People who don’t wear socks:
Indigenous people.
Surfers/beach people.
The homeless.
Hippies.
Third-worlders.
Double amputees (legs only).
Vice cops from the 80’s.

I think I might be on to something. I don’t really care about any of those people.

Actually, I don’t know what the problem was. I removed the plugins from the directory on the server, and it finally started to work. It’ll probably be another three years before I get around to figuring out which plugin caused the problem. No matter- I really just wanted to try out the new WordPress iPhone App.

As part of my ongoing obsession with converting and storing video on the Mac, one of the obvious tools I’ve looked at for converting from .avi files .mp4 files QuickTime. Assuming you can get your video to play (hint: http://www.divx.com/), Quicktime Pro has an Export feature that produces very acceptable video using the H.264 codec.

Since there didn’t seem to be any mechanism for batch processing, I looked into using Applescript to automate the task. I found numerous examples online that almost did what I needed, but nothing that was exactly right. In every case, the format was wrong, and the script in question did way more than I wanted. So here’s the bare bones, stripped down AppleScript code for…

…saving MPEG4 export settings to an external file:

tell app "QuickTime Player"
    tell first movie
        save export settings for MPEG4 to file "Users:yourname:MPEG4 Settings"
    end tell
end tell

…and converting an .avi file to an .mp4 using a saved external settings file:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
    activate
    close every window
end tell
tell application "QuickTime Player"
    open "Data:Upload:Harvey Birdman - 4x02 - Incredible Hippo.avi"
    if (can export front movie as MPEG4) then
        set theTime to duration of front movie
        with timeout of theTime seconds
            export front movie to ("Data:Upload:Harvey Birdman - 4x02 - Incredible Hippo.mp4") as MPEG4 using settings file "Users:yourname:MPEG4 Settings"
        end timeout
    end if
end tell
quit application "Quicktime Player"

One of the projects I’ve been working on for a while now, for example, is documentation on encoding DVDs and AVI files for iTunes/AppleTV. So far, I’ve documented my hardware setup, and the method I use for ripping and encoding DVDs, as well as tools I use to convert AVI files to compatible MP4 files. This documentation, though, only accounts for half, maybe a quarter of what I’ve implemented. I’ve got scripts for automating the converting process and moving the files back and forth between several computers, scripts for grabbing Plot, Relase Dates, Ratings and Posters from iMDB and automatically adding them to iTunes. I’ve got scripts for displaying parsing iTunes and uploading all that data to my web page, so I have remote access to view the movies in my collection.

None of this is documented yet. In fact, I find myself reluctant to continue to develop new features and new scripts because I don’t want the divide between the code and the documentation to grow any more than it already has. At the same time, the weight of the documentation is high, the desire do it is low, and the call of Oblivion is strong.

Doing nothing isn’t even a guaranteed method to preventing the Documentation Divide¹ from growing. My windows system started to go south, so I was forced to buy a new computer ahead of a schedule (a shiny new Intel-basic Mac mini; I call it Cletus).

Not only does this render most of my existing documentation obsolete (or at least irrelevant), it means that my model changes from a cross-platform, Frankenstein style system running on multiple machines to an integrated application running on a single box. Development gets easier, new features are possible, and my audience goes from three people who happen to be running the same outdated, multi-cultural hardware setup as me to anyone running a halfway decent Mac. The gulf between what’s documented and what I’m running is wider than ever, and finally having the speedy new Mac I wanted probably means it will continue to grow.

… and maybe that’s the lesson here. When I started this blog, I made the slogan “The Blog is Not the Point” as a reminder to myself that this was a web log, and that my projects were more important than usage statistics, getting Dugg, or trying to generate ad revenue. That same slogan can be equally effective in reminding myself that I don’t have to wait for my blog to catch up with the code before I get back to work: the Blog is Not the Point.

1. Someone make a note of the term “Documentation Divide”. If there isn’t already a phrase for this phenomenon, I want to nominate this.

As of OS X 10.4.10, at least, the Mac Address has the concept of “Primary” email addresses, phone numbers and street addresses for each contact, but you cannot change them unless you install a plug-in.

In retrospect, my title, “Buy a new Mac now to avoid having to pay for Leopard on your old Macs”, was probably my first mistake. Not only does it sound like an ad and sound like piracy, it sounds like an ad about piracy. In my own defense, though, I swear that it didn’t occur to me that I was advocating piracy; I thought I was just pointing out a good deal. But no, let’s be clear: you can only install your copy of OS X on a single computer unless you purchase the family pack.

To be fair, though, I was suggesting that people buy a new Mac, which, at the absolute minimum will run you about $600… and I was suggesting it to people who already own at least one Mac. In other words, even if you’ve already made a significant financial investment, and you make an additional financial investment, it’s still piracy; people will yell at you if you suggest it.

This is why people hate Mac users.

1. Which actually sounds like the Internet in a nutshell, now that I think about it

I just bought a new mini to replace my ailing Windows PC, and it came with a model-specific install/restore disc labeled “Mac mini: Mac OS X Install Disc”. Had I waited and bought a machine that shipped with Leopard, I wouldn’t be able to use that disc to upgrade my Quicksilver, my Powerbook, or (presumably) my old G4 mini. If I wanted to update those machines, I would be forced to spend $120 on a retail copy.

However, through December 31st Apple is offering a copy of Leopard for $10 to anyone who purchases a new Mac that comes with Tiger. If history is any indication, that disc should work for all models, and you’ll save $110.

Updated 10/21/2007: It’s been pointed out to me that, assuming that the Leopard software license matches the Tiger software license (PDF), installing this on more than one machine would be considered piracy, so I no longer officially advocate this course of action. Apologies to Apple, and to all the people who worked hard to make OS X a great operating system.

Finish Video Server series.

I got off to a good start with my series of entries on ripping and encoding files for my iTunes/AppleTV video server, but I’m sort of stuck on what was to be the final entry- adding meta-data to the files to make them pretty. It comes down, in part, to not being sure how to distribute a couple of accompanying scripts. They’re too long to post as part of the entry, so they’ll need to be archived and put up for download as a tar file. The real sticking point, though, is that they need more documentation, and I just haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.

Rework skedevel.com.

Moving skettle.com to skedevel.com was far simpler than I’d hoped, but that was only the first step. I need to reduce the complexity of the site, removing the ill-conceived user-centric directory structure for public facing content, and making everything function privately. In other words, go back to a log-in to use the tools model, and decide after the fact what is publicly accessible. The .site.com model is great for complex social-networking type sites, but since I don’t hve much interest in doing that, the complexity is making everything else three times more difficult. While I’m in there, I also need to streamline the database access and see if I can come up with a way to benchmark the capacity of the site. It would be nice to know exactly what kind of pounding the codebase could take.

Implement OpenID on skettle.com.

I was driving back from Sacramento one night when I had a revelation about how one might implement decentralized centralized user authentication for Websites. When I started looking around to see if anyone was doing what I was thinking about, I found that the guys at sxip.org were doing almost exactly what I had thought of, though there were some issues with the implementation at the time. I carefully weighed my options, and rather than using my copious free time and obvious genius to get involved and fix the perceived problems, I think I elected to watch TV and play video games. Eventually the sxip technology morphed in OpenID, and, for the most part, it seems to work. I implemented one of the early incarnations of the library for the skedevel.com code, and for all I know it still works, but I’ve been less successful finding a good WordPress plugin. One guy seems pretty close, and if he hasn’t released a stable version by the time to get around to working on this, I’ll try playing around with his beta.

Unit testing and monitoring precautionmail.com.

One of my chief goals is to build a codebase I can use for rapid development of new sites. I had two sites in mind when I started, and one of them, precautionmail.com, I already built before realizing that it wasn’t very exciting and not something I had any desire to work on long term. However, that doesn’t mean don’t want to it stay up and running. Since it’s running on the same alpha code that runs skedevel.com, there’s a very real chance that any changes I make on skedevel will break precautionmail, and it’s unlikely I’d notice it for weeks, since, let’s face it, precautionmail is boring, and there’s not a lot of incentive to make sure it’s working properly. Therefore, I need to implement some sort of functionality to monitor that the major functions of the site are working correctly, beyond just some sort of simple pattern matching HTTP check (though that would be a good start). Since fully testing the site involves logging in, writing a message, and verifying that it was delivered after a preset period of time, there could be some fairly major engineering involved.

Find a new WordPress theme.

When I first implemented WordPress, I liked the default theme, and I thought that most people using WordPress would change the theme- thus rendering my site, using the default, kind of original. I don’t know if that’s the case or not, but I have decided that it’s always lame to use the default. Even I were the only one in world doing it, I would still be lame, because using the default is lame almost by definition.