James Tauber's Blog 2005/10
iTunes Music Store Opens in Australia
The Apple release I've really been waiting for...
iTunes Music Store is now available to people in Australia.
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 24, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 24, 2005 : Categories apple : (permalink)
Aperture
Back in March, I asked Why No Apple Pro Photo App?
Looks like now there is one.
UPDATE (2005-10-20): I've now had a chance to watch the quick tour videos. It looks fantastic as a photographic productivity tool. It's no Photoshop when it comes to image manipulation (although perhaps it will eventually develop into that) but for actually managing photos it looks like they've got a lot of things right.
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 19, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 20, 2005 : Categories apple : (permalink)
Keep the Academic Writing Samples Simple, Stupid
James Gosling recalls his PhD days:
Back when I was a grad student I was spinning out of control trying to come up with a thesis topic. My advisor took me out to lunch one day and asked me a simple question: "What is a PhD thesis?" I yattered on for a while and he listened patiently. Eventually he said "No: It's just a stack of 100 pages with 4 signatures on top". I was falling into a common grad student trap of feeling that I needed to do something grandiose and solve all of the worlds problems. He was into "keep it simple". So I did, and I came up with a pretty straightforward thesis proposal. The odd thing was that when I finally finished my thesis, I realized that I had only delt with one sentence out of the simplified proposal.
This is significant for me, not because I'm having problems with my thesis, but with something much smaller. For my application, I have to provide samples of academic writing. I have two papers in mind I want to write (new papers because I'm too embarrassed about anything I wrote during my undergraduate days ten years ago). The problem is I think I'm setting the bar too high. I keep thinking these two papers have to be ground-breaking work. But they aren't even my thesis. They are just samples of academic writing. As long as remind myself they are just "a stack of 10 pages that proves I can write English and put together a bibliography" then I think I'm in good shape.
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 16, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 16, 2005 : Categories linguistics phd : 1 comment (permalink)
Error 400 Trying to Watch Apple Special Event
Last month, when I wanted to watch the Apple Special Event, QuickTime just gave me a 400 Bad Request error.
Same thing is happening with this month's Apple Special Event.
Anyone else getting a 400 Bad Request error?
In the case of the September event, it finally started working after a few days. Surely Apple can do better than this.
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 12, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 12, 2005 : 1 comment (permalink)
New Draft of Atom Protocol Out
draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-05 is now out.
I haven't looked at it yet to see what will have to change in Demokritos. I will, however, delay releasing Demokritos until I've implemented at least as much of 05 as I had 04.
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 12, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 12, 2005 : Categories atompub demokritos : (permalink)
Alibi Showing at New Hampshire Film Expo
I've neglected to mention until now that Alibi Phone Network made the official selection at the New Hampshire Film Expo which is on this week in Portsmouth. That's four festivals we've made the official selection for. Unfortunately I won't be able to make this one.
Tom Bennett had a great poster made for this festival which I'll hopefully be able to put online at some stage.
Tom is also a finalist in the screenplay competition for his feature script The War in My Backyard.
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 10, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 10, 2005 : Categories filmmaking alibi_phone_network : (permalink)
TiddlyWiki and Atom Store
Continuing my thinking about To Do List Aggregation, it would be interesting to see a variant of the amazing TiddlyWiki that is backed by an Atom Store.
Probably wouldn't be that hard to do. Any Ajaxians interested in working with me on something like that?
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 9, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 9, 2005 : 2 comments (permalink)
To Do List Aggregation
For a while now I've been thinking about the need for a To Do List Aggregator.
While some "next actions" can be manually put on a list, some are time-based (either coming from a calendar or from something like Sciral Consistency). Others come from yet other applications: flagged emails or blog entries, unread email, etc.
Having multiple "inboxes" is a bad thing. So what would be nice would be an application that simply aggregated action items from multiple electronic inboxes, or what I'll call "Action Feeds".
By separating aggregation from the feeds themselves, it would be possible for people to develop all sorts of clever action feed generators that ranged from simple manual lists to integrations with calendars, email, etc.
The list aggregator would be similar to a regular blog aggregator but with a few important differences:
- priority and not time would be the key ordering criterion
- 'done' and not 'read' would be the key annotation
- the items wouldn't necessarily have meaningful content
- it would be nice if marking items done and adding certain new kinds of items could be done from the aggregator and communicated back to the feed generator.
However, I still think Atom could be the basis for the protocol between aggregator and action feed generators. The comments I make in the UPDATE to Google Reader about IMAP are relevant here too.
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 9, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 9, 2005 : 3 comments (permalink)
Serenity
Saw Serenity last weekend but haven't had a chance to blog about it until now.
Enjoyed it a lot and will probably go see it again in Australia.
Some of my favourite aspects of it, as a filmmaker:
- the layers of flashback at the start: voice-over becomes childhood lesson becomes flash-back becomes security video
- the long tracking shot through the ship, introducing all the characters
- the use of hand-held-style camera shake and refocusing during dramatic CGI shots that made it look like news or doco footage.
You can even observe the first point in the comfort of your own home as the first nine minutes are online at Vividas.
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 8, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 8, 2005 : Categories filmmaking : 0 comments (permalink)
Google Reader
Google recently launched the beta of Google Reader which is a web-based feed aggregator with the GMail-look you'd expect from Google. Like GMail, feeds are tagged rather than in folders.
If I were still using Bloglines, I might consider switching but I'm pretty attached to NetNewsWire so I'm not sure. The cost of switching is high for me because I flag a lot and I'd like my 'read' list to be consistent between clients. With email, that's achievable because of IMAP.
I took a look at my server logs to see if Google is grabbing feeds with something different from their GoogleBot. Turns out they are. Since 7th Oct I've got regular accesses to my atom feed from a user agent:
FeedFetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)
The page linked to in the user agent string makes it clear that FeedFetcher is only for user-initiated feed retrieval (i.e. subscriptions in Google Reader or the personalised Google home page) and that the blog search and regular Google search are crawled for separately.
UPDATE: I started thinking more about IMAP for feed reading. Atom is the obvious contender but something more is necessary because the server needs to indicate what's read/unread and the client needs to be able to mark entries read/unread. A simple extension element would work for the former. What about the latter?
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 8, 2005 : Last modified Feb. 11, 2006 : 1 comment (permalink)
Demokritos and Leonardo
What is Demokritos?
Demokritos is an open source Atom Store I'm writing in Python.
What is the relationship between Demokritos and Leonardo?
The focus of Demokritos is implementing the Atom specifications. The focus of Leonardo is implementing a practical CMS for personal websites. Although the two will likely merge at some point, I think doing so at this stage would slow down things too much.
What's the short term plan for Demokritos?
Get a 0.1 release out that can at least be used for interoperability testing.
What's the short term plan for Leonardo?
Work out what else (if anything) needs to be done for a 0.7 release; start a beta cycle.
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 8, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 8, 2005 : Categories python leonardo demokritos : (permalink)
XML Catalog Spec Approved
I've just read, Via Anthony Coates, that OASIS has approved the XML Catalog 1.1 spec (disclosure: I voted YES to it)
XML Catalogs are near and dear to my heart...
Back in 1995, I was thinking about how SGML could be used on the Web and decided that one thing that would be useful is resolution of SGML public identifiers. So I proposed an extension to the existing SGML Catalog spec (under SGML Open, which was the forerunner to OASIS) to make them operate more like DNS than /etc/hosts for name resolution. Paul Grosso invited me to present the idea to an SGML Open meeting in early 1996. It was there that I met Jon Bosak and we shared our common vision for SGML on the Web. Just a couple of months later, Jon emailed me to say he had convinced the W3C to let him start a WG to work on this and would I like to be involved.
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 5, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 5, 2005 : Categories xml : 0 comments (permalink)
Laura Breckenridge: The Next Chapter
Back at SxSW I said of the film Southern Belles:
The real find was Laura Breckenridge, who plays Bell. Laura is definitely an actress to keep an eye on.
Well, Laura stars in the new series Related airing on the WB this Wednesday.
I can't comment on whether the series is any good, but Laura was certainly impressive in Southern Belles so it might be worth checking out if you're in the US.
Plus it's important to support actors who are into Ancient Greek :-) (Laura is a classics major at Princeton)
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 3, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 3, 2005 : (permalink)
The Circle is Not Simply Connected
In the comments to Number of Connected One-Dimensional Manifolds, I questioned why the circle (or more precisely the one-dimensional sphere S^1) was not simply connected. I wasn't trying to argue—I just didn't have the intuition myself, for some reason.
It's funny because now it's bleeding obvious to me that it isn't simply connected. A loop that goes from one point to another then back again clearly isn't homotopic to a loop that simply goes around the circle.
I think I was letting my intuition that S^n is simply connected override this fact. I was over generalising in my mind. S^n is simply connected only for n > 1. Thanks to Michael Hamm and Allan Engelhardt for setting me straight.
UPDATE: next post
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 2, 2005 : Last modified Aug. 9, 2007 : Categories poincare_project : 2 comments (permalink)
The Power of Editing
This has already gone around the blogosphere but I shouldn't assume that people that read this blog read the same blogs as I.
I think the first time I truly realised the power of editing in film was listening to the writer/director commentary on Jerry Maquire. Cameron Crowe said that the Tom Cruise - Renee Zellweger story was secondary in his script and during shooting. It was editor Joe Hutshing's rough cut that dramatically altered the story's emphasis and Crowe decided that he preferred it.
It's almost impossible to tell from the final cut of a film just how much the editor did to change the story. An editor may save a film but you'd never be able to tell this without seeing the raw footage. I once asked an editor "how do you judge good editing for, say, the Academy Awards, given that without seeing the raw footage, you really don't know just how much the editor contributed." His response: "you can't and that's the dirty secret of editing awards".
by jtauber : Created on Oct. 2, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 2, 2005 : Categories filmmaking : (permalink)