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Beyond Last Year's News

As an element in my comprehensive rearguard exploration of last week’s/month’s/year’s interesting computer doohickeys, I have finally begun a sustained experiment in using Gmail, which is proceeding apace.

Only one bump to date: the unflagged blackholing of a flood of comment spam from comments.cgi on the blog left me a mite frowny – if I can’t see the mail, it’s hard to click the mt-blacklist link, now innit?

As is my wont, here are some Gmail toys, for whenever I get around to them.

Mark Lyon’s list of Gmail candy. It includes Pop Goes the Gmail, for POP3 access, as well as his GML, an app to allow you to pop your current mail archive into Gmail, should you feel so inclined.

Most useful on Mark’s list in the short run is Address Book to CSV 1.1, which enables a user to export from Address Book into the format that Gmail supports to build its’ own contacts list.

There’s also the propellerhead tomfoolery of a PHP script that converts your unused Gmail space into an offline backup solution, something that I could have sworn that tall guy over there wrote about, but I find no trace of it.

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OmniWeb 5

TidBITS’ Adam Engst says it’s time to take another look at OmniWeb, a Mac-only web browser by the Seattle-area Omni Group.

I’ll be investigating it further sometime in the near future. Omni is a pretty interesting operation, something of a rarity on the Mac side, that clearly is devoted to the ‘first in space’ biz model. This means that they have consistently been first-to-market for significant application uses at nearly every juncture of the evolution of Mac OS X. It also means that follow-up developers solve problems left unsolved by Omni while adopting Omni’s successful solutions.

The first-to-market aspect of OmniWeb 5 is the product’s use of WebCore, an underlying element of the OS that Apple introduced recently. Without hitting the books, it’s behind parts of both Safari and Help Viewer, as I recall.

Paul Frankenstein has been musing on what WebCore and other things-to-come may mean in future. OmniWeb 5 may be of interest to him for that reason as well.

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Red Noses

This weekend, Viv and I went to a free production of the play Red Noses in a nearby park. It’s running through the end of the month at the Miller Community Center on 19th, just over the hill from Safeway on 15th.

The play garnered a lukewarm review in the P-I recently, and I have to concur in the judgement that the production was uneven. I’d say it was still a decent summer night in the park – I saw bats! It was a big cast – about twenty – and the outdoor setting was less than ideal, planes overhead drowning out dialog more than once.

The play is about a religious order that formed in France during an outbreak of the plague, advocating holy clowning as a spiritual balm; it’s also a pretty cynical, anti-clerical play (perhaps anti-church is a more accurate phrase). its’ depiction of the Pope, in particular, as a cynical lord of the age, is a central narrative feature.

The actress portraying the Pope (Lisa SanPhillippo) steps beyond the part as written to present a vision of the Pontiff of Avignon as a kind of bug-eyed Ralph Steadman caricature, hideously hilarious, brutally over the top. I suspect that her performance is close to the spirit that the company hoped to execute the play in.

Unfortunately, timing is the essence of comedy, and I rather expect that the sheer volume of the play undermined the possibility of refining the timing of the bits, such as they are in the play. Rebecca Davis, as Father Flote (the founder of the order) is effective and held my attention – but her perfomance lacked bite or menace, which undermines the base concept of clowning to hold death at bay.

I must note that the tipping factor in leading us to see the play was my awareness that a very funny man of known and merciless wit who spends his days engaged (however self-deprecatingly) in a battle against a hideous disease was playing a significant role in the production. His wit leads me to impute a certain persuasiveness to him, and thus I rather wonder if he played a role in the selection of this play.

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in a lonely place

Saturday night, I caught two Bogart films on TMC, 1951’s uneven The Enforcer, a fictionalization of the discovery and prosecution of the notorious Murder, Inc., and a great film I’d unaccountably missed in my peerings at and mumblings on the era’s work.

That film is In a Lonely Place (1950), based on the recently-republished Dorothy Hughes title of the same name. earlier this year, Bookslut ran an intriguing, thoughtful appreciation of the original book.

I won’t rehash the plot here, but I will reiterate Bookslut’s note that the film is much changed from the original. Bogart plays Dixon Steele, whom Hughes presents as a wannabe writer; in the film, he’s a has-been screenwriter.

The film’s writers, Andrew Solt and Edmund North, have a ball with the screenwriter’s tension between book and film, going out of their way to establish the screenwriter’s obligation to discard the book. The film’s tense narrative kicks off with the murder of a hat check girl last seen at Steele’s home. She has come by to retell the narrative of a potboiler that Steele is being sought to adapt. Steele makes no bones about his contempt for the source material.

Perhaps I was sensitized to this content by last year’s wonderful Adaptation – but I sure didn’t find any commentary about it elsewhere on the web.

The film is one of the most effective films I’ve ever seen Bogart in, and I highly recommend it to you.

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ividly

I spent a big chunk of today finally exploring the integration features in iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie. I’m working from a mixed base of assets representing the two most recent camping trips we went on (to Mount Baker in June and to the Olympic Peninsula this month).

As it happens, long-time MacWorld editor Jim Heid saw a prior entry on the topic of helping my Mom learn to use her new Mac, and kindly offered to send a copy of his book, The Macintosh iLife. We corresponded, and he sent a copy, inscribed to her.

I hadn’t ever really even attempted to use the apps as they were designed to be used (with the exception of iTunes), and before I sent the book on, I wanted to work through a demo project involving all the integration features with the book at my side, so I would be familiar enough with it to refer Mom to a chapter as needed. It’s been helpful, although my questions have been a bit more specific and technically oriented than the book is designed for.

For example, I did find a passing reference to the fact that iDVD only supports slideshows composed of up to 99 individual picture files, as I searched for reasons a folder of images was not generating the anticipated button upon drag-and-drop.

So, beyond the passing help the book’s provided, here are the issues I’m having that I think are failings in the suite of apps, speed not being considered (I’m using them on a G4/400 at the very low end of supported machines, and the speed is quite intolerable, something I cope with by time-slicing with household chores such as laundry and dishes).

The best feature that the suite provides is the ability to marry sets of images to selected songs from your music library. Unfortunately, each of the image-oriented apps – iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto – provides this feature with a slightly different implementation, and thus far I have not found a good way to seamlessly combine the various implementations. iMovie, for instance, will render your stills into a sliding, cross-fading quicktime montage using the well-known Ken Burns Effect. Unfortunately, the various transitions available in iPhoto, for example, are unavailable (at least at first) in iMovie, and in particular in the attempt to create a Ken Burns extravaganza. Furthermore, selecting and previewing a song and transition sequence in iPhoto is easy, easy, easy. Duplicating that in iDVD, or iMovie, is not quite so straightforward.

(UPDATE: Yes it is. in iDVD, dragging an iPhoto album from the iDVD Photos selection pane will also bring iPhoto slideshow effects into the iDVD slideshow.)

iPhoto offers an ‘iDVD’ button, presumably to allow you to send your iPhoto slideshow to iDVD. I say presumably because each time I used it, iDVD would launch and then crash. If it launched, would it add the sideshow to an existing project, or close the current project, replacing it with the new slideshow? I can’t say.

iDVD disappointed me in ways that are similar to and reflective of QuickTime Pro, rejecting native mpeg files for drag-and-drop inclusion in menu-item playback. I’ll be experimenting with optimal ways to incorporate the variant mpeg formats generated by our cameras into iDVD, probably routing through iMovie.

As I noted about a month ago, Apple’s applications treat video and photos as truly disjunct, something which made sense prior to the prevalence of dual-media recording devices. This is something that Apple must change to retain the leading-edge cachet regained with Jobs’ return.

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First Test

In one hour and thirty minutes I will be taking the first drivers’ test of my life.

Update, 2:30p. I failed. This is not surprising or upsetting given that I haven’t practiced at all for several months and loathe cars* and driving anyway. But my tastes and desires aren’t germane here, and I’ll be testing again as soon as possible. I was ready to go two weeks from today at 8am, but was overrruled.

*As a class, I mean. I have no problem with individual cars and kind of like ours as a specific object. But I would happily disappear it and all other cars from the world with a wave of my magic wand if I could do so.

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Rerun

[I posted this on MeFi yesterday, and it’s just chock fulla linky goodness, so I’m posting it here to keep it handy.]

Head Back to Mono in 32k at the rineke.net records archive, where a rather consistent curator has digitized a goody chunk of his record collection. It’s posted in more-or-less every iteration imaginable. Observe the linked scans (1 mb page, careful!) of the covers (also in multiple resolutions up to full-size). Note the records themselves, in sleeve or out, depending. Most especially, savor the clean, low-res mono mp3s that cry out to be played through the dashboard speakers of a 1967 Dodge Dart.

[Chris Dent is particularly directed here.]

Bonus Big Beat Bonanza: The site’s author is also behind the similarly detailed archive of shows by ex-WFMU dj The Hound, from 1987 through 1995, heavy on the rare regional sides beloved of certain of my pals down New Orleans way.

Last, but not least, rineke.net hosts the adventures of a platoon of Tux clones, sealing my geek admiration for the overseer of the site. There’s more, of course. My propeller beanie’s off to you, sir, and long may you wave, or particle, as is your choice and preference.

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Cringely, cogent as always

I, Cringely for August 12 concerns our country’s current unsupportable, unjustifiable rate of imprisonment, a suicide, and a government commissioned study that may have predicted dire results indeed if mandatory sentencing were to be adopted.

Serendipitously, we learn today that the latest trend in dealing with our spiraling inmate population is charge them rent. That’s lovely. A reliable labor and revenue source!