I guess I’m just biding time until the Walking Dead on AMC comes back online. Brian at work sent me a link today to the first three minutes of the first episode of the winter/spring season.

I have this idea for a story in my head and while it’stewing, I figure I’ll make sure I’m at least well read on the topic.

I took that picture, but I found a video with some good video footage of the game boy up close. The kids had a nice time in the city. Here is a shot of them sitting in front of the tree:

We also spent some time in Bryant Park on the way back and checked out the outdoor village they have. They have a pretty large ice rink there, but we were short for time as the day was drawing to a close so no-one put skates on.

Sports still dominates our time. Wrestling started but Marco go a bit burned out so we pulled him cause he was getting pretty stressed out about it. Giovanni joined wrestling and is learning it all from scratch. Giovanni hopes to wrestle in one tournament at the end of the season so we hope he does that. Antonio and Marco are doing basketball, which they  love. Antonio is getting really good, regularly scoring each game. Marco has been  in the clinic since first grade and now that he’s in 3rd grade they are starting to play games. He loves basketball as well and is quite the dribbler.

Lisa and I got Giovanni guitar lessons for Christmas and he’s been at 4 lessons so far. The instructor is really great and Giovanni is learning the fourth string right now. He’s doing great and practicing all of the time for fun. When I was his age I took lessons at the same place, it’s been there that long. Only after the 2nd or 3rd lesson, the teacher saw I wasn’t practicing and called me out. I quit right after that.

So, good for Giovanni.

Yesterday, I installed a foosball table in the basement. We’ve played a ton of games and loving the table. My cousin literally gave it to me and we’re so grateful. It came with some extra pieces, which was a good thing since one of the foosmen was broken. Here is a shot of the table in action:

Outlook Archive 2000.pst – 11,921 KB
Outlook Archive 2001.pst – 532,721 KB
Outlook Archive 2002.pst – 1,218,193 KB
Outlook Archive 2003.pst – 631,921 KB
Outlook Archive 2004.pst – 799,817 KB
Outlook Archive 2005.pst – 889,345 KB
Outlook Archive 2006.pst – 1,017,065 KB
Outlook Archive 2007.pst – 1,412,129 KB
Outlook Archive 2008.pst – 1,904,657 KB
Outlook Archive 2009.pst – 3,220,297 KB
Outlook Archive 2010.pst – 5,073,353 KB
Outlook Archive 2011.pst – 3,666,449 KB

I also have a 2010 Alerts folder… mostly automated e-mails I had on for a while, weighing in at 2,694,289.

How’s that for New Year Minutiae!

Football has taken the majority of our time. With two kids on two teams, we had 2 practices a week and 2 games a weekend. Our schedule more or less revolved around whether we had a game that day. Marco’s team had a very good record, 7-2 and made it into Tier 2 playoffs. Playoffs are divided into divisions based on your record and run through 2 rounds + a superbowl final. The top division, Tier 1, has the best 8 teams in it. Tier 2 has the second 8, etc. Marco’s team lost their first playoff game and his season is over. Today, Antonio plays in his Round 2 game. His team’s record as not as good, 3-5-1, and his team made it into Tier 4 playoffs. I feel they had a rough schedule and should have been in Tier 3. We’ll see if I’m right if they crush today’s team like they crushed Glen Cove 31-0 last week and they go on to win the Super Bowl.

Tailgating during the games has been a good time. Often there will be a string of home games so the parents will stay and watch other games and eat BBQ and have coffee or beer. Antonio and Marco always get together with a group of friends and play football off the sidelines while the other brother is playing. Most of the games have been on beautiful days, but the Sunday after our October winter storm was brutally cold and Marco had to stop playing because he complained he couldn’t move his fingers.

Our friends Tom and Gigi had a great BBQ in October, sporting a fantastic selection of beer and food. I brought over a 6-pack of Founders Red’s Rye and Tom had the Breakfast Stout for me to try (and love). A bunch of the kids and I went to the local schoolyard and played football for an hour to burn off the turkey deep fried in peanut oil. Desserts were out of this world.

I attended Whiskey Fest in New York with one of my friends and The Long Island Beer Festival in Nassau Coliseum with my cousin. Both events saw us having a very good time. Whiskey Fest had an amazing selection of whiskey and other spirits and top-grade food and canapés. Beer fest had hundreds of beers on tap by local, regional, and national brewers and bratwurst and pretzels. Beer fest is held every 6 months and I vow to get a larger crew together in the Spring. The more the merrier.

Lisa has been doing 5k runs almost every weekend this fall. One of the more interesting runs was the Merrell Down and Dirty run. You could better describe this run as an obstacle course with mud. It’s a 5k “mud” run where they have you jumping over walls, climbing ropes and surfaces, and swimming through an actual mud pit. She had a great time. This was on Marco’s Birthday and Marco had a football game so I wasn’t there to take any pictures. Damn!

I’ll save my adventures in recording and editing hours and hours of video related to football for another post. Needless to say, I’m running low on drive space again!

Check it out:

by Nick

Hers are still drying so I’ll post those when I can safely scan them without mucking up the scanner.

iMovie has a green screen feature which wasn’t working out so well against our semi-green walls. So, Antonio ordered a green screen and paid for it with his own money. It took about a week and finally arrived the other day. I didn’t expect such great results. I mean, the lighting was crude and the sheet came terribly folded. It seemed like the video would look simply terrible. Below is a video of his first test using the wonderful sheet of green. And by wonderful, I mean holy shit it works so well!

NO BE CHICKEN

CHICKEN LIVE IN CAGE. NO CAN HAVE PERSONALITY INSIDE CAGE.

LAST STEP IS SMASH CAGE, LIGHT BARN ON FIRE.

DO THAT, YOU WIN.

Via http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/09/minimum-viable-personality.html

Marco and Antonio are doing the Long Island Broncos again this year and each are having a ball. Last year they were rookies but this year they are both stronger and more confident. Each has been having pretty good game time and both are playing running back this year. They’re both on the small side, but both very quick so that position is a good fit for them.

And my oldest is starting to work his way into athletics which I’m thrilled about. Giovanni was never much into sports. But this year, things have changed. This past Spring he did track and field and this fall he’s doing flag football. He’s on a team with all his friends from school and he’s having a great time. Lisa and I are so happy for him.

And on the tech side of things…

I’m video taping every game and am starting to run out of disk and backup space again. Tonight, I’m spending some time going through some old footage and compressing it from 1080i/25Mbps to a more modest 720p/123Kbps. That’s a 200x space savings and the quality difference is minimal for every day viewing. If I want to use the footage in a second video, quality will degrade further but this is a sacrifice I need to make right now.

I maintain 2TB of drive space and 2TB of backup space. At some point, I’ll need to double this to 4TB/4TB but to do this, I need to start thinking about RAID devices like a Drobo or Cisco array. My budget can’t handle that right now so I’ll just need to compress things for now.

I hope you find this post useful for helping to manage your growing iPhoto and iMovie libraries. If you have your own techniques, I’d love to hear them.

iPhoto and iMovie take a long time to load

For some reason, iPhoto and iMovie are very sensitive to how big your library is. Very sensitive.

iMovie in particular has a nasty habit of looking through all of your events and making sure they are all “optimized” when it starts up. Having a big library makes this very slow, particularly for certain kinds of videos like 3g phone videos iMovie doesn’t like to deal with. The solution here is to remove the content from the UI so it’s not scanned.

One way to accomplish this is to simply delete the event. Create a project, make a movie, export it to iTunes, and delete the event. If you delete the clips, though, you may as well delete the project that used the footage because it’s useless. If you’re like me, you like to keep around the original clips so you can make multiple movies from a single event. I wish I could purge like this, my data would be a lot easier to manage.

What I did to solve this problem without losing the original clips was to move all of my events to a “special” folder. By “special” I mean a folder not managed by iMovie. Then, I created symlinks into the standard ~/Movies/iMovie Events folder and iMovie Events folders at the root of each hard drive. These folders is where iMovie looks for events. This allows me to instantly filter what iMovie can see without moving gigs and gigs around my hard drive.

lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    58 Jun  5 18:06 Antonio Math Bee Grade 5 -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/Antonio Math Bee Grade 5
drwxr-xr-x  157 nic  staff  5338 Sep 11 23:03 Broncos 2011 Week 1
drwxr-xr-x   44 nic  staff  1496 Jul 23 09:57 July 2011
lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    44 Jun 21 16:22 June 2011 -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/June 2011a
lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    44 Jun 21 08:55 March 2011 -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/March 2011
lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    41 Jun  5 18:06 Ohio TC -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/Ohio TC
lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    45 Jun 21 08:54 Shananigans -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/Shananigans
drwxr-xr-x   24 nic  staff   816 Sep 11 23:03 The Fight
lrwxr-xr-x    1 nic  staff    44 Jun 21 16:25 Track 2011 -> ../Movies/iMovie Events.localized/Track 2011

The entries with -> after them are symlinks and the path to the right is the actual location of the clip directories. iMovie doesn’t know the difference so it just works. Notice how some events are not symlinked. This is because iMovie by default writes real directories. It would be great if iMovie used symlinks, more on this soon.

To create symlinks, move to the directory where you want the symlink and type this at the Terminal:

ln -s /path/to/original/file

Time Machine backups are a bit of a problem, though. By default, the movies are imported into ~/Movies/iMovie Events and iMovie Events folders at the root of each hard drive. These obviously aren’t symlinked as I mentioned. So, when I have accumulated enough Events that I want to start hiding some, I’ll need to physically move these to my special folder. Not such a big deal, but this kind of move prompts Time Machine to backup the files in the new location again. This was a big problem since my backup drive is not much larger than my regular storage. I had to wipe the backup and backup clean to avoid out of backup space warnings.

As I mentioned earlier, this whole mess of managing movies would be best solved by a future version of iMovie and not by hacking the file system. For instance, it would be nice for iMovie to facilitate hiding events and projects from the main UI so the main UI doesn’t spend so much time accessing these older events.

Clicking around iMovie cases a lot of access, so the UI is largely unresponsive in many cases

This is a ridiculous feature, IMHO. The point of the feature is you can click on a project name in the browser and play the project without actually opening the project. The problem is that to move a project into a folder, you need to first click on it. This is an EPIC FAIL in UI as clicking causes enormous delays while the preview feature is launched.

The “iPhoto Videos” event just gets bigger and bigger and takes longer and longer to load

Most cameras can take pictures and video. iPhoto allows you to import videos taken on your camera and places them in events. This is not such a bad thing. What’s bad is that the videos all funnel into a single event in iMovie called “iPhoto Videos”. Clicking on “iPhoto Videos” causes iMovie to load previews of every video in your entire iPhoto library and as your library grows, so does your wait time.

It would be better, IMHO, to have the iPhoto Videos folder expand and show you the events where your movies lay. This would make things much faster. Since this isn’t the way it works, I have banned myself from importing videos into iPhoto. This is kind of a pain as I need to introduce a second step when grabbing content off my camera. I use the Image Capture application to grab the videos as a first step and drop them onto my hard drive. Then, I drag the videos into iMovie. Finally, I import the rest of the pictures into iPhoto.

Meh.

Moving clips from event to event takes forever, a lot longer than manually moving the underlying files

It’s possible that this problem is specific to my system. At least the crashing part. Yes, in many cases moves never finish and eventually result in a crash. Your milage may vary. Moving clips is generally a complex operation since I believe all projects referencing the clips are scanned and updated with the new location if necessary. The net effect is that moving clips from event to event is massively time consuming. Again, this is a basic problem that can probably be solved behind the scenes with symlinks or pointers to clips somehow. Moving clips on the same hard drive should be more or less instantaneous.

Still, I try to move clips often to make sure Events aren’t too large and clicking on a event doesn’t need to scan too many clips.

Projects can easily lose access to the clips they use if you go mucking around with moving events

In the original iMovie HD, clips were stored internally in the movie project file (a package) and things were very reliable. The advantage to the new UI, of course, is more flexibility. You can use event footage in more than one project. If you use the symlink technique I spoke about earlier, you may start getting these kinds of errors when referencing clips that have no symlinks from projects. All you need to do is create new symlinks as described above.

iPhoto slows to a crawl

iPhoto performance began to get intolerable when my library started to exceed 50GB or so. At my library’s peak, it was almost 90GB, over 30k photos, and 10 years of events. I am sure this is not large by professional standards, but it’s plenty too large for iPhoto to deal with.

The easiest way to bring sanity to performance is to simply create a second iPhoto library: divide and conquer. This is easy as all you need to do is to a) close iPhoto, b) rename the default library, and c) restart iPhoto. When you do this, a new library will be created automatically for you. You can get the old library back by clicking on it in the finder. Once you do that, the library you clicked on will be the default o ne. So, to get the new library back, you need to exit iPhoto and double-clic on the new library.

One caveat to this is that you lose your Faces database. But I do not use that feature.

There are some good iPhoto library managers out there but IMHO, this is the kind of thing that should be built into iPhoto. Or, better yet, Apple could spend time optimizing iPhoto and make this whole technique unnecessary. After all, Google does fine with Picasa.

Conclusion

I’ll conclude with a bunch of tips and links you may find useful:

• Other than creating symlinks, don’t muck with event or project folders in the finder or the terminal. The names of the event and project folders is essential to keeping projects properly linked to the underlying clips.
• You can rebuild your iPhoto library, thumbnail caches, etc., by holding down the Command and Option keys on the keyboard after launching iPhoto before the main window shows up. IMHO, this is stupid. These features should be available via preferences. Perhaps they can fuck things up for the user so Apple would rather they be hidden. Meh.

Well, I was right as the actor playing the drill seargent was Clancy Brown and he played all of those voice roles and a ton more… in addition to countless TV and movie roles. Recall he was the Kurgan in the original Highlander movie?

If you haven’t seen Phineas and Pherb, I highly recommend you introduce your kids to it.

The basic technique involves two things: encoding your image in base64 format and inlining the resulting string into your img tag. Here is an example:

<img src="data:image/png;base64,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">

The tag’s src=”data:…” bit is called the Data URI scheme and has been around for a while and is now implemented in most browsers.

The encoding bit is easy and can be done in most frameworks. I spend a lot of time in grails so to do this in groovy you just do this:

f = new File("tcsmall.png")
b = f.readBytes()
b.encodeBase64().toString()

This approach has some overhead. Base64 encoding only uses 62 or 64 characters of a possible 256 in a byte so overall bytes going over the wire will be more. You would normally only use this for very small images.

For the life of me, I don’t know why browsers don’t use this technique when you save web pages locally. My gut says loading the base64 encoded versions from disk is negligible. If browsers used this, they could save an entire image-rich web page into a single html page. Instead, what browsers do is they write a single html file and all image /css resources in a directory alongside the html. References to images are all then re-pointed to the files in this directory. Yuck. Maybe browsers do this specifically so you can have the images as files for easy access. Who knows.

Anyway, I see some browsers (like Chrome) use this feature for things like “file/folder” icons when viewing ftp sites. Unless the browser is using OS native calls to render these directly, it needs to do something if it renders html to display this kind of interface. In the case of Chrome, it uses data uri’s and plain html to show a ftp user interface. I suppose a browser could reference files on your local hard drive, but seeing links in “view source” like: file:///C:/Users/ncodignotto/AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/Application/icons/folder.png, well, that shit just seems wrong.

Moving all possible projectiles into my garage was just the start. I emptied my pool a few inches and left the evacuation hose out. If the pool floods, I may be able to have someone turn on the pump to empty it a bit more. I secured my BBQ to our jungle gym. I might even secure the jungle gym to the trees in my backyard. I have a special pump that activates every 60 seconds and turns off after a few seconds if it detects no water. It wasn’t set up right so I set it up properly and ran the hose away from my house. If a tree falls on my house or we lose power then there is not much I can do. Flooding from the excessive rain is my main concern and with the pump set up, there is little more I can do.

The goods news is my mom is going to ride out the storm in my house while I’m away. Her house is more or less in the flood zone so it’s smart to be out of there so you don’t have to evacuate during the storm.

I wish all my NY friends luck this weekend.

In the meantime, I figured I’d try something new. While on a boat trip with my brothers and a few friends, my brother Tom’s friend Ken was talking about Judo. He said it would be an excellent martial art for Marco since if can compliment wrestling rather well. I was intrigued as well so I figure I’d take a couple classes myself and bring Marco in once I’d gotten familiar with the school. As it turns out, Marco has a very busy calendar since Football is keeping him pretty busy, and I’ve only been able to get him to one class. Sera and Antonio also took a class. Everyone liked it and I’m sure I’ll have them al-l going once a week once school starts.

As for me, I’m pretty hooked. Judo is taught on some days and Brazillian Jiu Jitsu on other days. The classes are far more brutal than I’m used to. I’ve been choked, stretched, and contorted in ways I didn’t know were possible. The classes are all over an hour and a half  and I typically stay for almost two hours for open mat. All of the technique is totally new and foreign to me. Its harder. It hurts. The other students are all strong and experienced and I’m basically getting my ass kicked ten times over.

But it’s a lot of fun and I’ve been feeling my flexibility come back and feeling my strength come back. For the past two years, I’ve been doing these crazy triathlons and while the training definitely helped improve my stamina, the training is not something I love to do. It’s not something I look forward to. Right now, I look forward to these classes and  they seem like the right thing for me to be doing right now.

To relieve ourselves, we peed in a canister about the size of a plastic pretzel barrel. The canister was, by the way, actually a plastic pretzel barrel. We had to do this because the boats that were parked around us were rather close. So we basically got down low, did what we needed to do into the plastic pretzel barrel, and dumped the yellow contents overboard. To be nice, we would wash out the canister (you remember, the plastic pretzel barrel) with sea water. When we did that, we noticed a wonderful glow that happened when we disturbed the water.

What was this?

We were fascinated. So, we went to the back of the boat and began to stir up the water by hand. What we found was a billion billion jelly creatures that glowed when you disturbed them. It was amazing. I thought at first they were jellyfish, but then we caught one in our hands and it didn’t sting. Recall why we were all peeing and you can imagine how we were seeing double rainbows in the water with these little fucking jellies.

Soon after, a group of sea birds (maybe swans) came by to greet us. They waddled along and just started at our boat, floating and waiting patiently. Now, I know you’re not supposed to feed these cute guys (they are actually kind of big and scary-looking) but I wanted to do it anyway. My cousin was like, NO DUDE DON’T DO THAT. I was like, LETS SEE WHAT HAPPENS MAN?! Then he went onto say how the goose would come on board and wreak havok. I can remember wanting to feed them more than ever after hearing that. In the end, it was toward the end of the night and we had EATEN EVERY BIT OF FOOD ON THE BOAT. So there was none left for the geese.

When we got back to Tom’s dock, we ordered a pizza and hung out for a while. We had a lot of laughs that night.

http://www.primordia.com/blog/archives/2005/03/it_cant_be_true.html

Now, someone went and did this in real life. The effect is even more profound and amazing.

You can check out his main blog or subscribe to him on twitter. Below is a sampling of some of his recent images:

The original link is here.

Thanks Brian!

Thanks Brian!

When we got home, popcorn was made, the lights were turned off, and the volume turned up. In the end, huge success! Everyone was dancing and kicking the shit out of each other during the credits. For some reason, Marco turned into Bruce Lee and his brothers were sparring with him. Much crying and revenge ensued. I’m not sure why this happened as there was no martial arts action in the movie. Maybe this is just the way these boys show their excitement. In any case, all went to bed soon enough without complaint.

The cast for this movie is impressive: Adam Sandler, Keri Russel (do you remember Felicity?), Guy Pierce (the Momento guy!), Russel Brand (ha, love him), Richard Griffiths (the d-bag uncle in Harry Potter films), Teresa Palmer (so hot), Lucy Lawless (Lucy Lawless!), and Courtney Cox. Oh, and a brief appearance by Carmen Electra who was the so-called ‘hot girl.’ PS: she had nothing on Teresa Palmer, Lucy Lawless, or even Keri Russel, IMHO.

If you haven’t seen it, highly recommended.

Here is a clip from one of my favorite scenes:

Folks, it doesn’t get much better than this.

My son Giovanni is growing up fast. His birthday is in January so he’s never had a pool party for his birthday. We changed that this weekend when we hosted his friends for a 1/2 Birthday Party (today is his actual half-birthday). Giovanni and his friends had a grand time in the pool, throwing water balloons at each other, and watching tasteless adolescent videos on YouTube. Yesterday, he was at the beach all day with his friends. I was hoping to see Captain America with him Sunday night, but I found out he made plans with his friends :-). My boy is growing up.

As for Captain America, great flick. I was  eager to see it and wasn’t disappointed.

This week, Antonio and Marco are in Broncos football camp and next week the football season officially begins. I can’t wait. I love the sport and love watching my kids practice and play.

Finally, I started taking Judo and Brazillian Jiu Jitsu. I went to the Joe Moreira clinic hosted by the school on Sunday. I’m hoping Marco takes Judo as it is a good compliment to his wrestling. The BJJ classes work better for my schedule, but I hope to take both Judo and BJJ. BJJ is a lot different than Tae Kwon Do, as you can imagine. Instead of stepping back and forth, getting kicked, and jumping around, I was on my back and knees and being choked for 3 hours. I’m still practicing Tae Kwon Do at home and still hope to get my master degree from my school one day, but the new studies are really interesting and I’m looking forward to the change of pace.

I do have some favorite features and some gripes:

• Being able to resize windows from any corner rocks, just like Windows, but since I use HyperDock and can manage my window sizes much more effectively with Windows 7-style monitor docking, this is not such a big deal.
• Full-screen apps break multi-monitor support. IMHO, Full-screen apps should not span to the second monitor by default. This should be an explicit choice of the app and the user should have the ability to disable this.

This release is a big milestone — it is the first release which we are identifying as “ready to use”.

Even though we have been dogfooding Veracity for over a year, each release has been accompanied by verbiage which discouraged people from relying upon it.  This was mostly because we thought we might still change a repository storage format in ways that might not be backward compatible. Well, we have finally decided that this hesitation is no longer necessary. All future releases of Veracity will be compatible with a repository created with version 0.9.1.

Version 1.0 is coming very soon.  In fact, we considered blessing this build with the magical “1.0″ designation.  But we decided to do a little more polishing and make 1.0 happen during the week of OSCON at the end of this month.

Seems like the veracity scm is feature-rich and could give git a run for its money.

I see that veracityhub.com is already registered ;-)

@newsycombinator: How to Cure Deep Procrastination http://j.mp/oleHU7

WE MISS YOU from fireapple films on Vimeo.

More good stuff from haha.nu.

I can’t wait to get to work and embrace all those crazy words which seem fringe and incorrect, yet everyone knows exactly what I mean. Yeh!

via haha.nu

via haha.nu

• An article summary main index page (possibly)
• Links to archives, rss
• Links to the static files that make up the legacy for the original Movable Type Ooze (from 2003 to 2008)
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“Bright Lights, Big City” takes on a whole new meaning during Manhattanhenge, the semiannual phenomenon when the sun so perfectly aligns with the Manhattan grid that it shines on both sides of every cross-street. (May 31, 8:17 p.m., and July 11, 8:25 p.m.; the best views are from the east and from the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.)

As long as I’ve worked in the city, I never witnessed this myself. It’s probably more stunning if you are in a cab going North or South and seeing the sunset pop into view at every cross street.

The theme is far from complete, I am basically leveraging WordPress’s ability to provide default functionality when you don’t do anything. So, I implemented the most  important bits. After a few weeks when I implement links to my archives, stylize comments, etc., I’ll see if I can submit the theme to the WordPress theme gallery (with due credit fo Mr. Ronacher) and see how the whole theme submission process works.

I called  the  theme “Nick Cody” but I may change it. There are a total of 204 lines of php and css, most of the php was simple modifications to the defaults. Some php files I didn’t bother editing at all. I did very little work and the whole effort took about 4 hours from start to finish.

A new Apple patent reveals an interesting new method of exchanging information between your devices through “metaphorical gestures” that would, for example, allow you to “pour” your files into your iPad by tipping your iPhone over it.