work into a big way, but Ian is. Check out his analysis of the current state of play. He’s worth listening to.

Technorati tags: Ian Smith, Apple, iMovie, Keynote, presentations, video, video editing, Quicktime, Mac, OS X

Virtual Worlds and online shopping

We’ve had Sears and Circuit City as examples of what can be done with real world retail in virtual worlds for a while now. Essentially these stores attempt to replicate some of the real-life shopping environment, but with hyperlinks off to product pages on their website when a customer wants to know specifics about individual products. They have some other nice touches, too – check them out on IBM 10.

Yesterday, Jazzydee Raymaker showed me around the IWOOT sim in Second Life. This is the SL presence of I Want One Of Those, which is an online store for gadgets and goodies. I passed the recommendation on to epredator, who posted about it on eightbar.

The IWOOT store takes the virtual world <-> real world retail connection one step further. You pick up a cart, and can then walk around looking at the billboards. Click on an item, and a package appears in the cart, labelled with an image of the item you just added to it. This is synced up with the I Want One Of Those website, so it’s actually adding items to your shopping cart there too.

Oh, and if you go away from the virtual store and come back tomorrow, the cart is persistent and remembers what you’d already added, so when it rezzes a second time, the same items will still be there.

What’s the benefit? Surely all we did there was to go another step towards replicating a real world experience. Why bother?

Well, it’s a step up from a 2D web page for online shopping, and here’s why:

• It’s a social experience, more like really walking into a store. Jazzy was on the other side of the planet, but I was able to hop on the side of the virtual cart and look around the store at the same time.
• I was able to comment on the items in the trolley. You can’t do that on a website, as you don’t know who is already looking at the page, or what they have in their cart. You can do that in the real world. Apparently this is how supermarket singles nights are supposed to work, but obviously I wouldn’t know about that…
• IWOOT doesn’t currently have one, but they could mix in a live adviser. Although some websites have a “chat to a customer service representative online now” option, most do not.
• It would also be possible to mix in some of the special touches that Circuit City or Sears do have, like the couch that gets repositioned according to the size of the TV.

Is it better than a real world store? Well, maybe not. Could I have been in a real store with someone and also on the other side of the planet from them? Definitely not. But here, all the usual arguments for online shopping apply – you can stay at home, have stuff delivered, but also get the social aspect of being with friends and visual feedback. There are a range of other ways to get value from a virtual world – Jasmin Tragas describes some of them in a great recent post.

I found IWOOT to be an interesting new way of looking at online retail. It’s a well-executed store. Check it out.

(sorry about the screencaps. I forgot I had SL set to capture with the UI included… by the way, lighting effects by RenderGlow…)

Technorati tags: retail, I Want One Of Those, Second Life, virtual worlds, IBM

Augh. Video editing torture…

Earlier this week I gave a talk at an internal IBM conference.

I broke with tradition by using Apple Keynote to produce the slides, rather than Powerpoint. I love Keynote. The application is a joy to use; the rendering is beautiful; the slide transitions are lovely. It does seem to encourage me to think about not using bulleted slides, which can only be a good thing. Oh, and the presenter view is amazing – you can drag and drop different elements and create your own customised display, something that PPT does not offer.

So, presentation done. Roo was kind enough to use his voice recorder to record the session… OK, so it was in WMA format, but iTunes quickly converted that to MP3 for me. Slides, plus audio. Looking good.

On the audio side, I was able to use Audacity to balance the levels where the audience questions were a bit faint, and to cut out a few extraneous umms which trimmed the length of the talk a bit. It is a shame Audacity isn’t slightly more OS X-like, but I guess things like the lack of drag-and-drop support are largely the fault of the wxWidgets toolkit that Audacity is built on.

I really wanted to export the slideshow from Keynote as a Quicktime presentation, preserving the nice transitions. As it happens, that is possible, but you can only set a defined transition time which is the same for each slide. That meant that it would be hard to match the audio to the slide transitions, since obviously the length of time for each one, varied. I tried this anyway, loading both the video and audio into iMovieHD, and then had a go at cutting the movie up and matching it with the audio cues.

There’s a problem here. You apparently can’t stretch the duration of each video segment. So, I then thought about making still frames to go in between each slide transition. Another problem – the quality of the still frames created by iMovie was awful. OK… so then I tried exporting from Keynote as static images, and importing those into iMovie. Same problem – even after I’d got past the Ken Burns effect thing which was zooming each image as I added it as a movie frame, the still images themselves were an order of magnitude uglier than the main video.

At this point I was getting seriously frustrated with Apple’s flagship, easy-to-use, included-with-the-OS, just-buy-a-Mac-video-editing-is-a-breeze, iLife suite.

It turns out that iMovieHD uses some poor quality encoder to import and export still images. I don’t know whether this is to encourage users onto the £199 Final Cut Express, but it sucks. I tried exporting a slideshow from iPhoto, but that has limitations on the duration of each frame, too. Oh, and the transitions available in iMovie are not the same as those in iPhoto, which in turn are not the same as those in Keynote. Argh.

Next I downloaded Still Life, and had a play. This is a relatively cheap ($25/£15) application which is intended to build simple slideshows with more advanced panning, whilst retaining decent quality in the stills.

In the end, I exported my slides as images from Keynote, imported them into Still Life, set a duration for each slide of 5 sec, and then exported from Still Life as an iMovie project. Result: I had an iMovie project which had a series of 5 second frames. I imported my MP3 commentary track, and then repeatedly copied the frames so that each slide lasted for the relevant length of time whilst I was speaking on the audio track. Tedious, and I lost the pretty transitions, but it has worked.

My final challenge has been exporting the movie. iMovie provides some defaults, like full quality (estimated to produce a 9Gb file in my case – a lot for a 45 min slideshow with a bit of audio), DVD or Web. The Web version is pretty small and crunches my slides into a 320×240 frame, but it does come in at an acceptable size of 40Mb. The larger size I exported, at 640×480 frame size, ended up at 600Mb. Cote recommended VisualHub, which I’m also going to take a look at. I mean, it’s not even as if this is complex video – it’s a series of still frames with some audio underneath. I would have liked a bit more complexity, in all honesty, but it seems that was too hard to achieve with built-in tools.

I guess there was an alternative to all of this… I could have cut up my audio file into sections for each slide, attached them in Keynote, and exported in a format of my choice (Flash or QT, I suppose). It assumes that Keynote is smart enough to show each slide for the duration of the attached audio file. Maybe I’ll try that next time. Or maybe some Mac, presentation, and video editing guru will just slap me down and tell me what I did wrong. This whole thing felt a lot harder than I expected it to be.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iMovie, iPhoto, keynote, Mac, OS X, presentation, visualhub, Still Life, video, video editing

Getting set for Hack Day

I’ve mentioned that a few of us from IBM are going to be at Hack Day already.

Well, it is this weekend, and I think I’m mostly set. All I need to do is get up far earlier than I would on the average Saturday.

Lots to play around with… I’ve installed the Bonjour-enabled Twitterific client so that I can identify other Twitterers, and I’ve joined the Plazes group. I’m thinking there is likely to be some Java, SWT, Applescript, Eclipse, Sametime, Bluetooth, Mac OS, Second Life, Twitter / Jaiku / Plazes / Facebook / Flickr action on my part - as well as a lot of photographs when I get there. If you’re coming, I’ll be part of the developerWorks group: come and say hello.

The best part so far has been poking around the official backnetwork site and finding the number of people I’ve met before through e.g. Minibar and other events, people who know people I know (Dale has pointed me at a friend of his, for instance, and Roo knows Babbage), people who have commented on my blog in the past, or bloggers whose work I read regularly. It should be a great event for extending some of those contacts. I’ll need to have my Moo cards with me

We have competition from Interesting 2007, of course. I hope I can follow the coverage of that event, too. Continuous Partial Attention, here I come.

Technorati tags: Hack Day, hackdaylondon, London, BBC, Yahoo, IBM, Twitter, Plazes, social networking

Attacking social networking

A couple of fellow bloggers have noticed the BBC’s apparent attack on social networking tools. Dennis and Euan both highlight reports such as yesterday’s one about bloggers getting sacked for their postings. When I read that, I did think to myself that it was scaremongering… clearly people need to be aware about what they write, but I have a fair amount of faith in the common sense of individuals, and besides, responsible companies have blogging guidelines to enable people to navigate this scary new world of the editable web…

Then, of course, we have Stephanie Booth’s appearance on News 24 this week, answering typical alarmist questions about the “dangers” of the Internet (and a good job she did of replying to them, too).

As I drove in to work this morning, I heard a very silly story on the Today programme on Radio 4. Their journalist, Rory Cellan-Jones, was investigating whether Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter were any use. His conclusion appeared to be that he was too old for them, since he didn’t end up with any friends once he’d signed up (apart from the ubiquitous Tom on MySpace, and the founders of Bebo, once he’d pleaded with them to be his friend!). He also derided Twitter, commenting that people seemed to talk too much about mowing the lawn – ironically I do have one friend who talked about his lawn this week, but I typically find Twitter far more useful than that. He could have mentioned the status broadcast, IM, location awareness and microblogging features, but presumably those would have been too advanced for the Today audience to cope with. It was a very bad item. I was shouting at the radio by the end of it.

The one good thing about the story was that the Bebo folks did make the point that the age profile is getting older as users grow up. I had a similar conversation with a local authority who came in to IBM Hursley today – I was presenting on Virtual Worlds and talking about the fact that youngsters are driving the technology change and bringing social networking tools, and ultimately “games technology” and virtual worlds, into the enterprise.

Of course the week began with alarmist reporting about the dangers of wireless networks. Suw twittered and bsag wrote a commentary on that programme, so I won’t go into it myself.

So, in essence, we’ve now had a week of “the BBC beats up on social networking and the Internet”. A concerted effort? I do have to wonder. And to what end? The BBC already makes a big deal about its own blogs and talks a lot about Web 2.0, and then lays into the tools that are out there. Weird.

Partly as a reaction to today’s news story, I finally signed up for Facebook. Within a couple of hours of Twittering my presence there, I have a bunch (well, 10) friends – and those are only a few of my contacts from other networks. I really need to go and explore some of the groups and look up old friends and contacts from elsewhere – I’ll do that once I get some time.

(annoyingly, onxiam.com is not currently accepting my new identity – hope they get that fixed soon!)

Technorati tags: BBC, Web 2.0, social software, social networking, Stephanie Booth, Euan Semple, Dennis Howlett, Suw Charman, bsag, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Bebo, onxiam, identity, Rory Cellan-Jones, Radio 4, Today, Second Life, Virtual Worlds

Hostnames and MQ Explorer

I haven’t blogged about my day job for a while, but an interesting technical issue came up today.

A customer was trying to add a new queue manager to MQ Explorer. However, they could not enter the hostname into the relevant field in the GUI.

It turned out that the hostname had_an_underscore character in it. The entry field in MQ Explorer prevents the user from entering this character.

This restriction makes sense. As per several RFCs (RFC952, RFC1035, RFC1178) and the Wikipedia entry on hostnames, underscores_are_not_valid characters in hostnames.

… hostname labels can only be made up of the ASCII letters ‘a’ through ‘z’ (case-insensitive), the digits ‘0′ through ‘9′, and the hyphen. Labels can not start nor end with a hyphen. Special characters other than the hyphen (and the dot between labels) are not allowed, although they are sometimes used anyway. Underscore characters are commonly used by Windows systems but according to RFC 952 they are not allowed…

So, now you know.

A solution could be to reference the IP address of the queue manager in question, or possibly to alias the hostname in the hosts file so that it does not contain underscores. Note that I have not tested the latter solution, but it should work.

Technorati tags: MQ, IBM, WebSphere MQ, WMQ, MQ Explorer, GUI, hostname, RFC, IP address

Playing around with Skitch

I’m sat in Edinburgh airport and thought I’d have a play with Skitch.

Skitch is a new screenshot / drawing tool for OS X. It is currently in closed beta. The application is by plasq.com, the makers of Comic Life. It is ridiculously easy to use – and very cool.

The interface takes a little getting used to, as it departs from some of the UI conventions that we’ve come to expect. No menu bar. Preferences on the “back” of the window, more like a Dashboard widget. The tools and features are kept to a minimum. But, no problem – when you first start it, a small screencast leads you through the features and the way the tool works. It really is very easy.

You can quickly grab the screen, part of the screen, or take an iSight photo… and then resize it by dragging the window corners, which physically resizes the image inside it. To crop or expand, you grab the edges of the image inside the window, and drag. Once you’ve got something to play with, there are a series of simple drawing and shape tools, and a limited palette of colours. There is also a very cool text tool – simply start typing and your text will appear. To resize the text or change the thickness of the lines, there is a size slider on the left of the window.

Even cooler is the fact that all of the stuff that you do to the image is automatically done on layers, so text and lines can be moved around later – Skitch also keeps an image history so that you can quickly find stuff you’ve edited before.

To save, you simply “rip” off a tab at the bottom of the window, having typed a filename and chosen from one of the formats (JPG, PNG, SVF, PDF or the Skitch format which preserves layers, so that you can exchange the editable file with friends). There is also the ability to email, or you can upload to a web service like Flickr, an FTP server, or Skitch’s own mySkitch site at the click of a button.

I love it. It’s so simple. It took a little bit of getting in to, but now I’m using it more, I find it so quick and easy. Definitely one to watch, for Mac users.

As for Firefox, he’s not my friend anymore. Why use 70% of my CPU when there’s no network connection and the application is minimised and idle?

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OS X, plasq, preview, screenshot, skitch

RIA will lead to bad user interfaces?

Web Worker Daily makes the excellent point that the new wave of tools and technologies for building web applications could lead to some bad user interfaces:

With the wave of tools like Apollo, Microsoft’s Silverlight, and Sun’s JavaFX coming out, we’re going to have powerful visual design tools in the hands of developers who have little or no idea what works in graphic design.

Tools like widgets / gadgets have already made the whole desktop user experience much more fragmented. Does this matter?

I’d argue that too many application UIs have been built by low-level developers in the past, and have been far too complex. Back in the days when I produced software for UK schools[1], I used to think we[2] were good at this, but the fact is that we were developers and advanced users, and those kinds of individuals rarely understand what makes a good interface design.

Desktop environments like OS X and GNOME have tried to enforce consistency via user interface guidelines. I’ve read that Vista has a bunch of contradictory interfaces (“standard” buttons in different places with different icons and behaviours in different applications), but I haven’t played with it enough to know. Apple’s interfaces, and tools such as Adobe Lightroom, are far more user and task-centric (in my opinion), which is what makes them nice to use.

Will Rich Internet Applications make the computing experience more confusing for users, or will they be an unqualified success? I think there is certainly going to continue to be a case for understanding good interaction patterns and graphics and UI design.

[1] 15 years ago, fact fans…

[2] PTW Software, which I’m sure none of my readers will be aware of… we wrote educational software for RISC OS / Acorn computers

Technorati tags: user interface, UI, design, RIA, Apollo, Silverlight, JavaFX, Web Worker Daily

Speaking the language of business with SOA

Walking through terminal 2 at Heathrow on Monday morning, I saw one of the What Makes You Special* adverts near my gate.

I’ve been reading Sandy Carter’s recently-published book on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0. I’m about halfway through, so it’s possible that my opinions will change before I reach the end… but I thought I’d make a few points about it anyway.

The book is divided into three parts. The first talks about the business context – driving home the key point that SOA is all about business as well as IT. The second section talks about flexible IT to enable a flexible business, and has chapters covering the key concepts of SOA, governance, service granularity, and how Web 2.0 relates. The final part of the book (that I’ve not fully read!) is about how the concepts can be applied, and uses IBM as a case study as well as presenting some key “don’ts” for SOA implementations.

I have to say that it has struck a lot of chords with me. It probably all started with the fact that the first case study (on the importance of business processes) used a banking payment processing example, and I’ve done a significant amount of work in that area in the past five years! I’m also impressed by the business focus. As a techie I need to consciously switch my mind away from “hey, look at this cool new product feature!” towards “how can we use this stack of technology to improve business effectiveness”, and Sandy makes some great points in the early chapters that helped me to to do that. In particular, chapter 3 covers Component Business Modeling, which is an important concept in helping to align business and IT.

Quick aside: driving home from Sheffield last week, I listened to the recent Redmonk Radio episode about “Incremental SOA with NetManage”. I’ve been consulting on Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) – yes, pretty exclusive in the form of WebSphere MQ and Message Broker, but the specific form shouldn’t matter too much – for several years now, and a lot of what the guys talked about on the podcast made sense to me. It is common sense stuff. Although SOA is a potentially revolutionary model, trying to implement something as a “big bang” is generally not going to work – pick a smaller chunk of the business and technology, implement a small project (possibly one that does some form of wrapping of some legacy code to enable it as a service, as Archie Roboostoff of NetManage mentioned on the podcast – that can be a good demonstration of the value of the middleware), and build up from there.

Why mention that podcast? Well, as I listened to it, I was thinking “surely this incremental thing isn’t news?”, and I also decided in my own mind that SOA could be revolutionary, but it needed to be evolutionary too[1].

Sure enough, Sandy’s book talks a lot about choosing a place to start and building out from there. In the introduction to the book, IBM’s Steve Mills states that

An SOA is an evolutionary approach to building IT systems that is focused on solving business problems.

In a later chapter Sandy goes on to state that SOA is an evolution not a revolution (which made me jump since I’d essentially had the same thought last week – but again, this is common sense stuff to me). She also writes

A key to any SOA entry point is to start with a discrete project and then progress over time.

There are some pretty handy checklists in the book, too. Picking just a few of the “10 secrets for success” in implementing SOA, we have some of my favourites: #1 Get executive sponsorship, #2 align the troops (i.e. get people educated as to why the business is going down this road), and #7 … hop on the ESB!

Tying all of this into the Web 2.0 world, one example of flexible business that I picked out from the early chapters was

… the ability to … provide consistent multichannel access for customers to increase customer loyalty …

A couple of years ago, this was all about portals. Today the portals are still there as the user interface to the SOA, but enhanced with feeds, mashups, and other technologies which enable the access and improve the user experience.

If you are new to the concepts of SOA and wondering what the fuss is about, this is a useful book. It’s also a good summary / distillation of some of the key issues that we’ve come across over the past few years. Overall, worth a look.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to reconfigure an ESB for someone

Related link: Books by Sandy.

Disclosure: I received my copy of this book at no cost, but was going to buy a copy anyway.

[1] an unfortunate by-product of this is the way in which many of the standards are layered on top of one another, or reinventions of previous concepts – as an industry we seem never to want to throw anything away, so it gets wrapped, and then something newer comes along, so we wrap that last thing… still, at least XML has made this both easier, and more verbose

Technorati tags: Service oriented architecture, SOA, ESB, Enterprise Service Bus, Redmonk, IBM, Netmanage, Sandy Carter, Steve Mills, Web 2.0

Scrapbooks, now Scrapblogs

A few weeks ago I had a play with Tumblr. My “scrapbook” is still there, and getting automatically generated by my adding links to del.icio.us or finding new Plazes… but I haven’t done a great deal more with it.

Today I was reading Tara Hunt’s excellent HorsePigCow marketing uncommon blog and learned about Scrapblog, a new startup with yet more interactive web candy for us to play with. Except… this time, it’s really about building scrapbooks. It’s a very rich Flash-based application (possibly soon to run on Apollo) which allows you to build galleries and screenshows in a scrapbook style. You can upload photos directly or pull them from Flickr, Yahoo, Photobucket or Webshots; you can add “stickers” (logos and patterns), change backgrounds, add frames and text. Once you’ve done all that, you can publish your Flash-based Scrapblog on their site, or share the static images on Flickr, where you could create a photoset and run a slideshow in a similar way.

I liked it – very easy to use, with an “iLife” feel to it, and of course it just runs out of the browser. I don’t generally build these kind of slideshows, but this was fun to play with. You can take a look at the results.

Once you’ve uploaded the scrapblog, the site offers tagging, profiles, comments, and feeds – everything that we’d expect these days.

I’m not keen on the name, simply because I’m wary of all of the attempts to brand things as blogs when they are not. Other than that, a very cool site to play around with.

Scrapblog hasn’t formally launched yet, but if you read to the end of Tara’s post, you’ll discover a way in to try out the preview version.

Technorati Tags: apollo, flash, photos, scrapblog

Linux box progress

Back in November, I made a hopelessly failed attempt to upgrade my main Linux workstation from Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 6. This is a machine that I built myself – 2GHz AMD64 CPU, dual 160Gb SATA drives with software RAID 1 (mainly to protect my photos), NVIDIA graphics. The problem was that the upgrade process rendered the box unbootable – unable to find a kernel, and once I’d hacked at grub it was unable to load the relevant modules… I had to give up on it through lack of time.

This week I finally had some time to play. I was surprised to find that I hadn’t really missed the machine in 5 months, apart from the lack of access to my address book and quite a large number of photos. I knew that the data was at least safe, I just couldn’t get to it.

On Thursday I managed to get the system booting again. There had been two fundamental issues with the upgrade. The first was that the bootloader was broken. I had to boot into rescue mode, reinstall grub on both SATA drives, and hack the menu.lst file like this:

title RAID partition 1 Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=/dev/md3 rhgb quiet
initrd (hd0,0)/initrd-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.img

Now, this has the disadvantage that it is targetting a particular RAID drive – I need to look at making it disk-independent as it was before, but at least this is letting me load the kernel.

The second problem was that once it found the kernel image, it failed to load various modules (like via_sata, for example, which was fairly critical to the whole boot process). To fix this, I had to rebuild the initial RAM disk using mkinitrd… in the process discovering that I had obsolete options in modprobe.conf, like stuff telling scsi_mod to scan max_scsi_luns of 127, so I removed those.

Once I got the thing to boot, I had to clean up the networking, and then install months of Fedora updates.

The most important thing (!) about the whole process was that I wanted to get Beryl running for full GL-enhanced desktop goodness. I managed to do that this morning, although I had to reinstall the NVIDIA driver in order to prevent it from complaining about the GLcore module not being found, and then install the glx-utils package to get hold of all the glx programs like glxinfo and glxgears.

The final problem I’m faced with is overheating. It turns out that if the CPU runs at 1.6GHz or 2GHz it immediately heats up to ~75C and the system shuts itself down. This is despite having a fan+heatsink on the processor itself, and several fans in the machine… clearly not good enough. I’m currently running at 800MHz, which at least works. I need to find a better method of getting the machine cooled.

Posted whilst at White Leaf House [ plazes.com

Technorati Tags: beryl, Fedora, Linux, grub

Plazes: ecto Applescript, Dashboard widget

Regular readers will already know that I’m a big fan of Plazes. It is a service which, I think, deserves to have taken off more quickly.

The default Plazer application already integrates nicely with iChat, and will set my status to my current location. You can also get Applescripts that will enable other applications to do the same, for example Adium.

Last night, in a fit of interest, I hacked together my first ever Applescript. I recently read an article that described Applescript as “a hidden jewel in Apple’s crown”, and I have to say I was impressed. The blogging client I’m using, ecto, is scriptable – although I didn’t have anything to work from until I realised that the disk image had come with a bunch of example scripts, which I hastily installed for reference.

Making an XML-RPC call in Applescript is remarkably easy, and it was really simple to get hold of my current location – I used the Adium/Plazes script as an example, but the overall simplicity of the call really impressed me. After that, it was a straightforward matter of using an existing script that added text to the current draft to drop the location details into the post, and voila. The end of this post should demonstrate the capability.

I’ve uploaded the Applescript here.

1. Open the script in a text editor.
2. You will need to edit the script to put your Plazes username and password at the top. It will not work if you don’t do this.
3. If you wish to change the text that the script adds to a post, alter the contents of the _text variable about three quarters of the way down (be careful though).
4. Once you’ve made the changes, paste the script into the Script Editor and save it as Plazes.scpt, with a file format of script. The Script Editor should syntax highlight it all once it has been successfully saved as a script. Quit the Script Editor afterwards.
5. Move the script to ~/Library/Application Support/ecto/Scripts.
6. In ecto, choose Scripts->Plazes from the menu, and your location should appear in your current draft.

There’s one slightly frustrating feature of ecto – it apparently refuses to recognise the font-size style on the <p> tag and replaces it with lots of <span>s, and also replaces 10px with 10pt – not quite sure why that is yet.

Moving on from ecto, another interesting Plazes tool I’ve found is a Dashboard widget that displays a Google Map of your current location, and lets you find your contacts online. It is a bit rough around the edges, but I’ve been playing around with Apple’s new Dashcode tool and have tried making tweaks… I’ve dropped the author a line and hopefully he’ll want to resurrect it.

Posted whilst at White Leaf House [ plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: adium, applescript, dashboard, ecto, location awareness, Mac, OS X, plazer, Plazes, scripting, widget, XML-RPC