The Daily Grind

Almost there… almost there!

Ten down, two to go. This afternoon we had a viewing of the fifth programme in the series, which rather confusingly is the tenth to go through post-production. It’s the show based around the new Danny Boyle film Sunshine, and I must say I’m absolutely delighted with it. Brian Cox rocked up for an interview at dawn, bless him, and somehow mustered the energy to enthuse about physics with the sun rising behind him – it’s all very beautiful. The Futureheads get excited about sliced bread, there’s a bizarre and rather charming use of Silly Putty at fusion physics research centre JET, and then Boyle himself takes his own film with a refreshing pinch of salt, and takes the piss out of Brian a bit.

It’s all very chummy and approachable – despite some extreme physics in places – and I’m absolutely delighted with the tone set by director Christine. It’s irreverent without being flippant, pragmatic but not cynical. A fun show, that romps along and looks lovely, and the Big Bosses loved it.

Two more to go.

Biggs, Wedge, let’s close it up.

Adobe today announced the eventual availability – staggered through the year – of their ‘CS3′ suite of applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Premier Pro, Contribute, After Effects, Soundbooth, Photoshop Extended, Bridge, Encore, After Effects Professional, Photoshop Extended Again, Web Design Production Master Encore Professional Edition, and Would You Like Fries With That? Pro. Upgrade pricing options are available from earlier versions of all Adobe and Macromedia products, except the ones you actually own. Prices range from a few hundred dollars up to ‘My God, you could buy a car for that! And not a Daewoo, either!’

Adobe also announced a new training and certification process, by which a new breed of Adobe Solutions Specialists can attain detailed knowledge and understanding of the bundling, upgrade, sidegrade, crossgrade and retrograde pricing options. This training process is anticipated to take rather longer than the shelf-life of the CS3 packages, and should allow certified Adobe Solutions Specialists to charge about as much as the Professional Production Showcase Additional Extended Web Extreme Workgroup Pro Bundle Edition Plus Suite, for all client purchases.

Adobe’s CEO Bruce Chizen was quoted in the New York Times:

CS3’s prices may seem steep compared to other shrink-wrapped software. But Adobe customers — particularly graphic and video artists with deep-pocketed corporate clients — spend money relatively liberally compared with average software buyers, Chief Executive Bruce Chizen said.
“Our customer is not typically price sensitive,” Chizen said last week. “The cost of the tool isn’t what’s critical — it’s the productivity and what their output can be. They want to pay for value as long as we deliver innovative features that allow them to be more productive and creative.”

Users who just wanted Photoshop for Intel Macs might as well look at The Gimp.

We’re planning to film with a helicopter tomorrow, and with my production manager gone I’ve been delving into the whole insurance murk, always my favourite job. Our production insurers have, however, sent me a neat little checklist pointing me towards some of the stuff I need to think about for risk assessment purposes (which is all rather charmingly laid-back in Ireland), along with a pro-forma letter requesting a routine information exchange and indemnity with the helicopter operator’s insurers. Which is all fine, except…

…it’s in Comic Sans.

So, so wrong.

I’m wrecked. Scope has been hectic, trying to get the last bits done, and while I’m officially down to three days a week as it ‘tails off’ (ahem), I’m also starting to do some work for SciCast. Which, it turns out, is going to formally launch at the end of April. Which means there’s a mountain of stuff to do for that. Most of which is on poor Katie’s plate, but getting what passes for the website spec written is evidently my bag (quite how I ended up designing user interaction for a website I’m not sure, and it’s a bit worrying).

I was in London the other week, ostensibly doing SciCast stuff but in fact spending half the time sorting out Scope nightmares and seeing a preview of Sunshine, around which we’re basing a show (and on which more anon – short version: I think it’s considerably flawed, parts of it made me roll my eyes, but it’s so beautiful to look at I really didn’t mind, and in fact rather enjoyed it). Oh, and it was my birthday last week, by happy coincidence on a day when Flossie was over in Dublin. Hurrah.

I arrived back in Glasgow on Friday night to find a relatively monstrous tax bill (ulp), and… well, that’s about all I remember of the weekend, to be honest. I seem to have slept since then, pretty much. Sunday evening and I’m now mostly back in gear, with merely two days’-worth of ‘stuff’ to do before I return to Dublin… tomorrow night.

Back home Friday, Dublin for a couple of days the following week; London the week after (probably a day trip); Cardiff via Leeds after that; thence to Goole, Malton, Hull and Rotherham for the first batch of SciCast workshops.

…and my PowerBook’s buggered. Great.

(If you’re wondering why I’m not blogging much, it’s because none of this is really very interesting. Well, I mean – it isn’t, is it? Really.)

Further evidence that TextMate is the new Emacs: a Twitter bundle. Oh, for heaven’s sake!

Great interview with Vinay about his Hexaurt project; here. Vinay’s CV currently starts ‘Tech guru turned whole systems thinker seeks to save the world.’ Bold, but absolutely flat-out the truth. He really does. He’s just skint. And, improbably, in Iceland right now.

My PowerBook is borked.

It’s a little over three years old, and it’s seen ridiculously hard use; moved around pretty much daily, it’s recently eaten its second battery (down to about 40 mins life), and the keyboard reflects the half-million-or-so words I’ve bashed out on it. It’s been amazingly solid and reliable, having crashed probably less than a dozen times since I bought it – I think it locked on me in late January, when I hadn’t restarted it since early December, but I don’t recall the time before that. The LCD panel is showing the dreaded White Splotches of Doom, but unfortunately it doesn’t fall within the serial number range that’s supposed to be affected. Huh.

However, I fear its days are numbered, for the display has started glitching. Badly. I’ll be working away then it’ll suddenly freak out, displaying an overlay of little blue or red rectangles. When both come together, it looks like a tartan filter. If I whack the right-hand palmrest just right, it goes away again – or I can sometimes correct it by wiggling the lid, or refreshing the screen.

So, my first thought was that the display connection through the hinge is fatiguing, a common problem with heavily-used laptops. But get this – I can take screen captures of the problem. No, really. And it shows up on an external display, hooked up over a DVI->VGA adaptor. Which means the corruption is in the frame buffer, not the screen itself. Also, the problem shows up less when the machine’s running hot.

Loose VRAM, do you think? I’m not even sure it’s socketed on this machine, and I know it’s a bastard to get into, but… there’s hope. Maybe.

When I get back to Glasgow my friendly local Mac repair shop are going to have a new customer, and if I’m very lucky they’ll be able to peel poor Quern apart and wiggle a cable. If I’m unlucky… I’ll be exploring these options, none of which I can really afford. Ouchie.

(Incidentally, the last time there were that many refurb MacBook Pros around, the range was refreshed a couple of weeks later. Not that I want The Daily Grind to turn into a rumours site, you understand.)

For all the hype about Rocketboom, I’ve always found it overly-long and pretty much unwatchable. ‘The Show’ with Ze Frank, however, was much more palatable, even if he never seemed to blink. Short, direct, and pithily witty, it was compulsive viewing. Or at least, it was when he wasn’t heading off into bits of Americana that went over my head.

Sadly, however, it’s all past tense: Ze’s called it quits after a year, and he’s been having meetings in LA with all the big-wigs. He has an audience, he has talent, and I hope good things happen. I’m only concerned that, in a few years time, we might realise that what Ze did was perfect the one-man-and-his-vlog format, but that three minutes of him was about right for any one sitting. We’ll see.

If you want to catch the teary-eyed final show, it’s here.

Munching on some Emmental tonight, I found myself wondering if the holes are exactly spherical, or elongated. I suspect X-ray or MRI analysis would be tricky, since the cheese itself is moderately soft (and, one presumes, low contrast), but slicing the cheese sufficiently thinly should allow one to reconstruct the hole profile.

That led to my considering automating the slicing process, and feeding the slices into a scanner of some description, eventually allowing a three-dimensional digital reconstruction of the cheese. Invert for density, and one would be left with a number of holes hanging in void space, whereupon their spheralicity should be readily discernible.

With reference to the Visible Human Project (Wikipedia), I name this the ‘Visible Cheese Project.”

Future developments will involve an exploration of the vein structure in various blue cheeses.

[For the record, I’m assuming the holes are predominantly spherical, given the nature of their formation as bubbles of carbon dioxide. But I could be wrong.]

Attention hostees! Dreamhost are moving the mail server we’re on, tomorrow night. Downtime should be 2 hours. Figure on more.

[note: no email should be lost, blah blah blah]