James Tauber's Blog 2005/10/08
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 James Tauber : 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 James Tauber : 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 James Tauber : Created on Oct. 8, 2005 : Last modified Oct. 8, 2005 : Categories python leonardo demokritos : (permalink)