There is free wireless in the Denver International Airport (crazy masonic conspiracy stuff too).

After reading Using XML on A List Apart, I’ve decided that web browsers are not quite ready for the XML ideas I wanted to use for the Joe’s Filters documentation pages. So much for write once publish everywhere. It’s going to be a while before it does what I was imagining, but I guess I’ll take a crack at XHTML.

yep, regular expressions are just plain cool.

I noticed (to my horror) that Google didn’t seem to be indexing my archives since changing to the PHP query model back on July 2. A quick bit of poking around in the Apache documentation and mod_rewrite turns out to be the solution. I’m now masking my PHP queries as static page URLs. Old permalinks still work, but now Google should be finding a lot more to index around here.

In case anyone is wondering, I added the following line to my web root’s .htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^archive/(.*) /notes/notes_archive.php?a=$1

That matches anything after “archive” (and stores it in $1) then plops it onto the end of the existing PHP query. Adding a [R] to the end of that would send the altered URL back to the client, omitting the [R] masks the url.

That was much easier than I was expecting.

Damn, it happened again. All my Stickies are gone. The Powerbook needed to be force-restarted (finicky projector hosed the display) and when it came back, the Stickies file was overwritten with the defaults. This happened once before after some other hardware related force-restart.

Stickies stores its data in a hidden database file in each user’s Library folder. The path to the file is:

/Users/ Your user folder name /Library/.StickiesDatabase

View the contents by typing pico .StickiesDatabase from the Users/username/Library directory

I was thinking about creating an application to back up the original file at regular intervals, but then I had a different idea.

I moved the .StickiesDatabase file to a different location with the mv command, then made a symlink named “.StickiesDatabase” (symlink is the unix name for an alias) and pointed it at the moved file. Stickies seems to work fine and followed the link to the moved file. Now if Stickies crashes and overwrites the file, will it overwrite the alias or the original?

The commands I used were:

mv .StickiesDatabase newstickiesbackup
which moved the original file, and

ln -s newstickiesbackup .StickiesDatabase
which created the symlink.

It’s probably a good idea to back up the file anyway, but I’m going to give this a try. Maybe I’ll even force a few restarts later.

Yes, it’s pathetic that I both know about this and care about this: I am the 29th Joe on Google. Back into the twenties after a month or two in the thirties.

interesting email this morning:

Question: Do you think the iPod could be programmed to record DV live from the camcorder, and then download in to a editing program such as FCP.

Probably not. It is theoretically possible, but the biggest immediate problem is that the iPod only has one FireWire port. Since the iPod currently has no software which understands a DV stream, a computer would have to be connected to act as the DV interpreter, with the iPod simply acting as an external hard drive. It might be possible if the computer had two FireWire ports, but those tend to be desktop machines which would seem to go completely against the goal of building a small direct-digital system.

I don’t know much about the iPod’s OS, but considering that there are no third-party applications which actually run on an iPod (I’ve been looking and would love to be wrong about that), it’s very unlikely that this will be happening anytime soon. Apple probably can’t open up the architecture to developers because the first thing someone would do is write an iPod-to-iPod sync tool. The RIAA would see this as a “Walking Napster” and immediately send it’s army of lawyers (and Sen Fritz Hollings) to Cupertino. So it’s probably better that Apple doesn’t release an iPod SDK, but I’m looking forward to the day someone reverse engineers it.

As for capturing live DV, I’m not sure if all cameras can do it or not. I am able to capture live from a PD-100a into Final Cut Pro without recording, the trick in Final Cut Pro is to disable device control in the Log & Capture window and then click Capture Now.

My 10Gb iPod’s hard drive seems capable of playing back DV clips with only a few dropped frames, but using an iPod as a storage device seems like a waste of money. Portable FireWire hard drives offer more than five times the space of the biggest iPod for about the same price. They’re also fast enough to use for DV, can be powered through the FireWire connection and, while not as small as the iPod, are quite rugged and portable.

Personally, I’d love to see a portable version of the FireStore. Ideally this would be battery-powered and sit inline between the camera and any standard FireWire storage device.

After at least a year of being held hostage by Network Solutions, Stink.com is finally back online! (yep, I’m a monkey!)