christophe thinks out loud

Goin' Mobile

I'm still enough of a geek at heart to be amazed by things like being able to write blog entries on my phone/PDA.

I'm off to the UK tomorrow for work. Lube vendors to visit, dildo makers and smut toy company owners to interview (that's the theory, at least). The other theory is that I'll replace my old Nokia 7110e with this PDA, just switching the SIM as required. Brave new world of global roaming.

The line between "crazy" and "talking on cell phone" continues to shrink daily.

When I was a boy, we had to make our anti-mind-control caps out of aluminum foil and hoodies from the Salvation Army or Goodwill. You tell the kids today, they just don’t believe it. They can just buy them off the rack.

Cool DVD Cases

DVD cases suck. Big time. They are cheap, nasty things with completely inadequate central hubs that allow the DVD to come loose and rattle around inside, scratching the sucker up and making it completely unplayable: In the jargon of the industry, what you then have is a “shaker.” Shakers are defectives, even if porn video manufacturers, skinflints one and all, try to persuade you otherwise. (“Oh, just push it back on. It’ll be fine.”)

At Blowfish, we inspect every single DVD that comes in to make sure it isn’t a shaker, and even so, some manage to get on the shelf (we also check them before we pack them, just in case). We get about 1-2% shakers, which is a ton of returns we have to send back to the manufacturer. DVD cases suck.

It looks like these cases may not suck. They certainly look cool. I’ve ordered some, and we might use them for future Blowfish Video productions. And if you need to re-box a DVD or CD, or put out a short-run title (attention, Apple Garage Band users!), this may be just the thing for you.

Eastgate Tinderbox

You would think that one of the most obvious uses for a laptop is to take notes. But until recently, I just couldn’t get into the habit. Too many years of taking notes in traditional notebooks. Word is too much in some ways (I spend too much time worrying about getting the text styles right), and not enough in some ways (if you need to start a new, but related, note stream, a new document seems like too big a jump, just hitting return five times seems not like not enough).

Then, I tried out Tinderbox from Eastgate. The initial learning experience, I must admit, was not instantaneous. It was a bit like having a new, eager personal assistant who only spoke Serbo-Croatian . . . the ability and desire to help was obvious, but we just didn’t speak each other’s language.

As with most international relationships, though, this problem was quickly overcome.

Tinderbox can be viewed in a variety of ways: As an outliner; as a lightweight database storing bits of text; as a fast note-taking utility. What’s cool about it is that you can use it in one fashion, then switch to another. For example, you can spend the entire morning taking notes a conference, and go back and organize them using the outlining features and the database functionality, without having to stop to think about those functions while taking notes. It is wonderful for brainstorming-followed-by-organization, and that’s a very common way of working these days.

Although it’s probably going to far to call Tinderbox “programmable,” it does have a very nifty feature called agents. These are, in essence, canned, always-running searches that automatically organize your notes. For example, I have a file that contains notes about a forthcoming Blowfish Video production. Each scene has a note. Each scene-note lists the cast required for that particular scene. I also have an agent that scurries around and creates a note that lists the entire cast. Thus, if I add a cast member, the cast list is automatically updated. Same for locations, props, etc. Whee! It’s quite magical watching it go.

Tinderbox is fast. Given how fast modern computers are, I’m routinely appalled by how slow the software that runs on them can be. I’m a fast typist and all that, but if a 1.3GHz processor cannot keep up with my typing, something is badly broken.

You can export your notes into HTML (and XML) files using templates. There is, in fact, an entire blogging mechanism based on doing HTML export from Tinderbox. I can imagine putting together a shooting schedule, and then publishing it on a web site for use by the crew and cast, by using this feature.

At $145, Tinderbox isn’t particularly cheap, but it is great at what it does . . . something that is always worth paying a bit extra for.

StyleMaster

StyleMaster from (I wish I'd thought of this company name) Western Civilization is simply the coolest thing I've run into for building and validating style sheets. Such a tool is important, as style sheets are godawful pains in the neck to get right, given the number of browsers out there.

Speaking of which, allow me to add that Internet Explorer 6 on Windows is a buggy pile of manure that should have never been released, and which has caused me more trouble than all the other browsers put together to get to display this site correctly (thank god for Virtual PC). If you are on a Windows platform running IE6 and are having text display issues, hit reload. A lot. (And before any Microsoft apologists out there get on my case, CSS does not contain a "draw the text and then quickly blank it out only to randomly redraw it on hover" style attribute. I checked.)

Even better, everyone on Windows should switch to Firefox immediately. You will thank me later, I assure you.