Oh Cool

How to develop iTunes Extras

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:27:00 +0000

Well that's what I googled for and while I didn't find specifics I did find quite an interesting read with some insight into my query.

Skype for iPhone and iPod touch now available in Canada

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:46:00 +0000

I heard about it on the news yesterday and dowloaded Skype for free to my iPhone. It works beautifully and has a nice interface that seems to cover everything.

Web 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:17:00 +0000

Some people love this term, others hate it. The general reason that it is disliked is that communicating about it is problematic. There is a lack of consensus on the definition. For one thing, there never was a Web 1.0. The Internet is an organic medium that is not controlled by any body that is able to draw a clear line between 'versions'. The best definition you find will probably talk about how Web 2.0 is more application like, or community-centric. If you want to communicate clearly, without ambiguity to someone about something you are looking for in a site or something you want to build that is in your mind Web 2.0, you are better off being specific about the types of functionality you are interested in. These may include terms such as user
membership, connecting people to one another, rating content, cool functionality where the whole page doesn't need to refresh etc. That doesn't sound like such a big compromise does it? It just may save your bacon if someone expects something different after you tell them you want "Web 2.0".

NeoOffice mobile version now available

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:28:00 +0000

NeoOffice is a native Mac port of OpenOffice, which is an open source version of Microsoft Office. I use it instead of Office daily. Incidentally, OpenOffice for Mac also just came out but I found it didn't render all my Word documents reliably so I switched back to NeoOffice.

Anyway, a preview of NeoOffice mobile was just released for iPhone/iPod! Sweet!

Preparing video files for Final Cut Express for fast editing.

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:55:00 +0000

Final Cut Express (FCE) is a nice editing tool for those with modest needs. I prefer it to iMovie, although at the time of this writing a new version of iMovie just came out that I admit, I have not tried.

FCE can work with videos, editing, cross fading etc in a non destructive manner, in realtime without constantly needing to re-render the video each time you make a change. The catch is that if your videos are not prepared in one of FCE's preset formats, it will need you to render frequently as you work so that it converts from the format your videos exist in, to the format it prefers (Apple Intermediate Codec).

I recently bought a Flip Mino video camera, which has been a great compromise of good quality and portability. Think of it as creating really good quality youtube videos (rather than really good quality home theater videos). The Flip produces AVI videos. To be able to use FCE to edit your videos, here are the settings you will need to prepare them for FCE:

First, for your Mac to be able to play the AVI files in Quicktime Player, you might need to get the Perian plugin.

Export settings:
1. File, Export
2. Movie to Quicktime Movie
3. Click Options
4. Under Video click Settings
5. In Settings choose
-Compression Type: Apple Intermediate Codec
-Framerate: Current
-Preset: HDV 720p (that's good for Flip Mino, for the new Flip Mino HD you'll probably want the HDV 1080p option).

6. Click OK to exit Video, Settings
7. Under Video click Size.
8. In Size, choose
-Compressor native
-Preserve aspect ratio using: Letterbox
-Leave Deinterlace unchecked unless you know your source is interlaced (it is not if it's from a Flip camera but might be from a handy cam)

9. Click OK to exit Video, Size
10. Under Sound, click Settings
11. In Settings, select
-Format: Linear PCM
-Channels: Stereo
-Render Settings: Best
-Sample Size: 16
-Little Endian should be checked

12. Click OK to exit Sound, Settings
11. Make sure Prepare for Internet Streaming is not checked.
12. Click OK to return to the file save dialog, then click Save.

This will render one video to the destination of your choosing. Once that file is exported, drag it into FCE. FCE might complain about it not conforming to something but ignore that message for now. The real test, to see whether or not your video is optimal is to drag it into the timeline. Scrub the playback head with your mouse. If you can see the video playing and you can hear the audio scrubbing then mission accomplished.

Here's a trick to be able to batch convert those videos so you don't have to do it one at a time. This trick essentially uses the most recently used Quicktime export settings and applies those to a set of video files.

1. So, make sure you export one video first. I think you can get away with aborting the export after a few seconds just to get the recent settings to stick.
2. The software that lets this happen comes with OS X (I'm not sure if it comes with Tiger but it definitely comes with Leopard, OS X 10.5). Try it anyway. Here's the workflow I created. Download it.
3. What you should do is unzip it, open it up (should launch Automator).
4. Then in Automator go File, Save-As, Format: Application.
5. Drag that application into your dock for convenience.
6. From then on you can drag and drop your video files to the application you just saved. It will take the videos you dropped on it and open up Quicktime Player and export all the movies using the most recent settings. I find I have trouble bringing Quicktime to the foreground while it's doing the conversions but it does work, you just have to wait it out. You should see an indication that it's compressing in the title bar along side the date and time.

Hope this helps someone, took me a while to get the combination of settings right.

*Note, IF your files are coming from a Sony video camera and you can't play them or they don't play audio and you can't convert them, you can use this tool to prepare them: MPEG Streamclip. MPEG Streamclip is free, but it depends on the QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component that costs a small amount, I forget how much, but I can tell you it worked for me when I wanted to bring in wedding footage from a friend's sony handycam.

Using namespaces to implement the state design pattern

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:43:00 +0000

Click here to read the full post

Open source Flash player called Gnash

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 04:10:00 +0000

This is an open source post, but it's also a Flash post, so the full post is over at the other blog I contribute to, Flash Focus. Click here to read on.

CBC offers HD show downloads. Canadian ISPs are blocking though.

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:14:00 +0000

The CBC is making history by being the first to release a high definition television show, free of digital rights management. You will be able to download the show via bit torrent. Some ISPs such as Rogers block bit torrent though which means that "Rogers will effectively be blocking Canadians' access to the very content that their tax dollars pay for... and if that's the case it's something that the CRTC may want to look into" - quote from the CBC Radio show called Search Engine, on March 20, 2008.

Interesting related articles:
ISPs limit access to CBC downloads

Network Neutrality and Cogeco

Here's where you are supposed to be able to download the show, Canada's Next Great Prime Minister – if your ISP hasn't blocked you from doing so!

OS X Spotlight. Old dog, new tricks.

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:19:00 +0000

Spotlight was a good idea when it came out, but once your computer gets full of stuff it gets much slower as one might expect.

I like that with Spotlight I don't have to put every app I ever use in the Dock. Instead I can search Spotlight for occasionally used apps and launch them that way. But, if you're in a rush and find Spotlight slow you can get Quicksilver – what most of my Mac-using friends have. As it's name implies, it sure is quick!

Upon recently upgrading to Leopard I discovered a couple new handy features of Spotlight. It seems to be the quickest way to do some simple arithmetic as well as look up the definition of a word. Try typing into Spotlight 5+5-2*1.2. It'll show the Calculator application that you can launch, but next to it is also the answer. Try typing in the word 'affable' and you'll see the Dictionary app and the truncated sentence showing the definition of the word.

Store passwords securely in FireFox

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:05:00 +0000

I thought it couldn't be done – I thought that FireFox unlike Safari or Camino couldn't store web passwords securely. By its default setting, I was right. That's partly why I was using Camino instead for personal use (FireFox is still superior for Web development testing). Camino and Safari make use of OS X's keychain to encrypt your passwords, storing them securely. Well FireFox still can't do this without commercial third-party software but it basically has its own sort of keychain functionality built in. You go to your preferences under security, and set a master password. Here's a link that explains it more.

Also by the way, I was also preferring Camino because it started up so much faster than FireFox. With the introduction of FireFox 3 though, it's fast again! I think I'll retire Camino :)

Trick for moving a file in OS X from one mounted drive to another in one step

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:29:00 +0000

It always kind of bothered me that in OS X I couldn't choose to move a file from one location to another when the different locations were not on the same hard drive. For example from my hard drive to an external or network drive. If you drag, it copies, so you're left with the original to delete. For large files, I sometimes got in in the practice of using the command line wihich does have the ability:

mv foo.zip /Volumes/MyExternalDrive/

But this isn't very elegant.

I recently found a little Finder trick. If you hold down command while dragging, it moves the file instead of copying.

I'm happy now.

OS X Tip for copying a large file from a windows server over smb

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:57:00 +0000

Here's a tip.

Problem:
You have connected to a windows share at an address like smb://myserver. You tried copying the file from the mounted share to your computer. It's going to take a long time. Either the connection gets dropped, or you accidentally drop it, or you need to go somewhere but you can't because if any of these things happens, you'll have to start all over again.

Solution:
Initiate a copy with the 'curl' command that can be resumed later. Crack open your Terminal, and navigate to the location where you want to save your file. With the smb share mounted already in your Finder, figure out the path to the file. I usually use 'ls' to get the path right.

i.e.

ls /Volumes/myserver/path/to/the/file.mov

should show something like

file.mov

Now that you know the path (make sure to escape spaces in the path by prefixing them with a \. i.e.

ls /Volumes/myserver/path/to/the\ big/file.mov

if you can get the 'ls' command to work and see the file, then your path must be right.
copy and paste that path with the excaped spaces starting with /Volumes...
and prefix it with file://, so you'll end upwith an initial three forward slashes like

file:///Volumes/myserver/path/to/the\ big/file.mov

That's the way 'curl' likes the paths for a file copy. So now that you're in the place on your computer where you want the file to end up, type (and this O is a letter not zero):

curl -O file:///Volumes/myserver/path/to/the\ big/file.mov

You'll even see progress and time estimate.

If something bad happens, you'll be left with a partial file. (If you did this in the finder, you would be left with nothing)

To resume, make sure you're in the same directory as the first time, then type:

curl -O -C - file:///Volumes/myserver/path/to/the\ big/file.mov

That's it. This tip is best for one big file. For multiple files, look into the mighty 'rsync' command.

Wiping your mac clean but saving your Home folder

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 04:51:00 +0000

The problem:

Your OS is acting weird, or you've confirmed something's corrupted or damaged in the OS that can't be repaired (maybe Disk Utility verifies OK, but there are still anomalies like Dashboard widgets not appearing right or something that could point to a scarier problem). You still seem to be able to use your files and programs though. You'd like to reinstall the OS, but not have to reinstall all your programs and go through all the preferences setup etc. For me I think the cause of this was improper shutdowns because my battery was flakey. I know the hardrive hardware is fine, I've had it checked.

My Solution seems to have worked pretty well for me:

For simplicity, lets call my sick computer SICK and my healthy iMac HEALTHY.

I created a new user with the same short name (what you see in the Terminal prompt) on HEALTHY and logged in.

I booted SICK up in target mode on HEALTHY so that SICK mounted as a drive on HEALTHY

Then used rsyncx to sync SICK home to the HEALTHY's home (which remember, has the same short name)

I then synced my applications from SICK's from /Applications to HEALTHY's /Users/healthy/Applications/ folder (You may have to create an Applications folder in your home dir on HEALTHY (The reason I did it into the home's Applications is that I didn't want to mix up the applications from the existing user on HEALTHY.)

Once that was done, that user account on HEALTHY worked pretty much just like it did on SICK and since HEALTHY's OS was intact to start with, I saw no weirdness with the widgets (And in theory no other major problems).

On HEALTHY I had to log out and log back in again, then my doc even had all my apps in it and Eclipse started ok – but i did notice that FDT plugin for Eclipse wanted its serial # again. Still, overall probably rated a success since it seems most of my preferences and settings were retained.

So in theory (and I haven't actually tried this yet), if I do a fresh install on SICK and wipe it clean, i should have similar success syncing from HEALTHY's home back to SICK's home (and for good measure I'll give the new main user account have the same short name)

Later, to clean up HEALTHY I can just delete the user account I created

I know there are good cloning apps like Carbon Copy Cloner but i didn't want to clone my messed up OS, only my files/prefs.

If anyone has a better less time consuming solution, I'd love to hear it.

**UPDATE: It worked like a charm, I'm back up and though it wasn't a quick fix, it was no doubt faster than reinstalling everything and setting up all my prefs and paths etc again. Hurray!

Secure email using regular email.

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:53:00 +0000

Regular email is probably one of the least secure things out there. If you send an email to someone, not only is it plain text and insecure on your own computer (if someone had physical access to it), but it gets sent through the Internet. This means, that not only could someone intercept your email while it's being sent, but that it could get intercepted at MANY points along the way through the Internet, by which it hops between many different mail server computers. Furthermore, many if not all of these points will actually store that email for a limited time much like the post offices around the world need to collect and hold your mail while it gets ready to be sent to the next post office. This means that if a local server administrator or Web hosting company or hacker can get direct or indirect access to these machines they can also read your mail that way.

Most people know not to put information that is too sensitive in email, but they may not realize just how vulnerable your message is. Even once a message reaches your recipient, there could be lingering copies of the email on the servers it passed through, perhaps in a cache or whatever. Perhaps some organization whether a spy or a marketing agency is hording messages for analysis later, who knows. Anyway, I don't generally have any information that's of a life or death sensitive nature, but I do like to protect my clients' interest where possible. Often Web developers and the like deal with communicating about server access in terms of usernames and passwords.

If you still want to exchange user/pass or credit card information with the convenience of email there is a way to strongly encrypt your messages in a way that doesn't matter who intercepts them. If someone obtains your message it will be scrambled.

I'm not going to get into the subject of how Public Key Encryption (PKE) works, but there are some GUI plugins for most operating systems that allow you to manage your ability to encrypt and decrypt messages.

Especially useful is a plugin for Apple's Mail email client that allows you to encrypt a message. You can also send a plain text message that is digitally signed in such a way that shows that you irrefutably sent the message. If anyone changes even one character in the message, the signature will not validate any more. All this in the end, with plain text. This means that though you and your recipients need to have special software installed to allow this to work on your computers, you do not need any special email service from your company or host. Furthermore, this encryption software is free and open source. Learn more about it here:

gpg for os x
gpg for windows / linux

New security / cryptography blog

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:51:00 +0000

I came across this blog that I found to be an interesting read if you're into security and cryptography:

Matt Blaze's Exhaustive Search

Ubuntu (Linux)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:40:00 +0000

Background on why I tried Ubuntu

I've been using Redhat / Fedora Core for some time with Gnome or KDE. Mostly I've used these in a server capacity, but I have installed these on some old macs and PCs to try them out from a desktop computer perspective.

I have never been terribly impressed with the UI, but ever time I tried I saw more and more progress. As a developer, I saw great potential in using Linux as a desktop as there are some great tools that exist for Linux. However, not all of them did so it was just an early peek into the future for me. With the Flex SDK including Flash being available for Linux, I can basically do my job as a pure developer on Linux now. I don't, but I could! haha. I'm keeping my eye on this free alternative as it interests me purely because it is free. Free AND good is good right?

As a designer, I still don't see Linux making much headway for a while unless Adobe releases their tools for Linux too. Linux advocates will point you to graphic design tools such as Gimp and so on, but most career professional designers will work with the tools they were taught on, or those that work on the most prevalent machines (mac/pc) and with the tools that their colleagues use because often files are getting worked on by a group or traded. Then you get into the whole print shop / service bureau compatibility thing. A friend of mine at ILM is in the creative dept and he is now using Linux a LOT because of the custom tools they use, and says they're unbeatable, so it's not like we can discount Linux. However, they've got a controlled environment over there, with an exclusive group that can all agree to be cohesive. That doesn't really work (yet) for the mainstream.

Lately I heard some buzz about Ubuntu being a great Linux distribution, that it was easy to install and use. That caught my attention, because in the context, I interpreted that to mean that it was easy for anyone, not just someone more technical.

My wife's PC is a few years old and she basically hated how slow and bloated it got, so I finally convinced her to get an Intel iMac. She loves it! I took the old PC, partitioned it and installed Ubunto on the second partition.

My conclusion with the one pc i tested which is a P4 with 256MB ram, is that the installer took so long as to be unusable. I had to cancel, and go and download the text-based installer – which was pretty easy and usable compared to other distros' I've tried, but still – not adequate for a novice.

Once installed, the OS booted up faster that the PCs. The interface is pleasant and fairly polished. It's pretty straight forward to use, and has some similarities to windows as well as mac. Some of the same keyboard shortcuts are the same. Ubuntu is by far the easiest distro I've tried to use once it's on the user's system. To add and remove programs is very easy if you're picking from the list of online software they've got listed in the add/remove tool. The browser is FireFox, email is Evolution, which seems pretty darn powerful and will even work with an MS Exchange server. It comes with OpenOffice which is compatible with Microsoft Office files.

The conclusion that I have come to:

If you know someone who needs a computer, but either can't afford one or won't bother buying one, and you have or know someone who has an older pc that they're willing to part with, Ubuntu is a great solution for someone who just needs email, word processing and web surfing. There are even some games on there. You might just have to install it for them, that's all.

One cool thing too was that the Ubuntu installer itself had an option for leaving the existing Windows install on the computer and resized the partition and created another one for me. When the computer boots up you get a text based menu for 6 seconds that lets you choose between Windows and Ubuntu. When the time expires, Ubuntu boots up by default.

If you use the text based installer, the only thing i found confusing was the partition size. It wasn't clear whether or not the size you set is for the old Windows partition, or the new Ubuntu one. For the record, as of today's date, it's the size of the Windows partition after resizing it. I chose to leave 3 gigs on there for windows (beyond what it was already using), and used the rest for Ubuntu.

Also, Mac OS X still blows Ubuntu out of the water, but for those types of simple home users, Ubuntu just might be perfect. It'll also let your recycle an old computer. If you're more of a hard-core Linux head or developer, this article's probably not for you and you probably have a lot more options :)

Reduce your spam intake (in Canada)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:21:00 +0000

Supposedly this is pretty effective:

The Canadian Marketing Association's, Do Not Contact Service

I sure wish I could read my digital magazine subscription in bed more easily

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:26:00 +0000

This is an environmental post that begs a technological solution so I posted it on TreeHugger.com

Creating a bare-bones output window in the Terminal in OS X

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:09:00 +0000

Read the article on Flash Focus

I've switched from Firefox to Camino (OS X)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 06:16:00 +0000

I've recently switched my primary browser from Firefox to Camino for OS X. It's got the same rendering engine as Firefox, but the UI has been created natively for OS X rather than in the cross platform XUL. The downside is you don't get all the same plug ins which depend on XUL, but the upside is you get the rendering reliability of Firefox, with the speed of Safari.

I realized I wear two hats when I'm online – Web developer and everyday user. When I'm in Web developer mode I usually use Firefox because I take advantage of some great developer plug ins like Web Developer toolbar, FireBug and Charles.

When I'm a regular user though, I just want to get stuff done faster, and I want my browser to securely remember some of my passwords. Firefox doesn't remember passwords securely for you. Trust me, they're easy to crack open. Safari and Camino on the other hand are more native in OS X, can take advantage of OS X's Keychain security which encrypts password information. Note, Firefox does not encrypt passwords that it stores. I'm not going to get into encryption strength, but Keychain's pretty damn good compared to no encryption.

If you want to make the switch to Camino or any other browser other than Safari as your default browser, you'll have to actually change the default setting in Safari's preferences. I think that requirement is weird and that it should be in the OS X Preferences panel like everything else, but that's another topic.

Flash posts will be found on another blog, Flash Focus

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:21:00 +0000

I am honoured to have been invited to participate as a contributor on the Flash Focus blog. I will continue to post to this blog to because it has a wider topic range covering *nix, PHP and general tinkerings. For Flash and Flex however, I'll be posting to Flash Focus. I'll create a post here as a reference though when I post something new there.

Collections in ActionScript

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

An undocumented feature of ActionScript 2 is that list collection classes are possible. For the past year or so I've been using them and it's saved me a lot of time and headaches.

Other languages have had them for eons, but for those just getting acquainted with the idea, a (list) collection in this context, is simply an array of one type of object. Specifically, the collection only allows a specific type of object to be added to it, and the collection itself is a strictly defined type of object. That means, that when you encounter a collection that exists in someone's code, you can be assured that you know exactly what is inside it, whereas an array can hold anything.

It is quite reasonable for human error to cause you to unintentionally add a string object into an array that you intended to only hold numbers for example. Secondly, it is quite possible for you to accidentally pass the wrong array to a function. Collections save you from these headaches before they get buried like a needle in a haystack. That is, the Flash compiler will catch these mistakes early. If you're using MTASC, the error messages are even more helpful.

Imagine you have an address book class with a property called people in which you want to contain a list of PersonVO objects (see "Introducing the Value Object / Data Transfer Object Pattern" here to learn about using value objects. Using a collection your property would be strictly typed.

Your compiler would throw an error if you tried to pass anything other than a PersonVO object to the function.

Here is the source code that demonstrates the above entry

Google Calculator

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 22:57:00 +0000

Maybe this is old news to you, but in case it slips past you without you noticing, Google has added Google Calculator to their tool suite. All you have to do is enter a calculation into the regular search box, and it will give you the answer.

Now, on OS X I have a calculator that is very easy to use and can do pretty much anything including currency conversion. To convert $100 US dollars to Canadian dollars, I have to update my currency exchange rates, then pick convert currency, then pick the two different currencies. I've loved the convenience. Simply put, Google's is faster - and now I know I can use it on any computer that's on the Internet. Check out these searches:

Convert $100 US to Canadian

My recipe calls for 1 pound of lean ground beef, but the label on the meat I bought is in Kilograms

More on Google Calculator here

ActionScript class - IntrospectionUtils

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:27:00 +0000

I have started a class to wrap some common introspection functions. So far I've only got one in here, which wraps a function posted earlier. I'll post updates to it, with the latest version always here:

Usage:


ca.abcd.utils.IntrospectionUtils.showClasses( ["com", "mx"] );

Recursive function to find class that were compiled into swf - ActionScript 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Blair) — Wed, 10 May 2006 18:38:00 +0000

Here's a little script that I wrote which will find which classes are being compiled into your swf. This maybe helpful if you're trying to pare down your swf using an Exclude xml file.


/**
 * Recursive function, prints out names of classes
 * that have been compiled into the swf. Can be used
 * to reduce file size along with an Exclude xml file
 * to omit unneccessary classes.
 * 
 * @param mc Scope to look in
 * @param prefix Prefix of package level
 * @author Andrew Blair :: www.abcd.ca
 */
function findClasses(mc:MovieClip, prefix:String){
 if (prefix == undefined) prefix = "";
 for (var i:String in mc){
  if (typeof mc[i] == "function"){
   trace(prefix + "." + i);
  }else if(typeof mc[i] == "object"){
   findClasses(mc[i], prefix + "." + i);
  }
 }
}


findClasses(_global.com, "com");
findClasses(_global.mx, "mx");